Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#121

Post by reader_mode » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

henrikschroder wrote: post #97

grenoire wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is too much information around for the average person to filter and process and digest. All three are important parts of living in a society and it looks to me like even with e.g. economic issues alone, it's just very hard for (to be fair) anybody to keep up. In turn, people reach out to conspiracy theories to simplify the world around them with obvious answers and explanations. My theory, sort of.

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 commo…

>There was research last year that showed that cynicism is a way for less intelligent people to protect themselves from being taken advantage of. Basically, if you know you're not smart enough to figure out if other people are genuine or out to scam you, defaulting to assuming that all strangers are lying is a winning strategy.

That narrative is ridiculous - what does intelligence have to do with it ?

I guarantee you you are uninformed on so many issues and you could easily be taken advantage of no matter how intelligent you were by someone who spent time preparing/specialising in deception - especially if the negative outcome is less then the cost of investigating the issue. Nobody has the time to investigate every choice so by your logic cynicism should be a default strategy for everything you're not an expert in.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#122

Post by olladecarne » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

TallGuyShort wrote: post #32

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 somethi…

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.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#123

Post by mistermann » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #88

pier25 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

> So the problem is not that individual people can have fringe beliefs. The problem is that an entire society of people, minus a few outliers, can have, and act on, beliefs that are later shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be not just wrong, but delusional

Even more interesting, a very similar thing can be observed in the manner in which people evaluate the veracity of "religion", with their not perfectly logical tendency to see only the bad, and overlook the good, all the while holding a strong self-perception of being purely rational and right thinking. Human beings are truly quirky creatures, if only they didn't like fighting so much.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#124

Post by fl0wenol » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #9

java-man wrote: post #2

It is a fun read. But what we really need (to convert this to science) is to measure the objective metrics. For example, measure the number of articles in [insert social network name] for claims that contradict established scientific laws (let's say, physics). I know it'll be more difficult to do for economy or sociology, but at least with physics we might have a large body of well established and experimentally conf…

I've seen comparisons of how popular songs nowadays use simpler and less diverse words than they used to.

I think fundamentally many of those analyses are flawed, because they always start with a data set per year which is generated by taking the N most popular songs per year (i.e., Billboard's Top 100). This assumes the population count and distribution of songs which you would consider "pop" vs. not "pop" is consistent year to year, which I don't think it is.

What constitutes the top N pop songs each year is becoming more distilled and refined as the industry matures, which means they're all converging onto each other and losing complexity. I also contend if you chart the volume of sales for the whole music industry vs. this tight cluster, the cluster's ratio of single or streaming sales decreases.

Meanwhile there's artists in an increasingly large tail making what you'd probably call "pop" in style but just without marketing push, which are more experimental and less refined, and these become underrepresented in the study.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#125

Post by ironmagma » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #40

ironmagma wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [the world is fundamentally impossible] to understand in a completely rational way But it isn’t - rationality doesn’t mean knowing everything. We can be rational and also rely on heuristics; we only evolved those heuristics in the first place because they mostly work. So it’s perfectly reasonable to trust them in the absence of evidence.

You can place the irrational in a rational frame of understanding, of course. But if you use a heuristic you are saying "I will use this shortcut even though I don't fully understand why it works".

Yes, but how is that irrational? It’s not using anything that’s contrary to rationality. It’s something that rationality fails to cover — you can’t find a rationale if you have no information to input into the system of rational thinking.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#126

Post by SoSoRoCoCo » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #33

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…

> stupidity concentrators

Wow, that about sums it up in a succinct and bittersweet way.

Back in 2012-ish I began to honestly worry that the steady accretion of anti-information would eventually crush the internet if something wasn't done. Nothing has been done. Now add to that the effectiveness of SEO and searching Google or DDG, or even boutique sites like Stack Overflow or Epicurious reveals a huge quantity of chaff, crust, and effluvia. Not sure where to put my faith, but I do hope search engines can resolve the philosophical dilemmas.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#127

Post by cryptica » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #92

cryptica wrote: post #16

The Reserve Banks of the world are making people dumber by aiming for full employment... This means stimulating the economy and giving companies an incentive to create jobs which don't need to exist... Because the jobs are useless, people start to focus on increasingly menial and tedious tasks and lose their sense of pragmatism. We've all seen meetings going around in circles for hours, people arguing about tedium, c…

The fact that you're being downvoted is so typical of the kind of midwits that inhabit HN. People vastly underestimate (read: do not even consider) the role that vast monetary manipulation has on a society. It creates so many distortions at so many levels. People spend so much of their energy and time on earth engaging with the monetary system and when you do very extreme things to that it creates a lot of problems (…

I think that the people who are downvoting me are definitely not nitwits. They are smart, but they're short term thinkers and they think that they can improve things by censoring these kinds of insights. It's not uncommon for me to get many downvotes while people replying in the comments are saying that they agree.

The irony is that I don't think that our monetary system is evil. I just think it has been hacked/exploited and needs to be patched/reformed. Probably the central bankers already realize this by now.

If it keeps going, even the elites will start losing purchasing power and quality of life and they won't understand why.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#128

Post by qsort » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #99

qsort wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to attack you, but I don't think you are approaching this the right way. There are exactly zero people who believe the earth is flat. Some join conspiracy groups because they are social outcasts who enjoy being part of a tight-knit group, while for the most part they are being isolated and rejected (sometimes, admittedly, because of faults of their own, unrelated to being flat-earthers). They aren't insa…

> 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 givi…

> I don't think this is true. At any rate, if it is true

I'd be more inclined to follow this line of thought if this was about anything else. "The earth is flat" is not a claim that's false upon closer inspection of the available data, it's a claim that's prima facie false, it's in the same category of "the moon is made of cheese" rather than "we didn't land on the moon".

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#129

Post by szczesniewski » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

I think it is just a result of more people thinking by themselves. They don't believe authorities anymore, be it government, church or others. They make decisions, some of them can be stupid, it is impossible to be an expert in everything.

Social media, specially Facebook and Reddit, promote group think and writing posts that are liked, not that provoke discussion. If you go to a subreddit and you disagree with people there you get downvoted, that you avoid.

We need a social media that makes you think. We need information that we disagree with. Without it we will be fools. We need to promote effort, not likeability. Reading only thinks we agree with is a mental masturbation.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#130

Post by kubanczyk » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

Love the write-up. How it relentlessly widens the hypothesis space and avoids a premature* conclusion.

Don't love any of the comments which says "I was thinking and the answer is probably [a completely random opinion]".

* https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/rmAbiEKQDpDnZzcRf/positiv...