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.
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.
> 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.
Maybe social media are just tapping into the human need to have “fools” on the stage. It’s a pretty universal archetype. Silly fools, wise fools, serendipitous fools. Only the Jester can speak truth to the King sort of thing. Been around so long in so many places that it has to be useful for human culture...
"...people will similarly jump in to correct the wrong belief."
This works really well when you have a question about something. If you post a question asking for answers or ideas you often get crickets. But if you post an idea that is clearly wrong you usually get lots of people jumping in to correct you.
I can't believe the word "advertising" isn't in this thread yet.
It's simple. The dumber you are, the easier it is to sell something to you. Susceptibility to "influence" is a highly profitable trait, so it's selected. That's why the idiot networks need to aggregate as many fools together in one big writhing swarm of stupidity. Their revenue comes from advertising, and as long as that continues you should not expect it to get any better.
This realization may also lead to the solution: Don't regulate the content. Regulate the advertising.
I am convinced the world is "stupid", but it's not because I passively browse the front page of reddit more than I should. In fact, before you pointed out that it's mostly a stupidity concentrator (nice term btw), I didn't even notice that. When I read the front page of reddit I don't deduce the average intelligence of the participants by the most popular (mostly negative) posts of the day, I'm banking on the most upvoted posts being somewhat entertaining to me, nothing more.
What has convinced me the world is stupid is that as a whole we cannot get our shit together to deal with a global pandemic. You signal your intelligence when you show blatant disregard for the rules/law when you don't wear a mask when required. There are so many reasons why people do this (not knowing any better/not believing they work comes from lack of education), but it all stems from lack of intelligence (in my opinion). The fact that some parts of the world have effectively contained
while others are miserably failing, causing so many needless deaths, knowing what needs to happen to create this outcome, you can only conclude that as a whole, we are morons.
So yeah, I'm sure social media is definitely doing some damage, acting as a conduit for false information, spreading theories on 5G towers spreading the virus etc, but taking 5 watching some dumbass total his car via /r/idiotsincars because it was upvoted into /r/all does not make me feel hopeless, what makes me feel hopeless is getting on a tram, making a quick scan and concluding that I have to move into the next section because in the current one there are too many people not wearing a mask.
Your post has made me reconsider browsing /r/all though.. it is all pretty bland these days and /r/WCGW isn't entertaining as it was when I first found it
> You signal your intelligence when you show blatant disregard for the rules/law...There are so many reasons why people do this (not knowing any better/not believing they work comes from lack of education), but it all stems from lack of intelligence (in my opinion)
Coming from a country which had low enforcement of laws even before the pandemic(one of the reasons why it's still under "developing" category instead of "developed"), I doubt the disregard of law is due to lack of intelligence. On the contrary, the more intelligent/shrewd someone is, higher is their chance to get away disregarding the law(in these places). They are more selfish than stupid.
In every country I've been to I've seen the same levels of stupid. It's comforting to know that people aren't so different from each other.
But I think that what you are attributing to stupidity would be better attributed to culture, size, or strength of authority -- the countries that have handled the pandemic well score favorably in one of those attributes. Here in the 'states we are strongly individualistic and historically distrustful of government, and bad actors have been stoking those flames for a while so we are in a particuarly vulnerable state right now.
Now, in my opinion, stupidity is humanity's seeming refusal to not act more switfly about climate change, but I'm sure someone else would argue that's attributable to some other, er, attribute
"I'm banking on the most upvoted posts being somewhat entertaining to me, nothing more." - i do the same and i get stupider everytime it seems. i just watched for the first time on youtube "judge calls" which is basically video snippets of us american tv of judges sentencing ppl - i never knew such things existed before and i find its allowance on tv first and on youtube second pretty disgusting and inhumane.
'Stupid' is very subjective. Let’s take your example of the face masks. You (scientists including) call stupid whenever people aren’t wearing the masks. Others (also including scientists) might say that wearing a mask is stupid (because it’s weakening your immune system).
Another example. If you’d be living in the Middle Ages and there would be a growing group believing the earth wasn’t flat, you’d be called stupid. Now, it’s the other way around.
Either way, stupidity is very subjective when applied at an intellectual level.
At a more practical level, stupid would be a child that just heard their parents say not to touch the furnace but still touches it and burns itself. One could call it stupid, but it’s also a way of learning, exploring and getting experience.
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).
I don't disagree but I had one very miserable period in my life when schadenfreude (laughing at other people suffering) was my only entertainment. I was full well aware of it but couldn't change it due to chemical imbalances of the brain, plus being physically very weak (it's hard to change habits when your human battery is always at the 10% mark).
So again, I agree with the premise but statements like yours could be infinitely more helpful by suggesting ways to stop using these toxic motivators for fun.
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.
> 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.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. A friend of mine and I spent a lot of evening hours talking about [loosely summarized] "where the internet was going" from 2010-2013. Unfortunately we seemed to be correct on many fronts, and it has made some faucets of technology almost unbearable.
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.
Do you think that stupidity also is something which we’ve created a perfect environment for and which it can’t thrive ?
What were the consequences of acting foolishly and not concentrating 5000 years ago compared to today ? 50 years ago ?
Maybe you’d starve, maybe you’d get eaten by a lion, or ruin the hunt for food and your crops.
Today, that doesn’t seem relevant, you can spend all day believing in and talking nonsense and end up getting paid and receiving essentials. You won’t starve or freeze. You might even end up being the President of the United States by doing so.
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.
> 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.
I think you've made a sound point with good examples. The parts that do worry me are things where you wouldn't expect that to happen. For instance, in this post¹, you will see where many people have interacted with the comments. This is just the /r/bayarea subreddit so doesn't specifically select for 'stupidity'.
Now, set aside the actual proposition and read the comments. Most of them are trivially wrong about:
* What a California Ballot Proposition is
* What the role of the legislator is wrt ballot props
* The text of the proposition
Now, this would be a problem if the text was particularly hard, but it really isn't. Someone in the comments there pointed out that this was the same as the infamous Prop J and K pair where one raised taxes to provide funding for a thing and the other provided the thing but only if the funding was there. The funding failed, the thing passed. The thing never came to exist. Afterwards, on Reddit, I read commenters describing how they didn't know the two things were linked.
This is a pretty common pattern on forums like this. Even HN suffers from it where people avoid primary sources only to intentionally play telephone and get bad information which they then convincingly repeat. I've definitely seen folks confidently bullshit something they just learned from another comment instead of reading the primary source. As an amusing coincidence, one of these was about the ridesharing min wage law that Seattle passed. The primary source was very clear, but most comments argued about a thing that wasn't a failure mode of the actual law - but was a failure mode of a non-existent law that they had manufactured from thin air.
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.
I think COVID is causing it, but in a much simpler way: by increasing stress levels which increases fast system thinking. Globalization and the rising pace of change have increased global stress levels over the past decades, which has caused people to take a defensive mental stance, do more fast system thinking and be less open minded. You saw the same shift towards extreme politics throughout the world, which for me means it is not about the issues, but about how people feel. COVID turned that dial up to 11. I see people freaking out in many small ways, and they mostly don’t seem to be aware they’re suffering from anxiety and it is affecting their thought process.
Social media is the cherry on top. When you are in the fast system thinking mode, it helps you to stay there. Selection bias, shallow interactions, shallow depth of information, all things that increase as you engage more with social media. That makes it more toxic to people already under stress. These people then are able to find each other online, form vocal groups and try to spread their anxiety around. And that’s how it can appear like things are getting worse while mostly they’ve never been better. And how it can seem like people are getting more stupid while really they’re getting more stressed.
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.
I wonder if there's a 'shit rolls downhill' dynamic to the popularity of mockery content on Reddit.
Reddit's demographics skew very young, which means it's mostly used by people who have very little socioeconomic standing. People at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are subject to significant arbitrary humiliation at the hands of others (all entry-level jobs suck; so does being a student) and have no tools with which to fight back. People who are in this situation are likely to find catharsis in finding ways to see themselves--no matter how bad their personal situation is--as at least one step above someone else (hence the popularity of subs like /r/insanepeoplefacebook) and seeing abusive people being given their just rewards in ways the average Reddit reader cannot get away with (hence, the popularity of subs like /r/instantkarma).
I also wonder if there's a correlation between preferences for mockery content and the rigidity of social hierarchies in different countries. Japan, for instance, has a very rigid social hierarchy (meaning most people are subject to arbitrary abuse) and they had an entire genre of mainstream humiliation TV[0]. I'd be surprised if this kind of content is as popular in countries with flatter social hierarchies where sociopathic behavior directed at subordinates is less acceptable.
(As an aside, I haven't looked at Reddit's default subs for many years and it's shocking that they've crawled that far down into the clickbait gutter.)
> 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.
Hasn't been my experience that most people are stupid. I mean yeah, most people I ever met were quite helpless in various semi-emergency -- or just unusual -- situations but that doesn't make them stupid. It makes them kind of pampered and not well prepared, nothing more.
I think what you describe can be attributed to our brain noting the negative things much stronger in its memory while it always writes off the usual / slightly positive events as "normal".
In short, we get outraged easily, but it's hard to make us positively impressed in a lasting manner, it seems.
Or maybe this is the root cause? Seems like these stupidity concentrators would just yieldorw stupidity and make their consumers stupider, feeding back into more concentration of stupidity, etc.
IQ tests are being renormalized. Today's 100 may be last year's 99. Average IQs have gone up ~15 points since ~1950. Some evidence of slowing or reversing in the last 20 years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How does that work when flat earthers actually weave elaborate "theories" about the physics and mechanics leading everyone else to conclude that it is round? It's not like they say it's flat and stick their fingers in their ears. They respond with plausible-sounding retorts that, while obviously untrue, often make sense in isolation. For everyone else, the explanation of "the earth is round and gravity goes brr" is far less cognitively intensive than all the mental gymnastics flat earthers engage in.
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.
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.
I don't think there is too much information. There are plenty of very busy people with very good grasps on the world. I think it's more that people don't give time to information, and prefer entertainment. People in the U.S. spend on average 4 hours a day watching TV, not reading newspapers.
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.
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.
My opinion is this is due to a reduced level of trust that we place in either each other or large companies/organisations. It is known among the business industry that trust is lower than it was historically. Companies and people are increasingly seeming to engage in shadier and shadier practices, or we're becoming more aware of it. This erodes the level of trust we place in each other, research bodies, governments, policing and science etc.
In addition, where someone with an extremist view might be considered an outgroup, historically their views might have been suppressed among their peers or shutdown. Now they can engage online with thousands if not millions of other people who believe in the same out group ideas, potentially strengthening their view point.
One of the interesting psychological discussions is around people with extremist views such as flat earthers. These individuals are often minorities or outcasts of society and as such, many of those with extremist views form bonds with like minded people and their relationships and well-being are tied to those relationships. What this means is that not only are they less likely to respond pragmatically to opposing viewpoints, but that they would struggle to actually change their ways given that their relationships are tied with this belief. And if they were to believe differently, they would have to say goodbye to those bonds.
In addition, where someone with an extremist view might be considered an outgroup, historically their views might have been suppressed among their peers or shutdown. Now they can engage online with thousands if not millions of other people who believe in the same out group ideas, potentially strengthening their view point.
Not only that but those with out-group positions are great for those with agendas and willing to play along. Anti-vaxers are fodder for anyone looking for angry nuts to turn loose on their enemies etc.
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.
Yeah, I think our schools have long done US students a disservice in underemphasizing “information quality” — how to deal with incomplete, ambiguous, questionable, and bad info. A very large fraction of tests in school reinforce that every question has only one right answer. The notion of minimizing error is seldom even imagined. Instead it's taught that all learning must seek only one goal: “knowing the one and only truth”. Yet all too often, competing facts are not mutually exclusive and can change with time.
And don't get me started on the poor coverage of concepts like “necessary” and “sufficient” in judging evidence in support of an assertion or model.
After working in science for the past 15 years (drug development), I've come to appreciate how little in medicine we know in absolute terms. With any system as complex as the human body, generally the best you can hope for is to be less wrong.
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%.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
I believe that stupidity is and has always been widespread and in normal times the more intelligent ideas have the widest subscription, even among the stupid. But when leaders fail to [be open, be objective, act in good faith, stick to the truth], then even the stupid can detect that they are being played and they rebel and seek alternative facts. So my theory is that leaders are currently gaming the populous rather than leading them, and that this is so obvious to everybody that trust in leadership and institutions has gone out the window.
Scott Adams has recently asserted that about 90% of what we are being told is not true. I'm don't concur with Scott on that figure, but clearly even smart people have lost trust in leaders/institutions. When the news refuses to report on 25% of newsworthy stories because they either make Trump look good or Biden look bad... when the news claims it's perfectly safe to protest BLM issues in the streets during a coronavirus pandemic... when even judges are clearly acting in bad faith (Julian Assange extradition case, Michael Flynn case)... when the Supreme Court becomes (or is perceived as becoming) the arm of a political party rather than an objective trustable institution, then the populous loses faith in the leaders/rules/institutions and we get widespread rioting, violence, a hell of a lot of stupid ideas, and perhaps hopefully some positive changed buried within all that somewhere.
> leaders are currently gaming the populous rather than leading them, and that this is so obvious to everybody that trust in leadership and institutions has gone out the window
I agree with that assessment. My limited and probably wrong interpretation of history indicates that in general, behavior will now tend towards revolutionary.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
> 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.
This thinking is dangerous. You open the doors to labelling every opinion that isn't considered rational or part of the status quo to be a product of mental illness.
e.g I find those AI generated pictures of people that look like real photos to be mildly disturbing. It is clearly irrational, however I don't think people could claim I am mentally ill because of it.
Currently there is a push to make racism a mental illness. I see no evidence of that at all. I've spoken to some people that have gone on the "Iron March" and they aren't mentally ill (tbh they are just losers IMO but they are pretty harmless as most of them are NEETs living with their parents).
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
If someone was on your street rambling and raving, you wouldn't invited them in your house to have an argument. Yet, we figuratively do this when we reply to (and even seek) negative and angry arguments, leaving us fuming in our living rooms.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I can definitely sort people into "growing" and "static" groups, and definitely the static folks tend to be not very smart. Part of being smart is realizing you don't know very much, and wanting to rectify that.
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.
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).
I'd argue that good judgement of how reliable different pieces of information are is one of the most important aspects of intelligence. Some people are horribly bad at it while others are pretty good. In the long run this shapes what knowledge you have, so we can assume that someone who believe a lot of falsehoods isn't very smart. A smart individual can distill valuable information even when surrounded by propaganda while a dumb individual will still fall for a lot of propaganda even when surrounded by mostly correct information since they can't tell the difference.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
This works really well when you have a question about something. If you post a question asking for answers or ideas you often get crickets. But if you post an idea that is clearly wrong you usually get lots of people jumping in to correct you.
It's simple. The dumber you are, the easier it is to sell something to you. Susceptibility to "influence" is a highly profitable trait, so it's selected. That's why the idiot networks need to aggregate as many fools together in one big writhing swarm of stupidity. Their revenue comes from advertising, and as long as that continues you should not expect it to get any better.
This realization may also lead to the solution: Don't regulate the content. Regulate the advertising.
I don't find them particularly worse than the major mainstream media.
> If you've ever watched someone be completely wrong about something you know a lot about
This happens whenever I read a mainstream media article about something like airplanes.
What has convinced me the world is stupid is that as a whole we cannot get our shit together to deal with a global pandemic. You signal your intelligence when you show blatant disregard for the rules/law when you don't wear a mask when required. There are so many reasons why people do this (not knowing any better/not believing they work comes from lack of education), but it all stems from lack of intelligence (in my opinion). The fact that some parts of the world have effectively contained while others are miserably failing, causing so many needless deaths, knowing what needs to happen to create this outcome, you can only conclude that as a whole, we are morons.
So yeah, I'm sure social media is definitely doing some damage, acting as a conduit for false information, spreading theories on 5G towers spreading the virus etc, but taking 5 watching some dumbass total his car via /r/idiotsincars because it was upvoted into /r/all does not make me feel hopeless, what makes me feel hopeless is getting on a tram, making a quick scan and concluding that I have to move into the next section because in the current one there are too many people not wearing a mask.
Your post has made me reconsider browsing /r/all though.. it is all pretty bland these days and /r/WCGW isn't entertaining as it was when I first found it
Coming from a country which had low enforcement of laws even before the pandemic(one of the reasons why it's still under "developing" category instead of "developed"), I doubt the disregard of law is due to lack of intelligence. On the contrary, the more intelligent/shrewd someone is, higher is their chance to get away disregarding the law(in these places). They are more selfish than stupid.
But I think that what you are attributing to stupidity would be better attributed to culture, size, or strength of authority -- the countries that have handled the pandemic well score favorably in one of those attributes. Here in the 'states we are strongly individualistic and historically distrustful of government, and bad actors have been stoking those flames for a while so we are in a particuarly vulnerable state right now.
Now, in my opinion, stupidity is humanity's seeming refusal to not act more switfly about climate change, but I'm sure someone else would argue that's attributable to some other, er, attribute
Another example. If you’d be living in the Middle Ages and there would be a growing group believing the earth wasn’t flat, you’d be called stupid. Now, it’s the other way around.
Either way, stupidity is very subjective when applied at an intellectual level.
At a more practical level, stupid would be a child that just heard their parents say not to touch the furnace but still touches it and burns itself. One could call it stupid, but it’s also a way of learning, exploring and getting experience.
So even at this level, 'stupid' is subjective
So again, I agree with the premise but statements like yours could be infinitely more helpful by suggesting ways to stop using these toxic motivators for fun.
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.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. A friend of mine and I spent a lot of evening hours talking about [loosely summarized] "where the internet was going" from 2010-2013. Unfortunately we seemed to be correct on many fronts, and it has made some faucets of technology almost unbearable.
Its true. I think it appeals to our inner Just-world theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
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.
What were the consequences of acting foolishly and not concentrating 5000 years ago compared to today ? 50 years ago ?
Maybe you’d starve, maybe you’d get eaten by a lion, or ruin the hunt for food and your crops.
Today, that doesn’t seem relevant, you can spend all day believing in and talking nonsense and end up getting paid and receiving essentials. You won’t starve or freeze. You might even end up being the President of the United States by doing so.
What is the intuition that this runs counter to?
I don't see it as counterintuitive. It seems to me a reflection of human nature. I imagine people have always been that way.
Scene from the movie Idiocracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Idiocracy&oldid=9...):
https://youtu.be/1hj_7U40z5I?t=19
Now, set aside the actual proposition and read the comments. Most of them are trivially wrong about:
* What a California Ballot Proposition is
* What the role of the legislator is wrt ballot props
* The text of the proposition
Now, this would be a problem if the text was particularly hard, but it really isn't. Someone in the comments there pointed out that this was the same as the infamous Prop J and K pair where one raised taxes to provide funding for a thing and the other provided the thing but only if the funding was there. The funding failed, the thing passed. The thing never came to exist. Afterwards, on Reddit, I read commenters describing how they didn't know the two things were linked.
This is a pretty common pattern on forums like this. Even HN suffers from it where people avoid primary sources only to intentionally play telephone and get bad information which they then convincingly repeat. I've definitely seen folks confidently bullshit something they just learned from another comment instead of reading the primary source. As an amusing coincidence, one of these was about the ridesharing min wage law that Seattle passed. The primary source was very clear, but most comments argued about a thing that wasn't a failure mode of the actual law - but was a failure mode of a non-existent law that they had manufactured from thin air.
¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/j6c4lv/im_a_softwa... it's deleted now but the same text as https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/06/im-a-software-engineer-at-...
I think COVID is causing it, but in a much simpler way: by increasing stress levels which increases fast system thinking. Globalization and the rising pace of change have increased global stress levels over the past decades, which has caused people to take a defensive mental stance, do more fast system thinking and be less open minded. You saw the same shift towards extreme politics throughout the world, which for me means it is not about the issues, but about how people feel. COVID turned that dial up to 11. I see people freaking out in many small ways, and they mostly don’t seem to be aware they’re suffering from anxiety and it is affecting their thought process.
Social media is the cherry on top. When you are in the fast system thinking mode, it helps you to stay there. Selection bias, shallow interactions, shallow depth of information, all things that increase as you engage more with social media. That makes it more toxic to people already under stress. These people then are able to find each other online, form vocal groups and try to spread their anxiety around. And that’s how it can appear like things are getting worse while mostly they’ve never been better. And how it can seem like people are getting more stupid while really they’re getting more stressed.
Reddit's demographics skew very young, which means it's mostly used by people who have very little socioeconomic standing. People at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are subject to significant arbitrary humiliation at the hands of others (all entry-level jobs suck; so does being a student) and have no tools with which to fight back. People who are in this situation are likely to find catharsis in finding ways to see themselves--no matter how bad their personal situation is--as at least one step above someone else (hence the popularity of subs like /r/insanepeoplefacebook) and seeing abusive people being given their just rewards in ways the average Reddit reader cannot get away with (hence, the popularity of subs like /r/instantkarma).
I also wonder if there's a correlation between preferences for mockery content and the rigidity of social hierarchies in different countries. Japan, for instance, has a very rigid social hierarchy (meaning most people are subject to arbitrary abuse) and they had an entire genre of mainstream humiliation TV[0]. I'd be surprised if this kind of content is as popular in countries with flatter social hierarchies where sociopathic behavior directed at subordinates is less acceptable.
[0] https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/japanese-game-shows_n_45...
(As an aside, I haven't looked at Reddit's default subs for many years and it's shocking that they've crawled that far down into the clickbait gutter.)
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.
I think what you describe can be attributed to our brain noting the negative things much stronger in its memory while it always writes off the usual / slightly positive events as "normal".
In short, we get outraged easily, but it's hard to make us positively impressed in a lasting manner, it seems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude
IQ tests are being renormalized. Today's 100 may be last year's 99. Average IQs have gone up ~15 points since ~1950. Some evidence of slowing or reversing in the last 20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
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.
In turn, people reach out to conspiracy theories to simplify the world around them with obvious answers and explanations.
My theory, sort of.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In addition, where someone with an extremist view might be considered an outgroup, historically their views might have been suppressed among their peers or shutdown. Now they can engage online with thousands if not millions of other people who believe in the same out group ideas, potentially strengthening their view point.
One of the interesting psychological discussions is around people with extremist views such as flat earthers. These individuals are often minorities or outcasts of society and as such, many of those with extremist views form bonds with like minded people and their relationships and well-being are tied to those relationships. What this means is that not only are they less likely to respond pragmatically to opposing viewpoints, but that they would struggle to actually change their ways given that their relationships are tied with this belief. And if they were to believe differently, they would have to say goodbye to those bonds.
Not only that but those with out-group positions are great for those with agendas and willing to play along. Anti-vaxers are fodder for anyone looking for angry nuts to turn loose on their enemies etc.
And don't get me started on the poor coverage of concepts like “necessary” and “sufficient” in judging evidence in support of an assertion or model.
After working in science for the past 15 years (drug development), I've come to appreciate how little in medicine we know in absolute terms. With any system as complex as the human body, generally the best you can hope for is to be less wrong.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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?
I believe that stupidity is and has always been widespread and in normal times the more intelligent ideas have the widest subscription, even among the stupid. But when leaders fail to [be open, be objective, act in good faith, stick to the truth], then even the stupid can detect that they are being played and they rebel and seek alternative facts. So my theory is that leaders are currently gaming the populous rather than leading them, and that this is so obvious to everybody that trust in leadership and institutions has gone out the window.
Scott Adams has recently asserted that about 90% of what we are being told is not true. I'm don't concur with Scott on that figure, but clearly even smart people have lost trust in leaders/institutions. When the news refuses to report on 25% of newsworthy stories because they either make Trump look good or Biden look bad... when the news claims it's perfectly safe to protest BLM issues in the streets during a coronavirus pandemic... when even judges are clearly acting in bad faith (Julian Assange extradition case, Michael Flynn case)... when the Supreme Court becomes (or is perceived as becoming) the arm of a political party rather than an objective trustable institution, then the populous loses faith in the leaders/rules/institutions and we get widespread rioting, violence, a hell of a lot of stupid ideas, and perhaps hopefully some positive changed buried within all that somewhere.
I agree with that assessment. My limited and probably wrong interpretation of history indicates that in general, behavior will now tend towards revolutionary.
You may find these resources useful:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-s...
https://jamesclear.com/why-facts-dont-change-minds
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/words-matter/201810/...
https://ed.ted.com/best_of_web/hI9YSFHW#review
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/this-art...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Society has mostly been run by autocratic systems. If we are determined to make democracy work, conspiracy and anti-fact ideologies are existential threats.
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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?
* 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.
Although, sometimes the irony seems just a bit too rich to be true...perhaps a Matryoshka troll?
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.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
> 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...
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.
This thinking is dangerous. You open the doors to labelling every opinion that isn't considered rational or part of the status quo to be a product of mental illness.
e.g I find those AI generated pictures of people that look like real photos to be mildly disturbing. It is clearly irrational, however I don't think people could claim I am mentally ill because of it.
Currently there is a push to make racism a mental illness. I see no evidence of that at all. I've spoken to some people that have gone on the "Iron March" and they aren't mentally ill (tbh they are just losers IMO but they are pretty harmless as most of them are NEETs living with their parents).
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.
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.
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.
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.
My money is on this. You wouldn't typically argue with a kid, but on the internet you probably are.
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).
You have to coach them into being more critical of what they read online.
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.
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.
"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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Yes, there are more intelligent debates available for you to access than ever before.... but those don't get the million shares that stupid people get
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.