I am not sure.
But when I look at something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8 (Chomsky and Foucault debating at human nature)
I tend to think that current (public) thinkers are not as good as they were.
Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
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Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
#22Being unintelligent used to be something to be ashamed of in polite society. Society is becoming less polite.
This cycle has repeated throughout history. There's even a name for it.
The infliction point is when it becomes more advantageous - or even necessary for survival - to self censor.
Have you felt in recent years less and less inclined to argue with people? That is intellectualism being driven out of public discourse.
Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
#23how do you write a post on this without mentioning the flynn effect
Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
#24Yes. My reasoning is this:
The social media, centralized internet and content control on platforms are turning people into sheep. What we are doing is enforcing moral censorship and allowing bots to retweet echo chambers, what you end up with is people believing what they want to. Stupidity will prevail at that rate.
Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
#25No.
But I do believe the number of people who go around thinking everyone else is stupid is going up.
Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
#26Maybe stupidity is just entertaining and gets promoted because of that? As I watch another flat earth debunking video suggested by youtube to have a laugh I'm wondering ... Am I the part of the problem? How popular stupidity would be without people pointing fingers at stupidity and laughing?
> 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.
Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
#27It 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.
Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
#28> 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.
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.
Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
#29People have gotten stupider because the world is too complex (and fundamentally impossible) to understand in a completely rational way. Historically we have relied upon intuition, heuristics, and a network of trusted authority figures (usually a network of trusted institutions). The modern condition (post Enlightenment) can be understood as the elevation of rationality over all else and hostility towards heuristics a…
> [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.
Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
#30There'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.