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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?
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 ar…
Stupidity got certainly more diverse, and more complex and interesting varieties of it became more accessible to the general public.
There's often only one way to be right.
There's an infinite number of ways to be wrong
Most people have a deeply held trust in authority and so they tend to think the problem lies within themselves rather than something wrong in their environment and so they dumb themselves down in order to normalize their situation...
In order to cope with their environment, they convince themselves that what they're doing is useful and, in doing so, they start to neglect their own common sense and they gradually lose it.
The modern condition (post Enlightenment) can be understood as the elevation of rationality over all else and hostility towards heuristics and intuition. Heuristics and intuition come from listening to your grandmother and from sources like the Bible and old folktales.
Furthermore the networks of trust and the institutions are completely and utterly corrupt, inhabited and headed by the worst (morally speaking) and dumbest people (intellectually speaking) in society. Think Harvard and The New York Times.
The typical modern person (including the vast majority of people on HN) are almost completely hopeless when it comes to what we would traditionally define as "not being stupid" (aka "not being a sucker").
In your own life if you think of the stupidest people you know they tend to be the most "intelligent" (software engineers, PHDs, doctors, lawyers, etc). That's modernity.