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Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

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Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#81

Post by throw18376 »

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…

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.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#82

Post by colinmhayes »

reactspa wrote: post #59

The NYT recently had a piece on the NRC issue in Assam, India. In the lede they claimed that NRC was anti-Muslim because Muslims were caught up in it, and it was being done by Modi because he's anti-Muslim. Elsewhere in the article the reader would learn that 75% of the people caught up in NRC were non-Muslims, and that NRC had been started before Modi became PM, by the previous government, under orders from the Supr…

> Illegal immigrants who are willing to do your job for less will not affect your wages.

You might think that's untrue, and you're probably right, but all the experts believe that it will improve quality of life overall. Notice how no one claimed(in the last 20 years) that it won't effect wages, just that it'll improve your life by making goods cheaper and more accessible. They might be wrong, but I don't think that means they shouldn't be reported on.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#83

Post by dahart »

> I am the one getting stupider, or was stupid all along, and so I don’t have the cognitive strength to accurately judge the stupidity level around me, and just happen to be thinking it is getting worse because I don’t know any better. (Dunning-Kruger effect)

The Dunning-Kruger meme needs to go away. The popular understanding of it demonstrated here is wrong. Contrary to popular opinion, Dunning-Kruger did not demonstrate that some people are too stupid to judge their own abilities, nor that confidence is inversely correlated with ability. In fact the data in the experiment show the opposite: the main figure in the paper shows a positive correlation between confidence and ability, and the whole thing is just speculating about why the correlation is less than 1.

https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...

I do not believe stupidity is increasing, and there are measurable social indicators that back this up, such as rate of education, re-normalizing of standardized tests, global use of technology, etc. The post I just linked to has a plausible explanation: regression to the mean. More samples as you grow means your samples are getting more average over time.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#84

Post by spaceman_2020 »

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…

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.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#85

Post by mynameishere »

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've engaged a few flat earthers...

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?

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#86

Post by tomxor »

Fun list. I've a third category: All of the above to varying degrees.

When observing one surface of multiple vastly complex interacting systems (e.g society), I often have to remind myself that the causal relationships and measurements are uncommonly as singular as they are in a computer program behavior or [insert artificial technical field of choice] that I'm used to reasoning within.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#87

Post by ravitation »

Flankk wrote: post #7

> 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.

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).

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#88

Post by pdonis »

pier25 wrote: post #72
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…

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 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?

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#89

Post by curiousllama »

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…

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.

Re: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

#90

Post by ryandrake »

jessaustin wrote: post #75
astrea wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

We will almost certainly have one, and possibly multiple QAnon adherents in the US Congress next year [1].

1: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/qanon-republican-par...

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