[HN Gopher] Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
___________________________________________________________________
Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
Author : onemind
Score : 187 points
Date : 2020-10-15 20:19 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.greaterwrong.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.greaterwrong.com)
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| I think there are have always been stupid people but now they
| have a megaphone (social media) to spread their disease.
| cortesoft wrote:
| It is a well known phenomenon that the news is more violent than
| reality (if it bleeds it leads, and all)... this is simply
| because the mundane and peaceful happenings are not interesting
| to watch. People like being scared a bit, and they also like
| feeling "at least that bad thing didn't happen to me!"
|
| I think there is a similar phenomenon with stupidity on the
| internet. Because of social media and the internet, we have
| access to so many people. We can see what anyone on social media
| is doing.
|
| Now, if someone is doing normal, non-stupid stuff on social
| media, that is not going to be widely shared. But if someone does
| or says something really stupid, it is shared with everyone.
| People love feeling smarter than others, so reading what stupid
| people say and do is addicting.
|
| So we are bombarded by stupid people doing stupid things,
| collected from all over the world. We have the entire world's
| worth of stupidly at our fingertips, concentrated and curated for
| us.
|
| In addition, now that people realize it is what people want to
| see, people do fake stupid things for attention.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| But if all other things are equal , we should be seeing more
| frequent intelligent debates too, which is not the case. In
| fact if you challenge someone at best you d get a downvote
| waterheater wrote:
| Fun read. I have an item which I didn't see directly stated on
| here.
|
| According to Mirriam-Webster [1], definitions of "stupid"
| include:
|
| -slow of mind
|
| -given to unintelligent decisions or acts
|
| -dulled in feeling or sensation
|
| -marked by or resulting from unreasoned thinking or acting
|
| So, from this, we would the population to make slow,
| unintelligent decisions. However, the Flynn effect indicates that
| average intelligence of the world's population is increasing [2].
| To me, stating stupidity is increasing while intelligence is
| increasing is a contradiction, so I feel something else is at
| play, particularly with decision making.
|
| Historically, the information a person could access was quite
| limited. Information was largely passed down orally, especially
| if you lived in a poor society. This information was hard-won and
| passed down over generations. Then technology allowed information
| to disseminate though alternative mediums (paper, radio,
| television, Internet, etc.). The primary benefit of these new
| mediums was their accessibility, and that feature--like it or not
| --is a double-edged sword.
|
| To explore this, let's consider three scenarios:
|
| 1) A person only receives information that is true 10% of the
| time: this person will likely not survive into adulthood. If they
| do, they will likely cause harm to others.
|
| 2) A person only receives information that is true 50% of the
| time: would this person be able to make snap decisions? Likely
| not, as they would need to analyze every aspect of a situation.
| On a long-enough timescale, they might be able to figure out
| specific situations, but it's unlikely they will do a good job.
|
| 3) A person only receives information that is true 90% of the
| time: this person should do reasonably well. Their fast decision-
| making processes are well-tuned and reinforced by feeding in
| information known to be of very high quality.
|
| To draw the (inevitable) connection to machine learning: would
| you train a reinforcement learning model with training data where
| 50% of the labels are wrong? Of course not!
|
| My theory is that today, much of the information people receive
| by default is low quality; it doesn't generalize well. Novel
| situations are difficult to assess because people didn't develop
| good heuristics for analyzing it. For example, sometimes the best
| decision is to just say "no" and move on (for example, cutting
| out negative people from your life). But if a person is
| perpetually in a zone of undecidability, decisions becomes far
| harder to make. As a result, more situations pile up, creating
| additional decisions, creating additional problems, ad infinitum.
|
| Just my two cents here. And please do not overlook the irony
| inherent in this post. :)
|
| [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stupid
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
| voidhorse wrote:
| Another hypothesis: Simondon was right and each technology has an
| inherent tendency which shapes what's possible. Virilio was also
| right in suggesting the new forms of accidents that come along
| with an invention are more important than the invention itself.
|
| The negative technical tendency of industrial technology was
| weapons of destruction and machines for murder, which led us to
| world war 2, proving that the technical zeitgeist of industrial
| mechanics had surpassed its rationality and was no longer
| tenable. The negative technical tendency of information
| technology is the proliferation and rapid spread of
| misinformation which leads us to, well the present I guess.
| Diederich wrote:
| There's quite a bit of insight in this article, and I'm not going
| to dismiss or directly comment on any of it.
|
| In my mind, there are two pretty straightforward, first
| principles at work that underlay a lot of these items.
|
| Many, if not all, negative emotions, at least while being
| experienced, directly diminish cognitive capabilities. A concrete
| example: when a person is angry, that person is more stupid.
|
| Next: modern communication technology
| allows/facilitates/encourages negative emotions to be generated,
| travel widely, and 'stick' in the minds of more and more people.
|
| As I said, there's a lot of good analysis, but I believe that
| these two simple things are the most responsible for 'stupidity
| expanding'.
|
| I went out of my way to state these things briefly, because
| fundamentally I think they are simple. At the same time, there
| are mountains of nuances and relevant conditions surrounding
| them.
| omio wrote:
| Fear is a big one. Getting you in these emotional states makes
| it easier to influence your way of thinking.
| Diederich wrote:
| > influence your way of thinking.
|
| Yup! I've read a number of papers about this over the years,
| and it's a big chunk of this whole landscape. The old saw:
| you either pay for the product, or you are the product, is
| right on target here.
|
| Gaining attention and clicks from a person is much easier if
| that person is afraid. And/or angry, among others.
| jariel wrote:
| - Foolishness and stupidity are not remotely the same thing.
|
| - Adherence to norms doesn't necessarily take intelligence, it
| takes diligence. Those norms are mostly there as 'social rules'
| so that we all get along and prosper - and it's often difficult
| to tell 'which ones are important and not'. Sometimes norms are
| important merely as norms, i.e. 'standard modes of behaviour'.
| Language is like this - there's nothing inherently moral or
| 'good' about language but it helps immensely that we are all on
| the same page.
|
| It doesn't take intelligence to break norms either, but it
| definitely takes intelligence to develop reasonable opinions
| about them. Doing so is risky and can appear 'foolish' - which is
| not stupid.
|
| Sometimes we view arbitrary breaking of norms and 'not being
| serious' as stupid, when often it's not.
|
| - People have always been stupid, but we now have the internet to
| highlight stupidity
|
| - A lot of our own behaviours are influenced by
| emotional/ideological memes, which is why there are so many out
| and about, and even 'intelligent people' fall for them all day
| long. All major news outlets are written for a 'dumbed down'
| audience - which includes a lot of intelligent people.
|
| - Ideology. Even smart people are utterly confounded and made
| stupid by their ideologies. Carl Marx said some smart things, but
| a lot of utterly stupid things that continue to be 'orthodox' in
| some groups. Every 'touchy subject' is piled upon with stupidity
| because there isn't any nuance allowed in the discussion.
| [deleted]
| 02020202 wrote:
| "Is Stupidity Expanding?" - yes, yes it is. And on an exponential
| scale. Something's in the water.
| rectang wrote:
| > _They're not getting stupider; I'm just getting more
| conceited._
|
| That sounds plausible -- kudos to the author for at least
| entertaining the possibility. Here's my hypothesis on why:
|
| Marvin's Maxim: Every generation believes that the next
| generation is going to hell. Every generation is wrong.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their
| arguments and show them my own evidence that it's real (locating
| amateur radio satellites using data shared by people around the
| globe and demonstrating the doppler effect on them).
|
| The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness.
| And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted
| with that they're clearly irrational. And something's gotta be
| going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis.
| Don't know if mental illness is going up or down - our
| understanding and perception of it has changed so there's hardly
| reliable data on it. I'd have to go through a similar thought
| process as this article. But I think it's a factor, beyond "new
| media". I suspect that the toxic politics in the US is a similar
| phenomenon, the way people are controlled by confirmation bias
| and can twist their way into believing "my guy good, other guy
| bad" under almost any circumstances.
| Fricken wrote:
| Throughout most of history people have believed wildly
| incorrect things, yet civilization carries on.
|
| Unless you're an astronomer or involved in some pursuit in
| which the shape of the earth is of material consequence, it
| just doesn't matter.
|
| Flat earthers find community and identity amongst other flat
| earthers, and that to them is of much higher significance than
| whether the earth is actually flat or not.
| seppin wrote:
| > Throughout most of history people have believed wildly
| incorrect things, yet civilization carries on.
|
| Society has mostly been run by autocratic systems. If we are
| determined to make democracy work, conspiracy and anti-fact
| ideologies are existential threats.
| Fricken wrote:
| Democracy has worked in the past because most members of
| said democratic societies believe largely the same things.
| They don't have to be the correct thing, they just have to
| be the same thing. This was easier when information was
| more tightly controlled and curated. The internet has
| opened us to a Babylonia of different belief systems, which
| is not so good for functioning civilizations. Free speech
| was easier to defend before the internet when it wasn't
| quite so free.
| Siira wrote:
| The problem is actually economical IMO; Fools don't have a skin
| in the game, and don't lose anything from having false beliefs.
| They would be perfectly capable of discerning the nonflatness
| of Earth if their lives depended on it.
| biolurker1 wrote:
| My favorite way to end an argument is usually prompting a
| bet...
| sdht0 wrote:
| One thing I have come to include in my mental model when
| interacting with people online is the existence of people who
| deliberately keep up the "stupid" facade, either with the
| intention of trolling (think 4chan) or with nefarious agendas,
| such a government-sanctioned trolling farms that we keep
| hearing about. This at least helps me rationalize away the
| worst parts of Twitter, Reddit, or Whatsapp shares.
|
| Confirmation bias also explains a lot. I remember seeing many
| anecdotes about Trump before the 2016 election that felt quite
| possibly true but turned out to be false on further
| investigation. As if the true things were not exciting enough.
|
| Moreover, I suspect that much of our perceptions, esp. on
| topics that we don't directly seek out, are based on just
| glancing at the continuous stream of clickbaity article titles
| that cross our feeds everyday without even clicking them. In
| isolation, they'd be harmless, but if the same articles appears
| across HN, FB, and Twitter, they make a mental impact. And
| these half-digested impressions then color our opinions when
| those topics come up in debate or discussions.
| throw18376 wrote:
| it is generally agreed that the modern environment can cause
| people to have depressive symptoms, and that in most cases
| these will never progress to full clinical depression.
|
| seems at least worth considering that the same is possible with
| psychotic symptoms.
|
| i think some conspiracy theorists might just have a kind of low
| grade mania or psychosis. not enough to stop them from
| functioning, but enough to make them see patterns that aren't
| there and have a hard time thinking logically about certain
| topics.
|
| this would also explain why many conspiracy theories nowadays
| no longer even pretend to be rational. With JFK or the moon
| landing, they would at least try to present evidence and make
| arguments, however distorted.
|
| But if you talk to a QAnon believer or many flat earth people,
| their arguments do not even have internal coherence -- it's
| just free association.
|
| All this being said, I think there should be a strong norm
| against trying to diagnose specific individuals with mental
| illness over the internet. But it's hard for me not to
| contemplate this as a possible explanation.
| mynameishere wrote:
| _I 've engaged a few flat earthers..._
|
| Let me rephrase that for you: "I've been trolled by a few of
| the world's most obvious trolls..."
|
| Really, man. The internet has been around. We've been around
| the internet. There's this kind of stupidity that's
| almost...meta stupidity, you know? Like, do you really not
| realize the flat earthers are putting one on? Maybe you're
| putting one on right now...because, how can you seriously be
| that naive?
| jcranmer wrote:
| I'm not going to deny that trolls are definitely involved in
| Flat Earth, but I suspect that most of the adherents actually
| truly believe in it. The key thing to realize is that modern
| Flat Earth isn't just about Flat Earth; it's basically a (
| _very heavily_ ) syncretized modern Gnosticism. By that I
| mean that it combines several beliefs:
|
| * Absolute dualistic cosmology: there is an Absolute Good and
| Absolute Evil locked in a titanic struggle in which humans
| are the pieces. The forces of Absolute Evil are expending
| every effort to knock us off the narrow path to Absolute
| Good.
|
| * Gnostic notions of revelation: the path to salvation is
| mostly, if not entirely, dependent on the knowledge of the
| revealed truth of the universe. Acquiring this knowledge is
| difficult, and (following the above point) the forces of
| Absolute Evil are trying their best to prevent you from
| gaining it. But fortunately, those who have come before us
| can help us in the acquisition of knowledge.
|
| * Evangelism: once you acquire the knowledge, you must (as a
| good person should!) turn around and save as many people as
| you can by educating them on the revealed truths of the
| universe. And if they look at you like you're a rambling
| lunatic or try to "fix" your knowledge, then clearly they
| must be agents of Absolute Evil trying to drag you down with
| them.
|
| * The actual cosmology: [insert a mishmash of the cosmology
| [1] of several disparate religions here] and the Earth is
| actually flat.
|
| These kinds of belief systems, with a variety of
| substitutions for the last bullet point, have been around for
| millennia. Flat Earth isn't even the first such system in my
| short Millennial lifetime. The actual beliefs of these
| systems are less important than the fact that you have the
| revealed knowledge, which is also why people seem to be able
| to move very quickly from one system to another (as Flat
| Earthers basically all jumped ship to Qanon).
|
| [1] One of the things to draw attention to, from what I can
| tell, is that these sorts of beliefs tend to extract only the
| cosmological and supernatural beliefs from religion and
| ignore the moralist beliefs.
| mistermann wrote:
| Isn't it wonderful? :)
|
| Although, sometimes the irony seems just a bit too rich to be
| true...perhaps a Matryoshka troll?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I really wish that you were right, but you should consider
| the possibility that it's you who is being naive. I've met a
| real-life flat-earther (a relative of mine, actually) who
| definitely was not trolling. From sufficient distance flat
| earth beliefs are not really that different from anti-vax.
| Both employ the same questioning of conventional science and
| fall back on plausible-sounding but discredited theories.
| Yet, I don't think anyone would call anti-vax a troll
| movement. There's also a political dimension to these
| movements that should not be overlooked. If you have time, I
| highly recommend this video:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
| curiousllama wrote:
| It's interesting to me that you categorize irrationality with
| mental illness. I feel wuite the opposite. people make
| decisions based on many factors: logic, yes, but also past
| experience, common heuristics, mood, and situational context.
|
| A lot of what education is supposed to do is shape your
| instincts towards what is productive: there's no particular
| reason that reading history in my spare time should _feel_
| productive, but it does. That feeling was shaped by my
| education.
|
| We've all been trained to think of arguments as logic. They're
| not; they're a conflict of mindsets, fully fleshed out states
| of being.
|
| Arguments are a facades on beliefs - states of being. That's
| not an illness; that's being human.
| grenoire wrote:
| I think there is too much information around for the average
| person to filter and process and digest. All three are
| important parts of living in a society and it looks to me like
| even with e.g. economic issues alone, it's just very hard for
| (to be fair) _anybody_ to keep up.
|
| In turn, people reach out to conspiracy theories to simplify
| the world around them with obvious answers and explanations.
|
| My theory, sort of.
| tankenmate wrote:
| I have a similar vein of thought;
|
| Any sufficiently advanced technology (knowledge) is
| indistinguishable from magic -- Arthur C. Clarke
|
| So people just see competing ideas as a choice between two
| forms of magic. Add in identity politics and hey presto,
| changing their mind means denying themselves (a rather
| difficult thing for most to do). Add in Dunning-Kruger,
| through no fault of their own, and then people think there is
| a rational reason for denying objective evidence. My evidence
| is better because your evidence is just your opinion.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| There was research last year that showed that cynicism is a
| way for less intelligent people to protect themselves from
| being taken advantage of. Basically, if you know you're not
| smart enough to figure out if other people are genuine or out
| to scam you, defaulting to assuming that all strangers are
| lying is a winning strategy.
|
| The same kind of logic fuels conspiracy-minded people. The
| one thing they _all_ have in common is that they reject the
| mainstream view, they reject the consensus. And in turn, they
| embrace outlandish explanations, and the communities around
| those, because it gives them a false sense of superiority.
| They know something the rest of the sheep don 't!
|
| So these two psychological defense mechanisms interact with
| each other, and when the information flow in society is
| increasing, the threshold for how smart you need to be to
| keep up also increases. So people in general probably aren't
| getting stupider, but they're getting more and more
| overwhelmed, which looks the same.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| That makes a lot of sense. I'd be curious for a link or
| reference to that research if you remember any details.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| On cynicism: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177
| /014616721878319...
|
| On conspiracy beliefs:
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550611434786
| reader_mode wrote:
| >There was research last year that showed that cynicism is
| a way for less intelligent people to protect themselves
| from being taken advantage of. Basically, if you know
| you're not smart enough to figure out if other people are
| genuine or out to scam you, defaulting to assuming that all
| strangers are lying is a winning strategy.
|
| That narrative is ridiculous - what does intelligence have
| to do with it ?
|
| I guarantee you you are uninformed on so many issues and
| you could easily be taken advantage of no matter how
| intelligent you were by someone who spent time
| preparing/specialising in deception - especially if the
| negative outcome is less then the cost of investigating the
| issue. Nobody has the time to investigate every choice so
| by your logic cynicism should be a default strategy for
| everything you're not an expert in.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > That narrative is ridiculous - what does intelligence
| have to do with it ?
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014616721878
| 319...
|
| "Further studies demonstrated that cynicism is more
| likely to be a worldview endorsed by individuals with
| lower rather than higher levels of education (Haukkala,
| 2002; Stavrova & Ehlebracht, 2018) and intelligent
| individuals' behavior was shown to be more likely to
| depart from the norms of self-interest (Solon, 2014).
| Higher levels of education and com-petence in a broader
| sense might help individuals detect and avoid potential
| deceit in the first place, thus reducing the probability
| of negative social experiences, which might in turn
| contribute to a more positive view of human nature
| (Yamagishi, Kikuchi, & Kosugi, 1999). Indeed a number of
| studies showed general cognitive ability to be negatively
| related to cynical hostility (Barnes et al., 2009;
| Mortensen, Barefoot, & Avlund, 2012) and positively
| related to trust (Carl, 2014; Carl & Billari, 2014;
| Hooghe, Marien, & de Vroome, 2012; Oskarsson, Dawes,
| Johannesson, & Magnusson, 2012; Sturgis, Read, & Allum,
| 2010)."
| karmakaze wrote:
| Consider substituting some words and the argument holds.
| Instead of 'intelligent' say 'uninformed in relevant
| areas' which would work well to defend non-tech-savvy
| seniors.
|
| > cynicism should be a default strategy for everything
| you're not an expert in
|
| This would indeed follow, but if we allow for a small
| number of trusted sources can mostly be resolved.
| k0mplex wrote:
| this makes a lot of sense
| mistermann wrote:
| I think many neurotypical people suffer from the same
| information overload, in that they treat mainstream media
| news the same way that many conspiracy theory enthusiasts
| treat their "news": zero skepticism (someone I trust said it
| is true, so I will accept it as true, regardless of the
| quality of or existence of evidence).
|
| Now obviously there's a _significant_ difference in degree of
| accuracy between the two worlds, but then one shouldn 't
| forget that they're not dealing with equally difficult
| stories to investigate, or have access to the same
| investigative resources. Regardless, the same illogical
| behavior can be observed in both types, and an overload of
| complexity & information sounds like a very reasonable
| explanation.
| mdorazio wrote:
| I think this theory is missing a component: the erosion of
| respect for experts. It at least seems like pre-internet,
| when people didn't understand the world around them they
| would default to trusting what scientists/doctors/researchers
| told them was true. But today, we've gone so far down the
| disinformation "fake news" rabbit hole that a large portion
| of the general public, at least in America, just straight up
| doesn't trust what actual experts have to say on many topics.
| sebmellen wrote:
| This is not just because of disinformation though. Now,
| it's easier than ever to second-guess your doctor and any
| other expert (and I know because I've done this, and even
| been right on occasion).
|
| For example, every time someone worries about their health,
| they can sort through all possible diagnoses online, and
| convince themselves they have a certain sickness just
| because the symptoms match. A doctor will use Bayesian
| reasoning and conclude the problem is really a very common
| infection or something, but when the untrained mind is
| overwhelmed with information, Occam's Razor doesn't hold.
|
| The same goes for everything else. Information is dangerous
| for those who don't know how to reason about it carefully
| and properly, which is most of us, in most fields.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| Yeah that crossed my mind as well. People who have so little
| understanding of the mechanics behind it all that they think
| it's impossible we've put anything in Earth orbit - how could
| ANYONE understand that?
|
| In one case though I had someone say that I wasn't hitting
| satellites, I was hitting a solar-powered high altitude
| plane. When I pointed out that it would have to be going at
| 23 times the speed of sound at sea level and flying at
| 120,000 km, they said of course: technology is amazing. While
| in the same conversation claiming that satellites were
| impossible. At that point I stopped believing they even had
| basic common sense.
| josalhor wrote:
| This thread also summarizes my experience pretty well.
|
| To take this even further: I encounter in my day to day
| many instances of people making claims that are easily
| refuted with a quick online search. I have realized that
| correcting people over their lack of scientific knowledge
| is perceived as nitpicking and inappropriate. We got our
| incentives backwards. If we cannot speak up over
| misinformation to our peers, then they will spread faster
| than the truth.
|
| Sadly, I've had to accept that in order to be perceived as
| a much stronger source of truth, I have to correct people
| less.
| Krasnol wrote:
| They've probably been just improvising.
|
| They become quite good at it as it follows simple rules.
| mcbits wrote:
| My conclusion about flat-earthers is that the vast majority
| are just trolling. There are probably also a fair number
| who get sucked in by the idea, but they aren't the ones out
| there making the arguments for it. The frustratingly
| persistent people who can come up with one outlandish
| argument after another are too smart to actually believe
| what they're saying.
| d_tr wrote:
| I am not a mental health expert but I do not think of
| this persistent type of trolling as healthy behaviour. At
| the very least it is shitty and disrespectful behaviour
| towards someone trying to make a point using facts.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| I always assumed the flat earth thing was more of a
| troll/protest than a genuine belief, basically people just want
| to assert that "you can't force me to believe a certain thing".
| Even if in this case that certain thing is in the class of
| completely irrefutable facts, it doesn't really matter because
| they're just asserting their power to disagree. Like a toddler
| that gets in a mood where they just say "no" to everything.
| Trying to reason with that type of response is useless and it's
| also beside the point, the point is that they just want to
| exercise their free will. And they also probably are enjoying
| that it is frustrating other people.
|
| A mental illness framing is kind of interesting though, I've
| never really thought about it like that. It implies that it
| could be treatable, which I'm not really sure is true. Can you
| "treat" a troll?
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I'd guess there was a time in the US when if insisted the earth
| was flat it could have possibly gotten you committed to an
| asylum.
| savanaly wrote:
| Have you considered as an explanation the concept of "epistemic
| learned helplessness"[0]?
|
| [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-
| learn...
| qsort wrote:
| I don't mean to attack you, but I don't think you are
| approaching this the right way.
|
| There are exactly zero people who believe the earth is flat.
| Some join conspiracy groups because they are social outcasts
| who enjoy being part of a tight-knit group, while for the most
| part they are being isolated and rejected (sometimes,
| admittedly, because of faults of their own, unrelated to being
| flat-earthers).
|
| They aren't insane, they are desperately lonely.
| jariel wrote:
| So this is an interesting point and shouldn't be dismissed,
| it may be at the heart of irrational beliefs.
|
| People can 'come to believe' what benefits them.
|
| If an idea is truly exciting or engaging, or makes people
| feel special, or part of a 'group' esp. of 'special people' -
| it's just more likely we believe those things as 'factual'.
|
| So in a way - though they would 'pass a lie detector test'
| and 'truly believe in a flat earth' - it's predicate upon all
| those things - it's an _impassioned_ or _subjective_ kind of
| belief.
|
| They would act almost perfectly rationally if you asked them
| about some completely mundane subject like rocks rolling down
| a hill.
|
| Our egos tend to believe it when we're told we are good, and
| tend to be dismissive when we are told we're bad at
| something, that right there is evidence we're not very
| objective about taking in data to begin with.
| qsort wrote:
| Yes, this is a better way to phrase what I was trying to
| say. They might actually believe it, but it's not because
| they find the arguments convincing. It's a "meta" issue.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> There are exactly zero people who believe the earth is
| flat._
|
| I don't think this is true. At any rate, if it _is_ true,
| there are certainly a significant number of people who are
| giving an extraordinarily convincing imitation of believing
| that the Earth is flat. So convincing that it 's hard not to
| allocate at least some probability to the hypothesis that
| they actually believe what they say they believe and aren't
| giving an imitation at all.
| qsort wrote:
| > I don't think this is true. At any rate, if it is true
|
| I'd be more inclined to follow this line of thought if this
| was about anything else. "The earth is flat" is not a claim
| that's false upon closer inspection of the available data,
| it's a claim that's prima facie false, it's in the same
| category of "the moon is made of cheese" rather than "we
| didn't land on the moon".
| pdonis wrote:
| _> "The earth is flat" is not a claim that's false upon
| closer inspection of the available data, it's a claim
| that's prima facie false_
|
| No, it isn't. We view the claim as absurd today only
| because we have the benefit of millennia of collection of
| evidence and arguments and theory that has established
| "the earth is round" beyond a reasonable doubt. But for a
| person who either does not have access to all that
| evidence and arguments and theory, or who simply refuses
| to believe them (and, as someone else upthread noted, it
| can be a valid heuristic strategy for some people to
| refuse to believe claims by other people that they can't
| understand for themselves, in order to avoid being taken
| advantage of), the claim that the earth is flat is not
| absurd, which means it's not prima facie false.
| qsort wrote:
| > We view the claim as absurd today only because we have
| the benefit of millennia of collection.
|
| This premise is just historically false. Ancient
| civilizations knew full well the earth was not flat. More
| people in the history of mankind have known the earth is
| round than how to multiply.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Ancient civilizations knew full well the earth was not
| flat._
|
| Some did. Not all of them. The first one I'm aware of is
| the Greeks. Do you know of any earlier ones?
|
| Also, the fact that particular intellectuals knew the
| Earth was round in a society does not necessarily mean it
| was common knowledge in that society, much less that it
| was such common knowledge that the average person would
| think it absurd to question it and would be able to
| explain why. The books we have from the ancient Greeks
| that give good arguments for the Earth being round were
| probably not read by more than a tiny fraction of the
| population. The earliest example I can think of of the
| roundness of the Earth being taught in a widespread
| fashion is the Christian church after it accepted the
| roundness of the Earth as dogma and taught it as such.
| qsort wrote:
| (edit to answer the edit)
|
| There's evidence in some Sanskrit texts that early Indian
| civilizations did, but they are probably contemporary to
| the Greeks.
|
| But again, even superficial observations are sufficient.
| You don't really have to "trust" anybody or research
| anything. If anything, it's the belief in flat earth that
| requires extremely convoluted and unintuitive
| rationalizations.
|
| Again, I understand this stuff is frustrating, because
| unwillingness to change one's mind in front of
| overwhelming contrary evidence is one of the worst
| possible behaviors.
|
| They might believe the claim in the sense they'd pass a
| lie detector test, but I doubt it's because they find the
| argument genuinely convincing.
|
| > early christians
|
| This isn't true, either. Some early Christians might have
| stuck to a literal interpretation of the sacred texts,
| but the Church has strongly opposed that belief since the
| very beginning. I don't have any particular axe to grind,
| but this is really just a myth:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
| pdonis wrote:
| _> even superficial observations are sufficient_
|
| That depends on what you consider to be superficial
| observations. The fact that there is plenty of evidence
| for ancient civilizations before the Greeks believing the
| Earth to be flat (for example, descriptions in their
| mythology) indicates to me that the observations needed
| to figure out that the Earth is round are not
| superficial. Sure, it seems like they are if you live in
| a society that already has the belief and can teach it to
| you. But that doesn't mean they actually are.
|
| _> this is really just a myth_
|
| The myth referred to in that Wikipedia article (which I
| fully agree is a myth) has nothing whatever to do with
| what I said, or with early Christians. You are attacking
| a straw man.
|
| What I said, in fact, is stronger than the statements
| made in that Wikipedia article. The article only says
| that "scholars have supported" the view that the Earth is
| round since the 600s AD. _I_ said that the Christian
| church had taught it since it accepted it as dogma, and
| that, AFAIK, was several centuries earlier than the 600s
| AD.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| I don't feel attacked :) Some of these folks have indeed been
| randos from the Internet. Some of them are people that I've
| known well in real life and I'm convinced they genuinely
| think this. I could be fooled - I wouldn't know - but on my
| list of possible explanations, a desperate need for more
| attention than they otherwise get is high on the list.
|
| I would suggest that it's possible this need is subconscious,
| and if they're believing nonsense because that need is so
| great, I'd consider that a mental illness.
| qsort wrote:
| > I would suggest that it's possible this need is
| subconscious
|
| It's definitely possible. I'm saying I'd be more inclined
| to believe the "need" in question is a social need, rather
| than bad media/"fake news" influence.
| seppin wrote:
| Bingo. A study I can't find after trying on Google took
| people with objectively wrong opinions and payed them for
| accuracy. Magically, people corrected their own opinions
| when they had a financial incentive to do so.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| I'd be curious about the inverse though: does the rate at
| which a random sample of the population is willing to
| tell you something incorrect if you paid them change
| significantly?
| rocqua wrote:
| I don't think that acting weirdly when confronted with your own
| irrationality is a sign of mental illness. Accepting that you
| were wrong is generally a hard thing. Admitting to someone else
| that you were wrong is similarly hard.
|
| If you get totally and irrefutably proven wrong by someone you
| are having a heated argument with, that is doubly hard. In
| order to respond correctly you need to, within a very short
| time-span: - Realize the argument makes sense - Accept your
| entire world-view, with a great many other related things, is
| wrong - Admit that you were wrong to someone who just a minute
| ago you were angry at, who you thought was making bad
| arguments, and someone you felt was attacking you.
|
| Doing that in the span of 10 seconds is really hard. I could
| easily understand how someone would fail, and instead get even
| angrier at the person making the argument. This certainly is
| irrational, but it is not a sign of mental illness. It is a
| form of irrationality that I am ashamed to admit I also have
| sometimes.
|
| I think a big deal in the on-line space. Is that there is
| barely a way to re-engage after a cool-down period. You can't
| come back to a discussion a few days later, having had more
| time to process.
|
| Especially with conspiracy theories, the shift in worldview
| that is required to accept that it is wrong is massive, that
| isn't going to happen over the span of a minute. Heck, it seems
| unlikely to happen over the span of a day.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| Yeah I could understand that. Depending on the forum though,
| I seem to see people have the same conversation repeatedly,
| like they're just as confident as they were before. Vicious
| cycle if that is what's happening - that they believe what
| they believed harder because it didn't feel good to feel
| wrong.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| > I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their
| arguments
|
| I found the best thing to do is stop there. Just listen,
| observe, try to understand. Be patient.
|
| Unless someone comes to you asking a question, you're unlikely
| to change anyone's mind immediately, and even _if_ they are
| asking opinions often change slowly if at all.
|
| When we tell people they're wrong, we push them away a little,
| and our sphere of influence diminishes.
| imdoor wrote:
| Or maybe it could be that, given their prior beliefs, the
| reactions to your arguments are, in fact, _rational_ in a
| Bayesian sense?
|
| I think, with Bayesian probabilities, you can have a setup
| where, given the same data and two different prior
| distributions, you end up with two wildly different posteriors
| after updating the initial beliefs. Unfortunately, i don't have
| an example at hand but i remember there is a very interesting
| passage on this phenomenon in E. T. Jaynes "Probability Theory:
| The Logic of Science". Can anyone else expand on this?
| seppin wrote:
| > I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly
| irrational. And something's gotta be going on their heads that
| makes them cling to this hypothesis.
|
| The way i've heard it explained that makes the most sense to
| me: "people are convinced (rightly) that there is something
| wrong with our world and society, they just don't know what it
| is. Conspiracies provide answers and a framework to accommodate
| that feeling."
|
| The opposite of knowledge isn't no knowledge, it's bad
| knowledge. The creation of a parallel reality is not so
| unreasonable response to nothing nothing about our current
| reality.
|
| We all need something to hold on to.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I would not be surprised to learn that flat earth theories
| started as satire online, but it slowly turned into a theory
| for people who didn't know any better. I would also not be
| surprised to learn that QANON simply started out as trolling
| and morphed into the weird following it now has.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| In the case of q-anon, that is _exactly_ what happened. 4chan
| trolls were throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what would
| stick. Q-anon happened to stick, and off the rails it went.
|
| There's been a bunch of people who have had "control" over Q
| in the past few years. The current Q, Jim Watkins, is
| thankfully the laziest and most boring of them, and hopefully
| the entire thing fades away after the election.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| > _4chan trolls were throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing
| what would stick. Q-anon happened to stick, and off the
| rails it went._
|
| It's just like how 100% of the memes are created on 4chan,
| the mechanism is the same, applicable from cat pictures to
| political propaganda. Since 2016 or so, there has been much
| talk about "weaponized memes" on 4chan that was mostly a
| meme by itself (I was a witness there in 2016), but based
| on the situation by now it's unfortunately surely a real
| thing, and even MIT Technology Review is taking about it
| [0]. It feels surreal. What an interesting time to be
| alive! A bunch of random grassroot web dwellers can create
| something out of nothing by natural selection and genetic
| exchanges, and by attracting conspiracy zealots in this
| process, it will eventually become big enough to make an
| impact on national politics.
|
| 20 years ago, it was a Sci-Fi plot. Although Usenet already
| foreshadowed many social aspects of online communities (I
| could find conspiracy materials even from the early ARPA
| archives), but nowhere influential.
|
| One comment mentioned the changed perception of free speech
| before and after the 2010s, and this is an important
| contributing factor. Perhaps the society will learn to
| better adapt the new meme order in another decade.
|
| [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/24/132228/poli
| tical...
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| An old 4chan truism says,
|
| > Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be
| idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who
| mistakenly believe that they're in good company.
|
| - DarkShikari, Hacker News - in a comment on 4chan, 2009,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011498
|
| A decade later, it still applies...
|
| Since then, this has always been one of the most overused
| 4chan memes, with more than 100 variants of cute image
| macros. I always assumed it was a 4chan meme, and it was a
| huge surprise for me when I realized it actually came from
| Hacker News... Top 4chan meme from Hacker News?! It was
| beyond my imagination, I obviously underestimated the
| richness of cultural exchanges online.
|
| And it was from a well-known x264/ffmpeg developer...
| krapp wrote:
| Also see the Rule of Goats: Even if you fuck goats
| ironically, you're still a goat-fucker.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| There is also an old 4chan truism from the 2010s for
| that, "It's Still Shitposting Even If You Are Being
| Ironic", also one of the most overused 4chan meme of all
| time, with hundreds of cute image macros [0].
|
| Speaking of 4chan, I found its trolling and politics are
| extremely objectionable, yet there's a lot of psychology
| and sociology to be learned here, especially the
| mechanisms commonly found in an online community. QAnon
| is an excellent case study on how a self-organized online
| community can create an influential meme that eventually
| affected mass psychology.
|
| [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-still-shitposting-
| even-if...
| olladecarne wrote:
| I think if you look at the brain as a neural network then it's
| easy to see how this happens. Not everyone is born to educated
| parents and receives high quality education. If a lot of the
| information your brain received growing up was bad, then you
| can easily reach bad conclusions. The collapse of institutions
| makes it worse because now no one trusts anything. So to many
| the information on the internet is as valid as the information
| in the textbooks. Then if you keep feeding the brain bad
| information it starts generating bad information. Lately I've
| been thinking of information as a "substance" that has been
| diluted by the internet. So the whole "organize and make all
| information easily accessible" motto of big G and the web in
| general has had the consequence of diluting the concentration
| of good information.
| tunnuz wrote:
| Also vanity. There is something really comforting into thinking
| that YOU have it all figured out and know the truth and you're
| smarter than everyone else around you. And if someone proves
| you wrong, well then you have to face the hard reality that
| maybe you're not that smart. And that's hard to accept.
| [deleted]
| pier25 wrote:
| Generally speaking, humans have always been (and will always
| be) irrational.
|
| Even the most rational among us make plenty of irrational
| decisions or have contradictory beliefs.
|
| We've replaced religion and witches with aliens, new age
| beliefs, flat Earth, reptile conspiracies, etc. I don't think
| it was that different a couple of centuries ago. I read in the
| book Supersense by the neuroscientist Robert Hood [1] that in a
| study that is repeated every year for the past decades, the
| percentage of people having irrational beliefs has remained
| constant. I don't remember the exact percentage but it was
| rather high. Something like 75%.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/SuperSense-Developing-Creates-
| Superna...
| jariel wrote:
| Don't conflate 'religion' with 'arbitrary beliefs'.
|
| Of course within religion there is going to be a lot of
| 'arbitrary belief', but that's not what it is essentially.
| 'Parables' etc. are a function of how it's communicated and
| propagated, ironically, for the 'dumber folks' who 'need
| something material to believe in' and for whom more abstract
| concepts don't provide solace.
|
| Religion is a metaphysical perspective of existence, one
| based on spirituality from which we develop our humanity,
| morality etc. and none of that is irrational.
|
| Our earliest civilizations often confounded civic norms,
| civil law, religion, faith, cultural history etc. into the
| same sphere, from that you get things like the Torah for
| example (i.e. 'The Law') which is like a legal code, moral
| code, civic code, national history rolled into one.
|
| Since the Common Era (i.e. about Jesus' time) religion has
| developed into a more strictly moral and spiritual sphere,
| less so the core civic stuff, but it still lays at the
| foundation of all of our institutions ... especially
| ironically our University system, and partly medical systems
| depending where you're from.
|
| Our current scientifically materialist 'belief' whereupon we
| are all merely bags of tiny particles, randomly interacting
| in accordance with a few 'known forces' - which almost by
| definition denies the very existence of things which we
| otherwise believe exist - like 'life', 'love', 'intelligence'
| etc. is a pretty bizarre bit of irrationality that we somehow
| don't bother ourselves much about.
|
| Barack Obama along with the majority of our leaders of all
| kinds are religious and not in the Machiavellian 'fake' sense
| whereby he 'need to appear religious to get elected', so
| let's not write them off as idiots and contemplate maybe our
| crude and easy dismissal is too often misplaced.
|
| Yes, ideological conformism and orthodoxy are going to appeal
| to certain groups, and that's nice point, but it would be
| confusing the issue.
|
| And of course ... we all have some truly irrational beliefs.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _Religion is a metaphysical perspective of existence, one
| based on spirituality from which we develop our humanity,
| morality etc. and none of that is irrational._
|
| Humans have been naturally selected to cooperate over
| millions of years. Religion only exists because we yearn
| the feeling of community which is biological and it only
| makes sense that a unified culture makes a group most
| likely to survive.
|
| Also, any belief based on magical thinking (very present in
| religious people) is intrinsically irrational.
| jariel wrote:
| "Religion only exists because we yearn the feeling of
| community "
|
| No, community is only part of it, and frankly, that we
| lived in communities beforehand is irrelevant.
|
| Religion is the 'foundational philosophy concerning
| nature of who we are' that transcends most other subjects
| - i.e. it's metaphysics at it's core.
|
| The 'community' part arises only in the same way secular
| civic and legal issues arise in our own communities.
|
| 'Scientific materialism' as it applies to life etc. is a
| constant stream 'magical thinking' to the point wherein
| talking about it is akin to 'Flat Earth' people.
|
| Also - every modern politicized subject, even those
| adhered to by 'intelligent people' is chock full of
| 'magical thinking'.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> We 've replaced religion and witches with aliens, new age
| beliefs, flat Earth, reptile conspiracies, etc._
|
| I think you are understating the problem. Aliens, new age
| beliefs, flat Earth, reptile conspiracies, etc. are fringe
| beliefs in our current society, and are recognized to be
| fringe beliefs.
|
| Religion and belief in witches, in the societies you are
| referring to that had those beliefs, were _not_ fringe
| beliefs; they were mainstream. The people who were believed
| to be on the fringe in those societies--the people who were
| viewed in those societies the way we today view, say, flat
| Earthers--were people who did _not_ believe in the mainstream
| religion and all of its claims. For example, in Salem,
| Massachusetts in 1695, people who said witches did _not_
| exist were the ones who were believed to be on the fringe.
|
| So the problem is not that individual people can have fringe
| beliefs. The problem is that _an entire society of people_ ,
| minus a few outliers, can have, and act on, beliefs that are
| later shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be not just
| wrong, but delusional. So the question we should all be
| asking ourselves is not, what is wrong with today's flat
| Earthers, but which of the _mainstream_ beliefs we have today
| will end up being like the belief in witches in 1695?
| pier25 wrote:
| > For example, in Salem, Massachusetts in 1695, people who
| said witches did not exist were the ones who were believed
| to be on the fringe.
|
| Indeed, but those people were highly religious Puritans
| that emigrated to the New World because they were
| prosecuted in England.
|
| https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/puritanism
|
| When you put those kind of people in isolation and a high
| stress situation you get those kinds of behaviors.
|
| > _So the question we should all be asking ourselves is
| not, what is wrong with today 's flat Earthers, but which
| of the mainstream beliefs we have today will end up being
| like the belief in witches in 1695?_
|
| Totally agree. For example, climate change denial.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> When you put those kind of people in isolation and a
| high stress situation you get those kinds of behaviors._
|
| The Puritans were by no means the only people of that
| time who had mainstream beliefs that we now consider
| delusional. You'd be hard pressed to find any significant
| body of people of that time who didn't.
|
| _> For example, climate change denial._
|
| I would also say, climate change alarmism. Which, if you
| are inclined to disagree (you might not be, I don't know,
| but I suspect at least some people reading this will be),
| illustrates another aspect of the problem: it's hard to
| improve mainstream beliefs when there is not general
| agreement over _how_ to improve them--which new beliefs
| should take the place of the ones that are claimed to be
| wrong.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _The Puritans were by no means the only people of that
| time who had mainstream beliefs that we now consider
| delusional. You 'd be hard pressed to find any
| significant body of people of that time who didn't._
|
| We will be mocked for sure in 300 years but OTOH witch
| hunts maybe weren't as mainstream all over Europe as you
| might think.
|
| For example, in Europe between 1450 and 1750 35,000
| witches were executed. Of those, only 1,000 were executed
| in Spain, Italy, and Portugal in 300 years which for sure
| were religious countries (I'm from Spain).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-
| hunt#Early_Modern_Europe
|
| I'd be surprised if there wasn't some debate as to what
| caused those witch hunts. Was it societal paranoia or was
| it just a way for the church to exert their power?
|
| > _I would also say, climate change alarmism._
|
| I don't know what you consider alarmism in this case, but
| the situation is certainly dire. I don't think it's far
| fetched to think that if we continue in business as
| usual, modern industrial civilization could be at risk.
|
| As a small example, consider the wildfires of Russia in
| 2010 which triggered an increase in the global price of
| grain and many experts believe that fueled the Arab
| spring revolutions of 2011.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/world/europe/06russia.
| htm...
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-
| change-an...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/17/brea
| d-f...
| mistermann wrote:
| > So the problem is not that individual people can have
| fringe beliefs. The problem is that an entire society of
| people, minus a few outliers, can have, and act on, beliefs
| that are later shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be
| not just wrong, but delusional
|
| Even more interesting, a very similar thing can be observed
| in the manner in which people evaluate the veracity of
| "religion", with their not perfectly logical tendency to
| see only the bad, and overlook the good, all the while
| holding a strong self-perception of being purely rational
| and right thinking. Human beings are truly quirky
| creatures, if only they didn't like fighting so much.
| johnc1 wrote:
| > Politics and consumer capitalism are motivated to identify and
| target stupid people...
|
| My bet is on a variation of this. To some extent, we all target
| people to advance our goals, be it to get them hooked on our
| product, to get people to rally behind an idea or a policy we
| want, or perhaps to get ourselves elected to a public office.
|
| Entities with more resources naturally invest more in this and
| have more advanced tools to get people do what they want. Most
| likely emotions work much better when targeting large groups of
| people than smartness and objective truth, so that's what we get.
|
| I think it's nothing new, but the recent research advances and
| the ease of reaching out to people personally these day made it
| so that using people to accomplish your goals become probably the
| most powerful tool on the planet. Why build weapons or wage wars
| if you could just make people do what you want on their own will
| and also sing you praises along the way?
| hevelvarik wrote:
| People are becoming less thoughtful. With the advent of social
| media, almost anything one might think about has an appropriate
| right think construct and the incentives for conformity are more
| powerful.
|
| Humanities have been devalued and coopted by advocacy and the
| university has made its mission to please the customer, which is
| an increasingly emotional fragile late teenager who has been
| taught to demand a safe space.
|
| I could go on, we all could go on, and it's not funny at all.
| m0zg wrote:
| It's the algorithmic bubbles. They amplify biases and stupidity
| of any given group of people, and make biases and stupidity seem
| like the "norm" within the bubble, so not only it is
| imperceptible, it's also socially damaging to speak up against it
| with those still in the bubble. So instead of tamping down
| stupidity by exposing you to negative feedback (usually stupidity
| of the opposite polarity), you're only getting in-group positive
| feedback, so the system becomes unstable (EE's here will
| understand what I'm talking about).
|
| We have to deal with this somehow, because this is not going to
| end well.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Counterintuitively, people love reading about and engaging in
| what they consider "stupidity".
|
| Internet companies capitalize on this by bringing an optimized
| stream of stupidity for your viewing pleasure. Take a look at the
| front page of Reddit (logged out, default subs): Half of the
| content highlights stupidity of others: /r/IdiotsInCars shows the
| worst drivers from around the world, /r/insanepeoplefacebook
| shows the most bizarre clips from social media,
| /r/choosingbeggars highlights the dumbest negotiation attempts,
| /r/trashy and /r/iamatotalpieceofshit are selected stories of bad
| behavior, /r/whatcouldgowrong and /r/instantkarma are videos of
| people making bad decisions and suffering the consequences,
| /r/publicfreakout is videos of people fighting. Contributors hunt
| for the most egregious examples to post to Reddit in the hopes of
| getting upvotes.
|
| Twitter isn't much better: Topics spread on Twitter when they
| promote outrage or allow the reader to feel smugly superior to
| someone.
|
| If you spend your days online consuming this content day in and
| day out, you're going to become convinced that the world is
| "stupid" and getting stupider. In reality, you're simply tapping
| into stupidity concentrators, getting bite-sized views of
| stupidity so you can react in astonishment and feel superior to
| stupid people doing stupid things.
|
| I think COVID quarantine has worsened this, as people are getting
| even more of their worldview through social media feeds instead
| of actually interacting with people in the real world. If 90% of
| your insight into social interactions comes from clickbait social
| media sites selecting the most egregious stories and videos from
| around the world, of course you're going to think "stupidity is
| expanding". In reality, it's a sign that you need to revaluate
| your sources of information and move to platforms and networks
| where people are talking about something other than other
| people's stupidity.
| anewguy9000 wrote:
| actually, my friend, the median iq is still 100 - any way you
| slice it :/
| aj7 wrote:
| In the U.S., 95-98.
| puranjay wrote:
| I really think social media companies are deliberately
| promoting stupid and blatantly wrong beliefs. It's good for
| engagement.
|
| If you've ever watched someone be completely wrong about
| something you know a lot about, you know how strong the urge to
| correct them is.
|
| On social media, promoting clearly wrong beliefs and ideas
| (Flat Earth, for instance) is good for business because people
| will similarly jump in to correct the wrong belief. And if you
| tie that belief to a political ideology, the believers will
| defend their ideology, further increasing engagement.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I really think social media companies are deliberately
| promoting stupid and blatantly wrong beliefs. It 's good for
| engagement._
|
| I don't think it even has to be deliberate; the algorithms
| social media uses, by their very nature, are going to promote
| stupid and blatantly wrong beliefs, since so many people will
| enjoy mocking them and there will always be some believers
| willing to argue back and keep the discussion going
| indefinitely.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You could make a case that optimising for engagement - and
| getting stupidity - is a predictable outcome and therefore
| itself stupid.
|
| Imagine what would happen if social media algorithms
| started promoting the opposite. Engagement would drop, but
| there might be some interesting second and third effects.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| It's only stupid if you're trying to optimize for social
| good, makes perfect sense as a short sighted, profit
| maximizing corporation.
| selestify wrote:
| Unless these second and third order effects are more
| profitable than the first order ones, I don't see any
| incentive for social media companies to promote them.
| mdoms wrote:
| One of the best pieces of advice I have taken recently is "stop
| using anger as entertainment" (you can substitute
| "incredulity", "smugness" or "schadenfreude" for "anger" to
| make it more applicable to the websites you listed).
| abhinav22 wrote:
| A really good post - didn't think of it that way
| dahart wrote:
| > people love reading about and engaging in what they consider
| "stupidity
|
| Its true. I think it appeals to our inner Just-world theories
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
| aaron695 wrote:
| The Just-world idea I really don't think gets the attention
| is deserves.
|
| It's obviously everywhere but you see it in tech when people
| say company X deserved Y because they didn't do Z when they
| get Black-Hatted for instance.
| wolfgke wrote:
| > Internet companies capitalize on this by bringing an
| optimized stream of stupidity for your viewing pleasure. Take a
| look at the front page of Reddit (logged out, default subs):
| Half of the content highlights stupidity of others:
| /r/IdiotsInCars shows the worst drivers from around the world,
| /r/insanepeoplefacebook shows the most bizarre clips from
| social media, /r/choosingbeggars highlights the dumbest
| negotiation attempts, /r/trashy and /r/iamatotalpieceofshit are
| selected stories of bad behavior, /r/whatcouldgowrong and
| /r/instantkarma are videos of people making bad decisions and
| suffering the consequences, /r/publicfreakout is videos of
| people fighting. Contributors hunt for the most egregious
| examples to post to Reddit in the hopes of getting upvotes.
|
| Scene from the movie Idiocracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde
| x.php?title=Idiocracy&oldid=9...):
|
| https://youtu.be/1hj_7U40z5I?t=19
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Anything out of the ordinary is eyecatching. Human (and mouse)
| brains are overactive in novelty, it s well established
| azhu wrote:
| > If 90% of your insight into social interactions comes from
| clickbait social media sites selecting the most egregious
| stories and videos from around the world, of course you're
| going to think "stupidity is expanding"
|
| Agreed. Isn't this the majority of people though? And if this
| is in fact the majority of people, then doesn't it mean that
| stupidity is in fact expanding?
|
| I don't think any of us are going to hit upon the end-all-be-
| all decisive proof either way, but I think there's value in
| considering how everyone perceiving it getting larger may be
| the definition of it getting larger.
| jxramos wrote:
| _stupidity concentrators_ so good. Always remember folks, you
| get good at what you do. I 'd like to coin the term
| _intelligence concentrators_. We need some of those.
| SoSoRoCoCo wrote:
| > stupidity concentrators
|
| Wow, that about sums it up in a succinct and bittersweet way.
|
| Back in 2012-ish I began to honestly worry that the steady
| accretion of anti-information would eventually crush the
| internet if something wasn't done. Nothing has been done. Now
| add to that the effectiveness of SEO and searching Google or
| DDG, or even boutique sites like Stack Overflow or Epicurious
| reveals a huge quantity of chaff, crust, and effluvia. Not sure
| where to put my faith, but I do hope search engines can resolve
| the philosophical dilemmas.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| While I definitely agree with this, I am baffled by the amount
| of sheer stupidity that _does_ appear to be getting wider
| traction. I mean, QAnon basically started as a 4chan joke that
| I feel like even the originators thought was outlandish, and
| now you have _successful_ Congressional candidates talking
| about it seriously.
| dahart wrote:
| > I am the one getting stupider, or was stupid all along, and so
| I don't have the cognitive strength to accurately judge the
| stupidity level around me, and just happen to be thinking it is
| getting worse because I don't know any better. (Dunning-Kruger
| effect)
|
| The Dunning-Kruger meme needs to go away. The popular
| understanding of it demonstrated here is wrong. Contrary to
| popular opinion, Dunning-Kruger _did not_ demonstrate that some
| people are too stupid to judge their own abilities, nor that
| confidence is inversely correlated with ability. In fact the data
| in the experiment show the opposite: the main figure in the paper
| shows a _positive_ correlation between confidence and ability,
| and the whole thing is just speculating about why the correlation
| is less than 1.
|
| https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...
|
| I do not believe stupidity is increasing, and there are
| measurable social indicators that back this up, such as rate of
| education, re-normalizing of standardized tests, global use of
| technology, etc. The post I just linked to has a plausible
| explanation: regression to the mean. More samples as you grow
| means your samples are getting more average over time.
| flr03 wrote:
| Why do I find this essay arrogant and superficial? From the pub
| to HN, everybody is happy to give an uneducated opinion on the
| qustion. I'm too stupid, I'll pass.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Well, whatever the case is, stupidity is overdetermined.
|
| Here are a few ideas not mentioned.
|
| * Similar to #13. Expansion of rural broadband, mobile computing,
| and cell phone networks, combined with post-9/11
| entrenchment/mainstreamization of fringe cable news and talk
| radio. That's a lot of "information" getting to folks with below-
| average formal education.
|
| * It has always been somewhat unfashionable to call religious
| people "stupid", but the steady decline in religiosity may have
| led to gullibility in other areas of life, particularly politics
| and conspiracy theories (MAGA/QAnon/Fox News/4Chan) that we are
| more apt to call "stupid"
| tomxor wrote:
| Fun list. I've a third category: All of the above to varying
| degrees.
|
| When observing one surface of multiple vastly complex interacting
| systems (e.g society), I often have to remind myself that the
| causal relationships and measurements are uncommonly as singular
| as they are in a computer program behavior or [insert artificial
| technical field of choice] that I'm used to reasoning within.
| egh wrote:
| no
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| For any given question, there are few right answers and many
| wrong ones. Therefore it's a lot easier to be wrong than to be
| right.
|
| Combine that with the permanence of the internet and you have a
| few right answers surrounded by a sea of things that range from
| almost right to complete nonsense.
|
| I think B:9 is related. I really liked this article. A lot of the
| points made me go "hmmm".
| wobbegongz wrote:
| In the past people believed in lots of stupid things like "god
| exists", "the poor deserves its situation and the rich has earned
| its situation", "hatred toward blacks, Jews, neighbor country,
| homosexuals, handicapped and many more", "kings are good and
| democracy bad", "the strong country has a right to invade the
| week country", "the rich are evil and the poor saints" and so
| one.
|
| So I think the idea that stupidity has increased is an illusion.
| The thing in the modern world is more that the tolerance for
| stupidity has decreased so we discover it more. The sad truth is
| also that each one of us believes in lots of stupid things but we
| are more interested in finding errors in other when in self
| improvement. Like Jesus said, "and why do you look at the speck
| in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own
| eye?"
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > "the strong country has a right to invade the week country"
|
| Indeed they do.
|
| But not the month country. I mean, maybe they have the right
| to, but it'd be foolish. And invading the year country would be
| outright suicide.
| ctlachance wrote:
| Comedy? In MY serious thread? Not on my watch.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Making jokes on HN is pretty hit-or-miss.
|
| Though I suppose a joke based off a typo is pretty low-
| effort.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Hard to say if they downvoted for the joke, or they just
| stopped reading at "Indeed they do". I'll say I stopped
| reading until I saw the reply.
| thotsBgone wrote:
| Go back to reddit zoomer.
| ravitation wrote:
| I think this is undoubtedly a relatively large contributor to
| the perception of modern stupidity.
|
| Additionally, I read it as part of some of the written
| hypotheses, but, upon rereading, I don't know that the exact
| conditions are captured particularly well in any of them.
| karlerss wrote:
| All of those statements are statements of value.
|
| Maybe, in the past stupid was mainly reserved for people who
| knew very few facts. Knowing or having access to facts was much
| less common before the internet. So people used to argue about
| facts. But since those arguments were about facts, they always
| died down (someone was right and someone wrong) and you did not
| have a feeling of "expanding stupidity".
|
| Since access to facts is pretty much universal now, people have
| started arguing about values. If someone states they have
| different values than you, you call them stupid. Since no one
| is right an no one wrong, the arguments don't die down and you
| perceive expanding stupidity.
| Flankk wrote:
| > I am acquiring greater wisdom with age as I ought, but the
| average age of the typical person I encounter stays the same so
| they cannot keep up. I'm noticing the contrast increasing but
| misattributing it.
|
| My money is on this. You wouldn't typically argue with a kid, but
| on the internet you probably are.
| astrea wrote:
| This has been my pet theory for a while now that I've seen
| people start to wake up to lately (perhaps I manifested it).
| How can one believe any discourse on the internet when the
| other person on the other end could easily be an unsupervised
| 9-year-old. For this reason, I'm terrified of the fact that
| Q-Anon has gained any traction at all.
| jessaustin wrote:
| I wasn't convinced they _had_ gained any traction, regardless
| of all the noise, until I saw them holding a "Save Our
| Children" protest at a local (rural southern Missouri)
| courthouse. Yikes.
| ryandrake wrote:
| We will almost certainly have one, and possibly multiple
| QAnon adherents in the US Congress next year [1].
|
| 1: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/qanon-
| republican-par...
| ardy42 wrote:
| > How can one believe any discourse on the internet when the
| other person on the other end could easily be an unsupervised
| 9-year-old.
|
| I think you'd be able to spot a 9-year-old attempting to
| engage in "discourse on the internet."
|
| However, I think it's common to engage with people who are in
| their late teens to early 20s, who are at the point in their
| lives where their intellectual self-confidence has increased
| far beyond where their actual understanding is, but they've
| yet to realize that. They're fluent enough with adult
| language that they're hard to spot, but they've basically
| only absorbed one or two big ideas which they mistake for the
| gospel truth of everything.
| irrational wrote:
| That is one thing that frustrates me on discussion boards. You
| have no idea who is behind the nickname. Is this an adult with
| a college degree, corporate job, kids, mortgage, etc.? Or is
| this a 12 year old masquerading as someone older? Sometimes
| people argue against things that seem so obvious as an adult
| that I really really want to know who is on the other side.
| ngngngng wrote:
| This is perhaps why we see spelling and grammar called out so
| often on the internet. We're trying to lift the veil the
| fiber cables put in front of our eyes and reveal the idiot on
| the other end, but there's not much to go off of and we cling
| to whatever evidence we can.
| dorkwood wrote:
| I think people incorrectly assume that a child will type in a
| childish manner and be easy to spot.
|
| I used to post online when I was 12. I wanted to be part of
| the conversation and feel like an adult. What usually
| happened is that people would label me a "troll" and tell
| others to ignore me. I would genuinely use the phrase "I'm
| just asking questions", and people would treat me like I was
| intentionally trying to inflame the situation.
| sidpatil wrote:
| https://youtu.be/iMV8btPW4wU
| ravitation wrote:
| I doubt this considerably. Aside from the fact that it is
| almost assuredly a combination of multiple of the hypotheses,
| from my in-person experience (i.e. not on the internet), age
| does not directly correspond to intelligence (specifically
| referring to the term as I believe the author would define it).
| When considering the entire population (i.e. not just the
| highly educated and the intellectually interested), I'd argue
| they are essentially entirely unrelated (though I know some
| would probably argue they are actually inversely related).
| forinti wrote:
| I've noticed older people near me just weren't prepared for all
| the silliness on the internet.
|
| You have to coach them into being more critical of what they
| read online.
| phkahler wrote:
| Definitely to some degree. I see younger people learning
| lessons that I learned 20 years ago right here on HN. It's not
| that they are stupid, ignorant, or didnt get the memo way back
| then. It's that learning is a life long adventure and they
| aren't as far along yet. Ok, so they did just get the memo but
| because they were 5 when I read it, and it's been around far
| longer than that.
| koyote wrote:
| I agree and I'd like to go further:
|
| If you're out and about and a person comes up to you and shouts
| about how the world is controlled by goats in cow suits, your
| brain will quickly assess the trustworthiness of this person.
| Is the person wearing clothes? Is the person
| rambling/coherent/visibly intoxicated? Are the person's eyes
| shifting around/manic looking? Does the person smell weird? (I
| am making up random examples, but I am sure there are many
| things that every person will look at to gauge
| trustworthiness).
|
| Most of the above goes out of the window on the internet. Even
| the shouting part does not usually manifest itself into a
| website comment (ALL CAPS is less offensive than someone
| actually shouting in your ear/many people don't know the
| connotation).
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| I think the proportion of stupid to smart is the same as always.
| It is just the internet has given stupid a much bigger amplifier
| than it has given to smart. It is just as easier to distribute a
| stupid idea to billions of people than it is to distribute a
| smart idea.
| sudosteph wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with the core phenomenon that the author is
| trying to explain.
|
| Is it really people on average are getting stupider - or just
| people on the internet? Because yeah, coherent discussion on
| internet has been on the decline ever since Twitter got popular.
|
| I haven't seen people in my real life have become less
| intelligent, though many have become more skeptical and
| outspoken. People on the left are skeptical towards police and
| religious and financial institutions, and people on the right are
| becoming more skeptical of news media and academics. The real
| difference here, which is probably influencing the author's take
| - is that many liberals regard skepticism towards moral authority
| is seen as healthy, and skepticism towards intellectual authority
| as stupidity (and for others, it's vice versa)
|
| It's not that clean cut though, both sides have actually fed into
| each other with this skepticism - which entrenches it further. I
| grew up watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Colbert
| Report every night. Sure they mocked politicians, but they mocked
| news reporters just as often. Fox News was a big chunk of it -
| but nobody was spared. I spent a decade watching talking heads
| from every network lie, get called out, and then lie some more.
|
| Likewise, while many of the right line up to "support the police"
| - is there really any greater sign of distrust for authority than
| gun ownership? I've talked with plenty of gun owners, and the
| reasons most admit to owning guns are as follows:
|
| 1. They're worried they'll be in trouble and cops wouldn't
| respond in time to help them. 2. They're afraid the government
| will become tyrannical
|
| In either case, those reasons betray the underlying belief that
| even at it's best - the government and it's officials (cops) are
| not more capable of enforcing personal law and order than an
| individual is, and at worst - violence might be required to stop
| government officials.
|
| So sure it's weird, but in a way, this could just be what it's
| like when people of all backgrounds start to look more critically
| at flawed institutions. Many of these people are excited to see
| that others who are "waking up" (ie, realizing that things are
| flawed) and are feeding into that energy online. It's similar to
| a religious fervor like the great awakening. Once the novelty of
| it all has passed, people will either start working towards
| actual change, or they'll be distracted by something else.
| nemo44x wrote:
| "There is no truth, only power. What I've been interpreting as
| truth and rationality has been my own attempt to align my
| thinking with the political clique that was in power when I was
| being educated. What I'm interpreting as rising stupidity has
| been the collapse in power and status of that clique and the
| political obsolescence of the variety of "truth" and
| "rationality" I internalized as a child. Those pomo philosophers
| were right all along."
|
| This is a part of it to be sure. This line of thinking is
| becoming more and more popular and accepted as the only truth is
| that there is none. The enlightenment era scientific-liberal
| approach is rapidly disintegrating. But I don't think the pomo
| philosophers would actually think an entirely new meta-narrative
| would be constructed from their ideas. In fact their premise was
| that there are no true meta-narratives. But they've had parts of
| their ideas cherry picked to advance a new, illiberal agenda.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| A rejection of truth doesn't necessarily imply that scientific-
| liberalism is bad. I don't think that the post-modernists
| should be held responsible for encouraging anti-scientific
| thinking - of course unless your version of science is that
| science and rationality give us absolute truths of the world.
|
| Science can have lots of utility and not find us truth at all.
|
| It's a fault of some post modernists for not saying this part
| out loud as much as they should, and maybe a small handful are
| the rabid radicals who reject the scientific method as not
| having any utility, but I don't think that the majority of
| left-wing post modernists are anti-science per say. I think
| that they want science to be more narrowly defined and to have
| a broader understanding of the socio-political ramification of
| its approaches.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > Science can have lots of utility and not find us truth at
| all.
|
| It depends how far you want to jump into the rabbit hole.
| 2+2=4. It does. It always will and always has. It isn't just
| utility that is useful for building things. It is a universal
| truth and until someone can prove it actually does not, then
| it does. No ones lived experience changes this.
|
| And it's not just about finding facts and attaching moral or
| ethical considerations to them. It's about making claims of
| knowledge in ways that are _falsifiable_. Any claim must have
| a way of being proven wrong, otherwise it isn't something we
| should accept into the discourse of what is knowledge and
| what is not. 2+2=4 is a claim that is falsifiable and
| therefore valid to propose.
|
| > ...but I don't think that the majority of left-wing post
| modernists are anti-science per say
|
| I don't think most right wing people are either - except when
| it is convenient. People appeal to science until it doesn't
| help or in fact is detrimental to their cause. Science will
| make us uncomfortable and I agree that many bad things have
| been done because "science". But at the minimum, claims from
| eugenists were falsifiable and in time they have been
| disproven.
|
| And yes I agree, we need to be careful how we interpret
| things. I love the left's idea that "race is a social
| construct". I 100% agree it is. Yes, there is DNA that
| determines race and people are therefore biologically
| "different" - but it's unimportant. The social constructs
| that exist made race into something more than it is. It's no
| more important than nose shape, or eye color, or fingerprint
| shape, etc.
| java-man wrote:
| It is a fun read.
|
| But what we really need (to convert this to science) is to
| measure the objective metrics. For example, measure the number of
| articles in [insert social network name] for claims that
| contradict established scientific laws (let's say, physics). I
| know it'll be more difficult to do for economy or sociology, but
| at least with physics we might have a large body of well
| established and experimentally confirmed facts.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I've seen comparisons of how popular songs nowadays use simpler
| and less diverse words than they used to.
| searchableguy wrote:
| That may be due to wanting to tap into a global market. This
| is how English became simpler to use historically.
| jasperry wrote:
| One explanation I've recently heard for this is that, since
| there are now so many sources of information competing for
| our attention, only the most blatant and simplistic
| attention-grabbing music gets noticed and thus becomes
| popular.
| fl0wenol wrote:
| I think fundamentally many of those analyses are flawed,
| because they always start with a data set per year which is
| generated by taking the N most popular songs per year (i.e.,
| Billboard's Top 100). This assumes the population count and
| distribution of songs which you would consider "pop" vs. not
| "pop" is consistent year to year, which I don't think it is.
|
| What constitutes the top N pop songs each year is becoming
| more distilled and refined as the industry matures, which
| means they're all converging onto each other and losing
| complexity. I also contend if you chart the volume of sales
| for the whole music industry vs. this tight cluster, the
| cluster's ratio of single or streaming sales decreases.
|
| Meanwhile there's artists in an increasingly large tail
| making what you'd probably call "pop" in style but just
| without marketing push, which are more experimental and less
| refined, and these become underrepresented in the study.
| robocat wrote:
| That could easily be explained in other ways: fashion, reach,
| global market, simplicity and clarity, anti-intellectualism,
| LCD.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I suspect articles would be where you would go for "bullshit"
| as perhaps slightly more rigoriously quantifiable - stupidity
| is more a "in the wild thing". Generally bullshit is defined as
| a lack of concern for the truth vs what sounds good and
| supports the desired goal. A few axioms/metrics for "bullshit"
| for example:
|
| 1. Counts of unironic/unacknowledged logical fallacies -
| discussing psychology of loss aversion wouldn't be an example
| or even a strategic examination of loss aversion's performance
| and concluding it say has a niche. But stating it is better to
| not make an additional $10k without extra work or opportunity
| costs and pay a higher marginal tax rate on it? Flagged. 2.
| Claims which when examined closely are vacuous (having no
| meaning). 3. Unsupported claims which upon closer examination
| do not justify assertions but merely reassert more furiously.
| 4. Evasive chosen definitions that refuse to stay consistent as
| either specific or general in classifications.
|
| One gap with it is a matter of hypotheticals and implications -
| even a theoretical model contrary to reality can be a
| demonstration against a hypothesis.
|
| A fuzzier/snarkier example at a field level is a "SCI/Gen test"
| where even experts cannot distinguish noise from data indicates
| a lack of knowledge - although in a more positive sense it
| could just be a field's complexity being high such as
| description of a drug which interacts with proteins. I am no
| expert in it but given some infamously whimsical names they
| might not realize that a drug's complex organic compound that
| binds to the "Romero" prions wasn't a real specific subtype of
| prion without looking it up - let alone that the drug wouldn't
| bind with it let alone without unacceptable side effects.
| acbabis wrote:
| I don't think volume of articles is a very good measure. The
| distribution of people who publish things has changed over
| time.
| zepearl wrote:
| Maybe the problem is that (because of multiple reasons) the way
| of thinking is nowadays trending more towards extremes, meaning
| that people are not able (or don't want) to see/admit that often
| something is not absolutely good/bad, white/black, etc... .
|
| What then comes out of sticking to any sort of extreme
| thought/position/behaviour about something is then often wrong,
| and this might be seen as "stupidity".
| zadkey wrote:
| Reminds me of that one movie Idiocrasy.
| mattigames wrote:
| The most likely culprit for me is that a lot of gullible people
| weren't exposed to so many stupid ideas before internet which
| also gave them a quick and easy tool to share them (and therefore
| amplifying their reach), so their numbers can quickly increase
| and be louder than ever before in human history.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I m entertaining the idea that it is indeed expanding. Well not
| expanding , but that intelligence is regressing to the mean which
| is equally bad. People thrive under constraints and struggle.
| It's what makes games fun to play. Maybe the ease of modern life
| makes humans complacent. I mean i can't explain why i see so many
| people struggle when they use an old computer program which used
| to be commonplace in its day/ observing them shows a clear
| laziness to do deep-thinking. I m afraid i m becoming one of them
| too -- the horror!
|
| I can't help but think that we 're lacking the genius giants for
| which the last century is notorious. Where are the kolmogorovs,
| the von neumanns, the einsteins, the fred sangers of the past ~40
| years? Is there a big gap in the higher end of intelligence? What
| about the lower end of intelligence? If both are lacking that
| means we are indeed regressing to become average idiots.
|
| I like to think we already live in idiocracy. People forget
| however that in that movie, the biggest idiot wasnt President
| Camacho, it was the people, the way-below-average joes, who are
| evenly distributed across the political spectrum. (In fact the
| blind belief that politics alone can bring progress is kind of
| dumb in itself). Could it be something in the way we eat? There
| is a well established and colossal drop in testosterone levels in
| the past ~50 years. After all we are just neurochemical
| intelligence generators.
|
| (Also why is everyone focusing on social media? That's just a
| symptom)
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| There's good scientific evidence that stupidity is expanding:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
| klyrs wrote:
| Doomscrolling is objectively the best thing that I can do for the
| environment. If I put my phone down, I'd get bored, be
| productive, and probably make stuff. No good comes of that.
|
| People aren't stupid. But there's little incentive to exercise
| one's intelligence, once the dopamine pathways get plowed the
| wrong way too many times.
| aj7 wrote:
| Stupidity is like charge. Stupidity mobility, hence conductance,
| hence current has dramatically increased. Stupidity mobility.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| I've thought a bit about the "It's real, and it's probably all
| that extra CO2 in the atmosphere" option a bit, myself. It seems
| to be a worldwide phenomenon, with IQ's dropping [1] for the past
| few decades, and seemingly a bit of a resurgence in fascistic
| world leaders. I know increased CO2 does have a negative impact
| on cognitive ability--but I'm not sure what levels yield a
| meaningful effect.
|
| Regardless, no harm in having a small arsenal of houseplants!
|
| [1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/13/health/falling-iq-scores-
| stud...
| ben_w wrote:
| From what I've seen/read, levels inside closed offices could
| plausibly have a significant effect.
|
| The good news is the global CO2 levels probably aren't high
| enough to be a _severe_ problem yet (but it might still show up
| in the stats); the bad news is there is enough unburdened
| fossil fuel in the ground to make it into a big problem.
|
| https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/co2-on-the-brain-and-the...
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| The "everybody is stupid except for me" hypothesis (which is more
| accurately the "everybody who disagrees with me is stupid"
| hypothesis) has been around for ever. Conceited people have been
| espousing this since we first learned language. The basis of it
| is a failure to understand that your opinions are in fact
| opinions, and instead believe that they are
| established/unassailable/scientific... fact.
|
| The only thing that's made it appear worse than before is an
| increase in political polarization. That has made people less
| likely to believe that people with differing opinions are simply
| people with different views to them, and more likely to believe
| that people with differing opinions are simply
| wrong/stupid/malevolent. For every person out there wondering why
| people are so stupid, there are other people making equally valid
| observations about them.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Maybe stupidity is just entertaining and gets promoted because of
| that?
|
| As I watch another flat earth debunking video suggested by
| youtube to have a laugh I'm wondering ... Am I the part of the
| problem?
|
| How popular stupidity would be without people pointing fingers at
| stupidity and laughing?
| nicetryguy wrote:
| > As I watch another flat earth debunking video suggested by
| youtube to have a laugh I'm wondering ... Am I the part of the
| problem?
|
| I feel the same way. It seems sites like reddit have taken a
| sharp turn towards pointing out "stupidity" to briefly secure
| some fleeting sense of mental superiority. I find it mean
| spirited. It's strange how the zeitgeist of CURRENT_YEAR is
| fighting both for hyper political correctness and lambasting
| the mentally unfortunate. I find Gen Z very hypocritical.
| prox wrote:
| This line of reasoning has always felt as dishonest. The
| arguments you mention where all the hype ten years ago.
|
| For instance, hyper political correctness always has ment a
| double speak word to me for "I want to be racist /
| misogynistic, but they don't let me"
|
| It's not about mental superiority, imo it is about turning
| around polarization and hyperbole.
|
| If you're happen to be "mentally unfortunate" as you put it,
| I don't see any lambasting going on. Feel free to give
| examples.
|
| Edit : for clarity
| prox wrote:
| Entertainment polarization I call it. It taps into the inborn
| urge to point your finger at something and feel something
| (superiority, laugh at the dumbness, curiosity)
|
| I feel it is quite insidious and not many have a defense
| against it.
|
| The way outlier theories and polarized content can now reach a
| crowd that was hitherto undreamed of. And people get swept up
| in it.
|
| We must learn from this, but we as technologists should also
| put the cat back into bag, to make our algorithms not promote
| "stupidity" , and to educate people to discern information.
| sudosteph wrote:
| You've done an excellent job at identifying the problem, but
| I am extremely doubtful that this could be improved by
| focusing on algorithms and improving people's ability to
| discern information. When somebody has adopted a irrational
| position on something, it's not always possible to reason
| them out of it - especially when reason wasn't the primary
| factor in adopting that position in the first place. People
| often believe in things because they have emotional ties to
| it, or because they think it's just part of their self
| identify.
|
| The real question is how to do we stop everyone else from
| piling on top of these people and turning them into high
| visibility punching bags (which in turn propagates the bad
| information further and actually makes some folks more
| sympathetic to the people who now appear to be bullying
| victims). And that's not a question of intelligence, but one
| of morals and ethics.
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| Stupidity got certainly more diverse, and more complex and
| interesting varieties of it became more accessible to the general
| public.
| bgroat wrote:
| I think this is the ticket.
|
| There's often only one way to be right.
|
| There's an infinite number of ways to be wrong
| 60secz wrote:
| Ignorance not stupidity
| L-four wrote:
| My theory has been that the stupidity is constant but the
| increasing accessibility of mass communication is allowing us to
| see more of it.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| I would be curious about what is the author's definition of the
| word "stupidity"?
|
| "Lack of judgment"?
|
| "Lack of knowledge"?
|
| "Unintelligent"?
|
| "Mental slowness in speech or action"?
|
| Perhaps, "Lack of education"?
|
| In a lot of the points, the author uses "smart" as the opposite
| of "stupid". Smart is also a vague word that comes up with
| multiple definitions such as "having or showing a high degree of
| mental ability", "stylish or elegant in dress or appearance" and
| "appealing to sophisticated tastes".
|
| I have read the article multiple times, and it seems to me that
| it fires in all directions. It addresses environmental cognitive
| issues (air quality, etc.), education, political polarization,
| etc. In short, it lumps multiple issues under a personal
| interpretation of a vague (and rude) word.
|
| I avoid the word "stupid". Not only is it vague but it is ableist
| because it creates and enforces systemic and institutional bias.
|
| Is a lack of education the same as having temporary cognitive
| issues? Is it comparable to having a condition which decreases
| someone's cognitive ability permanently? What about people who
| are unable to grasp social intelligence? What about people who
| take beneficial drugs that happen to have mental fog as a side
| effect? Where is the line? To me, the answer is no. Those are all
| unrelated social issues that need to be addressed separately.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Both the words stupid and genius are vague and undefined yet
| you know them when you see them. For one , they make you feel
| genius or stupid, respectively
| contravariant wrote:
| It's disappointing how many examples in this thread are about
| lack of knowledge (or even just disagreeable beliefs).
|
| If intelligence is taken to be about manipulating the world
| around you then this is to some extent connected to the ability
| to obtain and verify knowledge but the ability to act upon that
| knowledge is far more important. True stupidity is almost by
| definition self-defeating.
|
| While I will admit that some supposed signs of stupidity whole
| 'flat earth' movement is catastrophically misguided, it is a
| bit sad to see people dismiss it with arguments that are
| somehow even worse than the ones given by the people who have
| somehow convinced themselves the earth isn't spherical (often
| with quite sophisticated, but wrong, arguments).
| ravitation wrote:
| I'd argue, at least in part, that the discussion about "lack
| of knowledge" in these comments is at least partially a
| result of the author's own failure to define, or even
| maintain a consistent implied definition throughout his own
| hypotheses of, intelligence/stupidity (even going so far as
| to use "wisdom" in place of intelligence in some of the
| hypotheses).
| contravariant wrote:
| That's possible but it's something that pops up more often.
| The problem with it is that people then try to fix it by
| just telling people the knowledge they supposedly lack
| (typically failing despite their supposed superior
| intelligence).
|
| Needless to say it's somewhat pointless to just tell a
| flat-earther the earth is actually round.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| The author's direct words: "The way we educate children went
| seriously sideways a while back, and so, yeah, stupid
| happened."
| tus88 wrote:
| Well we are destroying the global economy over an illness not
| much worse than the common cold...so yes it is.
| srsQtho00 wrote:
| Isn't this just simple math?
|
| Before mom & dad rambled at Dan Rather or their friends. Same old
| stupid, half thought out, tired stuff. "Commies! Righties!
| Lefties!"
|
| Now it's in our faces all day (or sold like that's "the way").
|
| Most people are just people living out their lives.
|
| Pretty sure dumb isn't expanding but awareness of how much dumb
| there is is made more obvious.
|
| It used to be one show called Jackass. Now 90% of YouTube is
| jackasses.
| reactspa wrote:
| The NYT recently had a piece on the NRC issue in Assam, India. In
| the lede they claimed that NRC was anti-Muslim because Muslims
| were caught up in it, and it was being done by Modi because he's
| anti-Muslim.
|
| Elsewhere in the article the reader would learn that 75% of the
| people caught up in NRC were non-Muslims, and that NRC had been
| started before Modi became PM, by the previous government, under
| orders from the Supreme Court of India.
|
| I honestly believe I became stupider by reading that article, and
| realized that the NYT is basically functioning as a tool to
| confuse people at this point.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > Illegal immigrants who are willing to do your job for less
| will not affect your wages.
|
| You might think that's untrue, and you're probably right, but
| all the experts believe that it will improve quality of life
| overall. Notice how no one claimed(in the last 20 years) that
| it won't effect wages, just that it'll improve your life by
| making goods cheaper and more accessible. They might be wrong,
| but I don't think that means they shouldn't be reported on.
| nicetryguy wrote:
| I doubt it. I think most everyone using social media has shined a
| spotlight on it though.
| honest_josh wrote:
| Before the Internet and social networks The Stupids never got a
| change to speak. Now their voice are amplified by their peers.
| ponker wrote:
| The Internet has exposed the fact that human brains are like
| unpatched Windows 98. Hacking in and causing mayhem is very
| simple, not everyone can do it but the knowledge on how to do so
| is widely available. Advertisers, Trump, Zuckerberg, etc. are
| basically script kiddies and unfortunately there is no patch
| simpler than quality education.
| hsod wrote:
| I have a different theory. I think in a world of mass
| communication and social media there are a large number of people
| who feel grey, flat, anonymous, just another face in the crowd.
| They want to stand out. Being right isn't as important as being
| interesting.
| cryptica wrote:
| The Reserve Banks of the world are making people dumber by aiming
| for full employment... This means stimulating the economy and
| giving companies an incentive to create jobs which don't need to
| exist... Because the jobs are useless, people start to focus on
| increasingly menial and tedious tasks and lose their sense of
| pragmatism. We've all seen meetings going around in circles for
| hours, people arguing about tedium, coming up with bureaucratic
| procedures, adopting bureaucratic workflows, etc...
|
| Most people have a deeply held trust in authority and so they
| tend to think the problem lies within themselves rather than
| something wrong in their environment and so they dumb themselves
| down in order to normalize their situation...
|
| In order to cope with their environment, they convince themselves
| that what they're doing is useful and, in doing so, they start to
| neglect their own common sense and they gradually lose it.
| googthrowaway42 wrote:
| The fact that you're being downvoted is so typical of the kind
| of midwits that inhabit HN. People vastly underestimate (read:
| do not even consider) the role that vast monetary manipulation
| has on a society. It creates so many distortions at so many
| levels. People spend so much of their energy and time on earth
| engaging with the monetary system and when you do very extreme
| things to that it creates a lot of problems (many of which have
| to do with distorting pricing signals and staving off
| bankruptcy which lead to many people doing completely
| unproductive work while at the same time giving them the
| feeling that they are).
| cryptica wrote:
| I think that the people who are downvoting me are definitely
| not nitwits. They are smart, but they're short term thinkers
| and they think that they can improve things by censoring
| these kinds of insights. It's not uncommon for me to get many
| downvotes while people replying in the comments are saying
| that they agree.
|
| The irony is that I don't think that our monetary system is
| evil. I just think it has been hacked/exploited and needs to
| be patched/reformed. Probably the central bankers already
| realize this by now.
|
| If it keeps going, even the elites will start losing
| purchasing power and quality of life and they won't
| understand why.
| googthrowaway42 wrote:
| Midwits, not nitwits. Obviously these people are very smart
| in a particular sense. But yes I agree with you. The super
| elites with competent financial advisors will just roll
| over into gold or crypto.
| cryptica wrote:
| I didn't realize that was even a word. I guess it crept
| into our vocabulary for a good reason ;p
| [deleted]
| chewz wrote:
| Stupidity? Alternative wisdom I would rather say...
| neillyons wrote:
| I've been thinking the exact same thing.
| googthrowaway42 wrote:
| People have gotten stupider because the world is too complex (and
| fundamentally impossible) to understand in a completely rational
| way. Historically we have relied upon intuition, heuristics, and
| a network of trusted authority figures (usually a network of
| trusted institutions).
|
| The modern condition (post Enlightenment) can be understood as
| the elevation of rationality over all else and hostility towards
| heuristics and intuition. Heuristics and intuition come from
| listening to your grandmother and from sources like the Bible and
| old folktales.
|
| Furthermore the networks of trust and the institutions are
| completely and utterly corrupt, inhabited and headed by the worst
| (morally speaking) and dumbest people (intellectually speaking)
| in society. Think Harvard and The New York Times.
|
| The typical modern person (including the vast majority of people
| on HN) are almost completely hopeless when it comes to what we
| would traditionally define as "not being stupid" (aka "not being
| a sucker").
|
| In your own life if you think of the stupidest people you know
| they tend to be the most "intelligent" (software engineers, PHDs,
| doctors, lawyers, etc). That's modernity.
| ironmagma wrote:
| > [the world is fundamentally impossible] to understand in a
| completely rational way
|
| But it isn't - rationality doesn't mean knowing everything. We
| can be rational and also rely on heuristics; we only evolved
| those heuristics in the first place because they mostly work.
| So it's perfectly reasonable to trust them in the absence of
| evidence.
| googthrowaway42 wrote:
| You can place the irrational in a rational frame of
| understanding, of course. But if you use a heuristic you are
| saying "I will use this shortcut even though I don't fully
| understand why it works".
| ironmagma wrote:
| Yes, but how is that irrational? It's not using anything
| that's contrary to rationality. It's something that
| rationality fails to cover -- you can't find a rationale if
| you have no information to input into the system of
| rational thinking.
| googthrowaway42 wrote:
| I'm using the term irrational to mean "not within the
| domain of the rational", not as a synonym for "stupid" or
| "folly".
| throwawaygh wrote:
| So your world view is that Harvard professors are eveil and
| stupid, NY Times reporters are evil and stupid, most modern
| people are stupid, software engineers are stupid, PhDs are
| stupid, doctors are stupid, lawyers are stupid, no one has
| taken advice from their grandmother since 1785, and no one
| reads the Bible anymore.
|
| Is it possible that becoming an MD might require a base level
| of mental capabilities and hard work? Is it possible that
| becoming a Harvard professor in their Math or CS department
| requires a big helping of skill, work, and luck? Is it possible
| that passing the Bar exam requires, if not a genius intellect,
| at least a base level of intellectual capability? Is it
| possible that all these people you disparage are actually just
| normal humans doing a pretty decent job at playing a small
| productive role in running society?
|
| More importantly: do you feel this way about the actual people
| that surround you -- your significant other, your in-laws, your
| old school friends, your coworkers, etc.? If so, please talk
| with a therapist (or your grandmother) about these feelings.
| This isn't meant in any way as an attack or belittlement. It's
| meant as genuine advice. Feeling like everyone around you is
| evil and stupid isn't healthy.
| googthrowaway42 wrote:
| You're speaking in very black and white terms, but yes in
| general that is my view and like all historical trends these
| things tend to decrease or increase in their effect over
| time. It's not a binary thing. Certainly I am saying that the
| number of people who read the Bible has decreased as a
| percentage of the population substantially since 1785.
|
| > Is it possible that becoming an MD might require a base
| level of mental capabilities and hard work?
|
| As an example of what I'm talking about, back in
| March/February all of the nurses and doctors I know were
| saying that Covid-19 was just the flu and that only medical
| professionals should wear a mask. I even reached out to one
| or two of them to try to give them more of a heads up. This
| was at the same time that videos were coming out of China
| with vast stadiums filled with sick people and where people
| were committing suicide rather than infect their family. Now
| all of those same medical professionals I know are saying
| that Covid-19 is extremely serious and that everyone should
| stay home when possible and wear a mask despite the fact that
| clearly the risk level is a lot lower now. Here where I live
| Covid-19 primarily attacks the GI like a typical stomach bug
| rather than as a serious respiratory illness.
|
| > Feeling like everyone around you is evil and stupid isn't
| healthy.
|
| Again you are imputing a black and white meaning to what I am
| saying when it was never said or implied. Certainly if one
| were living in Nazi Germany in the 1930s or the Soviet Union
| in the 1920s it would be reasonable for one to feel like
| generally speaking, "everyone around" was evil and/or stupid.
| Are things that bad here? Absolutely not however we are much
| closer to living in that kind of environment in the US than
| we were at the beginning of the 20th century.
|
| You have a very typical midwit view on this. I do genuinely
| feel bad for people that are so naive.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I suspect 3 and 10 - the internet is more accessible to the
| masses and rather than becoming smarter when information was more
| available they mept their same patterns and they communicate more
| over it which makes it easier to notice when they were confined
| to say doing stupid stunts or staging innane protests for stupid
| causes. Remember when Jackass and Reality TV were considered the
| downfall of civilization? (Although there some may half-seriously
| blame Trump on the latter it is a matter of debate of how much he
| is considered a symptom vs a problem in himself.)
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I am not sure.
|
| But when I look at something like this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8 (Chomsky and Foucault
| debating at human nature)
|
| I tend to think that current (public) thinkers are not as good as
| they were.
| recuter wrote:
| Being unintelligent used to be something to be ashamed of in
| polite society. Society is becoming less polite.
|
| This cycle has repeated throughout history. There's even a name
| for it.
|
| The infliction point is when it becomes more advantageous - or
| even necessary for survival - to self censor.
|
| Have you felt in recent years less and less inclined to argue
| with people? That is intellectualism being driven out of public
| discourse.
| puranjay wrote:
| I haven't managed to read a book in two years now. I spend all my
| free time on this rectangular glass hellhole. And I seem to have
| given up on rational analysis and stupidly jump into the trenches
| to argue with people I _know_ are incredibly wrong.
|
| So I can at least say that I'm getting dumber.
|
| But if I had to comment on the original article, I'd go with
| option B, no. 9. The internet has truly made stupidity more
| accessible and permanent.
| [deleted]
| unwoundmouse wrote:
| how do you write a post on this without mentioning the flynn
| effect
| szczesniewski wrote:
| I think it is just a result of more people thinking by
| themselves. They don't believe authorities anymore, be it
| government, church or others. They make decisions, some of them
| can be stupid, it is impossible to be an expert in everything.
|
| Social media, specially Facebook and Reddit, promote group think
| and writing posts that are liked, not that provoke discussion. If
| you go to a subreddit and you disagree with people there you get
| downvoted, that you avoid.
|
| We need a social media that makes you think. We need information
| that we disagree with. Without it we will be fools. We need to
| promote effort, not likeability. Reading only thinks we agree
| with is a mental masturbation.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Love the write-up. How it relentlessly widens the hypothesis
| space and avoids a premature* conclusion.
|
| Don't love any of the comments which says "I was thinking and the
| answer is probably [a completely random opinion]".
|
| * https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/rmAbiEKQDpDnZzcRf/positiv...
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Almost every one of the possible explanations (for rising
| stupidity, and for rising perception of stupidity if it isn't
| real), looked plausible to me. But that probably just means that
| "stupid" isn't a word with a precise enough definition, and so
| for each of the possible ways to define it, one (or more) of the
| various answers applies.
|
| But, in general, it seems not unrelated to the phenomenon in
| which weird things are much more commonly encountered (due to the
| ability to see/hear/read about things happening to anyone,
| anywhere, anytime). Weird (and perhaps also stupid) floats to the
| top of the list of things to be perceived, and there is now an
| industry (or several) to bring them to us all the time.
| cgriswald wrote:
| It's also often presented as if it is representative. See the
| various people-on-the-street 'interviews' of people with
| opposing viewpoints being argued with by the interviewer who
| clearly came armed for an ambush.
| vkaku wrote:
| Yes. My reasoning is this:
|
| The social media, centralized internet and content control on
| platforms are turning people into sheep. What we are doing is
| enforcing moral censorship and allowing bots to retweet echo
| chambers, what you end up with is people believing what they want
| to. Stupidity will prevail at that rate.
| atoav wrote:
| In my eyes it is just the visibility of stubidity that is
| expanding. Ironically at the same time more and more people learn
| more -- the question of our time is, whether the seeming
| knowledge they get is actual knowledge or some made up thing that
| just fit the hole in their soul perfectly in that time of their
| life.
|
| Today more people than ever are yearning for knowledge. Knowledge
| gives security. You then know what you place in this world _is_
| if you know how the world looks like. The problem starts when
| different actors start to abuse that needs, while those who
| believe them are incapable of differentiating between what is
| real and what feels good.
| chasing wrote:
| No.
|
| But I do believe the number of people who go around thinking
| everyone else is stupid is going up.
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