Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

Maybe, in the past stupid was mainly reserved for people who knew very few facts. Knowing or having access to facts was much less common before the internet. So people used to argue about facts. But since those arguments were about facts, they always died down (someone was right and someone wrong) and you did not have a feeling of "expanding stupidity".

Since access to facts is pretty much universal now, people have started arguing about values. If someone states they have different values than you, you call them stupid. Since no one is right an no one wrong, the arguments don't die down and you perceive expanding stupidity.

On conspiracy beliefs: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550611434786

According to Mirriam-Webster [1], definitions of "stupid" include:

-slow of mind

-given to unintelligent decisions or acts

-dulled in feeling or sensation

-marked by or resulting from unreasoned thinking or acting

So, from this, we would the population to make slow, unintelligent decisions. However, the Flynn effect indicates that average intelligence of the world's population is increasing [2]. To me, stating stupidity is increasing while intelligence is increasing is a contradiction, so I feel something else is at play, particularly with decision making.

Historically, the information a person could access was quite limited. Information was largely passed down orally, especially if you lived in a poor society. This information was hard-won and passed down over generations. Then technology allowed information to disseminate though alternative mediums (paper, radio, television, Internet, etc.). The primary benefit of these new mediums was their accessibility, and that feature--like it or not--is a double-edged sword.

To explore this, let's consider three scenarios:

1) A person only receives information that is true 10% of the time: this person will likely not survive into adulthood. If they do, they will likely cause harm to others.

2) A person only receives information that is true 50% of the time: would this person be able to make snap decisions? Likely not, as they would need to analyze every aspect of a situation. On a long-enough timescale, they might be able to figure out specific situations, but it's unlikely they will do a good job.

3) A person only receives information that is true 90% of the time: this person should do reasonably well. Their fast decision-making processes are well-tuned and reinforced by feeding in information known to be of very high quality.

To draw the (inevitable) connection to machine learning: would you train a reinforcement learning model with training data where 50% of the labels are wrong? Of course not!

My theory is that today, much of the information people receive by default is low quality; it doesn't generalize well. Novel situations are difficult to assess because people didn't develop good heuristics for analyzing it. For example, sometimes the best decision is to just say "no" and move on (for example, cutting out negative people from your life). But if a person is perpetually in a zone of undecidability, decisions becomes far harder to make. As a result, more situations pile up, creating additional decisions, creating additional problems, ad infinitum.

Just my two cents here. And please do not overlook the irony inherent in this post. :)

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stupid

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

- Adherence to norms doesn't necessarily take intelligence, it takes diligence. Those norms are mostly there as 'social rules' so that we all get along and prosper - and it's often difficult to tell 'which ones are important and not'. Sometimes norms are important merely as norms, i.e. 'standard modes of behaviour'. Language is like this - there's nothing inherently moral or 'good' about language but it helps immensely that we are all on the same page.

It doesn't take intelligence to break norms either, but it definitely takes intelligence to develop reasonable opinions about them. Doing so is risky and can appear 'foolish' - which is not stupid.

Sometimes we view arbitrary breaking of norms and 'not being serious' as stupid, when often it's not.

- People have always been stupid, but we now have the internet to highlight stupidity

- A lot of our own behaviours are influenced by emotional/ideological memes, which is why there are so many out and about, and even 'intelligent people' fall for them all day long. All major news outlets are written for a 'dumbed down' audience - which includes a lot of intelligent people.

- Ideology. Even smart people are utterly confounded and made stupid by their ideologies. Carl Marx said some smart things, but a lot of utterly stupid things that continue to be 'orthodox' in some groups. Every 'touchy subject' is piled upon with stupidity because there isn't any nuance allowed in the discussion.