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 confirmed facts.
One explanation I've recently heard for this is that, since there are now so many sources of information competing for our attention, only the most blatant and simplistic attention-grabbing music gets noticed and thus becomes popular.
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.
I suspect articles would be where you would go for "bullshit" as perhaps slightly more rigoriously quantifiable - stupidity is more a "in the wild thing". Generally bullshit is defined as a lack of concern for the truth vs what sounds good and supports the desired goal. A few axioms/metrics for "bullshit" for example:
1. Counts of unironic/unacknowledged logical fallacies - discussing psychology of loss aversion wouldn't be an example or even a strategic examination of loss aversion's performance and concluding it say has a niche. But stating it is better to not make an additional $10k without extra work or opportunity costs and pay a higher marginal tax rate on it? Flagged.
2. Claims which when examined closely are vacuous (having no meaning).
3. Unsupported claims which upon closer examination do not justify assertions but merely reassert more furiously.
4. Evasive chosen definitions that refuse to stay consistent as either specific or general in classifications.
One gap with it is a matter of hypotheticals and implications - even a theoretical model contrary to reality can be a demonstration against a hypothesis.
A fuzzier/snarkier example at a field level is a "SCI/Gen test" where even experts cannot distinguish noise from data indicates a lack of knowledge - although in a more positive sense it could just be a field's complexity being high such as description of a drug which interacts with proteins. I am no expert in it but given some infamously whimsical names they might not realize that a drug's complex organic compound that binds to the "Romero" prions wasn't a real specific subtype of prion without looking it up - let alone that the drug wouldn't bind with it let alone without unacceptable side effects.
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 are much more commonly encountered (due to the ability to see/hear/read about things happening to anyone, anywhere, anytime). Weird (and perhaps also stupid) floats to the top of the list of things to be perceived, and there is now an industry (or several) to bring them to us all the time.
It's also often presented as if it is representative. See the various people-on-the-street 'interviews' of people with opposing viewpoints being argued with by the interviewer who clearly came armed for an ambush.
Well, whatever the case is, stupidity is overdetermined.
Here are a few ideas not mentioned.
* Similar to #13. Expansion of rural broadband, mobile computing, and cell phone networks, combined with post-9/11 entrenchment/mainstreamization of fringe cable news and talk radio. That's a lot of "information" getting to folks with below-average formal education.
* It has always been somewhat unfashionable to call religious people "stupid", but the steady decline in religiosity may have led to gullibility in other areas of life, particularly politics and conspiracy theories (MAGA/QAnon/Fox News/4Chan) that we are more apt to call "stupid"
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I think you'd be able to spot a 9-year-old attempting to engage in "discourse on the internet."
However, I think it's common to engage with people who are in their late teens to early 20s, who are at the point in their lives where their intellectual self-confidence has increased far beyond where their actual understanding is, but they've yet to realize that. They're fluent enough with adult language that they're hard to spot, but they've basically only absorbed one or two big ideas which they mistake for the gospel truth of everything.
That is one thing that frustrates me on discussion boards. You have no idea who is behind the nickname. Is this an adult with a college degree, corporate job, kids, mortgage, etc.? Or is this a 12 year old masquerading as someone older? Sometimes people argue against things that seem so obvious as an adult that I really really want to know who is on the other side.
This is perhaps why we see spelling and grammar called out so often on the internet. We're trying to lift the veil the fiber cables put in front of our eyes and reveal the idiot on the other end, but there's not much to go off of and we cling to whatever evidence we can.
The whole notion of spending time sharing thoughts to random strangers on the internet seems pretty silly on the surface. With introspection, however, it becomes apparent that the return on investment, so to speak, is that it provides a platform to challenge your understanding of the world.
It is easy to fall into misunderstood or outdated ideas. Sharing those ideas with others prompts them to correct any errors in thought as a service to you. In turn, they will receive similar corrections for their misunderstood and outdated ideas as they share them. Collectively, this improves the shared understanding of everyone. The foundation of education.
Spelling and grammar corrections come part and parcel in that. They are given because they equally want to be received. There is really no greater feeling than being able to learn something new, and realizing that you were spelling something wrong, to be able to spell it correctly in the future, fulfills that as much as realizing your understanding of some complex subject was off.
On that note, those of us involved in the software industry know that software testing is greatly benefitted from testing invalid inputs as much as valid inputs. When challenging your ideas, it can be equally useful to try and take an alternative perspective – invalid input, if you will – and see what kind of correction data is returned. If the correction data is poor, what was seemingly incorrect input may be closer to being correct than you originally thought. This can be just as useful in correcting your understanding as simply posting what you hold as being true.
The old adage about asking "How do I do X in Linux?" will yield no response, but stating that "Linux sucks! It cannot do X." will solve your problem nicely captures what online message boards serve. To try and apply a human element to who sits behind the "Linux sucks" statement misses the point.
I think people incorrectly assume that a child will type in a childish manner and be easy to spot.
I used to post online when I was 12. I wanted to be part of the conversation and feel like an adult. What usually happened is that people would label me a "troll" and tell others to ignore me. I would genuinely use the phrase "I'm just asking questions", and people would treat me like I was intentionally trying to inflame the situation.
Definitely to some degree. I see younger people learning lessons that I learned 20 years ago right here on HN. It's not that they are stupid, ignorant, or didnt get the memo way back then. It's that learning is a life long adventure and they aren't as far along yet. Ok, so they did just get the memo but because they were 5 when I read it, and it's been around far longer than that.
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).
If you're out and about and a person comes up to you and shouts about how the world is controlled by goats in cow suits, your brain will quickly assess the trustworthiness of this person. Is the person wearing clothes? Is the person rambling/coherent/visibly intoxicated? Are the person's eyes shifting around/manic looking? Does the person smell weird? (I am making up random examples, but I am sure there are many things that every person will look at to gauge trustworthiness).
Most of the above goes out of the window on the internet. Even the shouting part does not usually manifest itself into a website comment (ALL CAPS is less offensive than someone actually shouting in your ear/many people don't know the connotation).
If someone was on your street rambling and raving, you wouldn't invited them in your house to have an argument. Yet, we figuratively do this when we reply to (and even seek) negative and angry arguments, leaving us fuming in our living rooms.
I can definitely sort people into "growing" and "static" groups, and definitely the static folks tend to be not very smart. Part of being smart is realizing you don't know very much, and wanting to rectify that.
I've thought a bit about the "It’s real, and it’s probably all that extra CO2 in the atmosphere" option a bit, myself. It seems to be a worldwide phenomenon, with IQ's dropping [1] for the past few decades, and seemingly a bit of a resurgence in fascistic world leaders. I know increased CO2 does have a negative impact on cognitive ability—but I'm not sure what levels yield a meaningful effect.
Regardless, no harm in having a small arsenal of houseplants!
From what I’ve seen/read, levels inside closed offices could plausibly have a significant effect.
The good news is the global CO2 levels probably aren’t high enough to be a severe problem yet (but it might still show up in the stats); the bad news is there is enough unburdened fossil fuel in the ground to make it into a big problem.
> 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.
Entertainment polarization I call it. It taps into the inborn urge to point your finger at something and feel something (superiority, laugh at the dumbness, curiosity)
I feel it is quite insidious and not many have a defense against it.
The way outlier theories and polarized content can now reach a crowd that was hitherto undreamed of. And people get swept up in it.
We must learn from this, but we as technologists should also put the cat back into bag, to make our algorithms not promote “stupidity” , and to educate people to discern information.
You've done an excellent job at identifying the problem, but I am extremely doubtful that this could be improved by focusing on algorithms and improving people's ability to discern information. When somebody has adopted a irrational position on something, it's not always possible to reason them out of it - especially when reason wasn't the primary factor in adopting that position in the first place. People often believe in things because they have emotional ties to it, or because they think it's just part of their self identify.
The real question is how to do we stop everyone else from piling on top of these people and turning them into high visibility punching bags (which in turn propagates the bad information further and actually makes some folks more sympathetic to the people who now appear to be bullying victims). And that's not a question of intelligence, but one of morals and ethics.
Yes. Absolutely. Fueled up and invested in your belief, it becomes harder to surrender that.
I do believe our best bet is to let science speak louder and put more weight into that. Both in our algorithms and into our debates. If people see some dude on a talkshow with an opinion vs an expert in a field, some equate that with both having equally valid and valuable opinions. Same if that happens on social. The presentation makes it seem both opinions have equal and valid weight.
That said, it’s a valuable discussion and a good incentive to really work harder and to do our research as technologists so we can be better at curbing the trend.
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, coming up with bureaucratic procedures, adopting bureaucratic workflows, etc...
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 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 (many of which have to do with distorting pricing signals and staving off bankruptcy which lead to many people doing completely unproductive work while at the same time giving them the feeling that they are).
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.
Midwits, not nitwits. Obviously these people are very smart in a particular sense. But yes I agree with you. The super elites with competent financial advisors will just roll over into gold or crypto.
People 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 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.
> [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.
It is rational to not waste time and energy thinking about things that are unlikely to matter. Being rational doesn't mean that you always make the correct choices according to some artificial metrics, it means that you make the correct choices based on the information available to you and your goals. Intuition and folk tales is a part of the information available to you, so keeping them in mind is a part of being rational (although you shouldn't put too much weight on them either).
So your world view is that Harvard professors are eveil and stupid, NY Times reporters are evil and stupid, most modern people are stupid, software engineers are stupid, PhDs are stupid, doctors are stupid, lawyers are stupid, no one has taken advice from their grandmother since 1785, and no one reads the Bible anymore.
Is it possible that becoming an MD might require a base level of mental capabilities and hard work? Is it possible that becoming a Harvard professor in their Math or CS department requires a big helping of skill, work, and luck? Is it possible that passing the Bar exam requires, if not a genius intellect, at least a base level of intellectual capability? Is it possible that all these people you disparage are actually just normal humans doing a pretty decent job at playing a small productive role in running society?
More importantly: do you feel this way about the actual people that surround you -- your significant other, your in-laws, your old school friends, your coworkers, etc.? If so, please talk with a therapist (or your grandmother) about these feelings. This isn't meant in any way as an attack or belittlement. It's meant as genuine advice. Feeling like everyone around you is evil and stupid isn't healthy.
You're speaking in very black and white terms, but yes in general that is my view and like all historical trends these things tend to decrease or increase in their effect over time. It's not a binary thing. Certainly I am saying that the number of people who read the Bible has decreased as a percentage of the population substantially since 1785.
> Is it possible that becoming an MD might require a base level of mental capabilities and hard work?
As an example of what I'm talking about, back in March/February all of the nurses and doctors I know were saying that Covid-19 was just the flu and that only medical professionals should wear a mask. I even reached out to one or two of them to try to give them more of a heads up. This was at the same time that videos were coming out of China with vast stadiums filled with sick people and where people were committing suicide rather than infect their family. Now all of those same medical professionals I know are saying that Covid-19 is extremely serious and that everyone should stay home when possible and wear a mask despite the fact that clearly the risk level is a lot lower now. Here where I live Covid-19 primarily attacks the GI like a typical stomach bug rather than as a serious respiratory illness.
> Feeling like everyone around you is evil and stupid isn't healthy.
Again you are imputing a black and white meaning to what I am saying when it was never said or implied. Certainly if one were living in Nazi Germany in the 1930s or the Soviet Union in the 1920s it would be reasonable for one to feel like generally speaking, "everyone around" was evil and/or stupid. Are things that bad here? Absolutely not however we are much closer to living in that kind of environment in the US than we were at the beginning of the 20th century.
You have a very typical midwit view on this. I do genuinely feel bad for people that are so naive.
“You are a midwit” is not a critique. It’s just name-calling. I suppose I somehow agree that name calling is a common critique of pretty much anything.
More importantly, it also shuts down conversations. Behaving like you’re the only non-idiot in the room makes you an unpleasant interlocutor. Consider the possibility that the people you interact with and think are midwits are actually intelligent but are optimizing for “have as short an interaction with this unpleasant egomaniac as possible without being unpleasant myself”. Particularly irl.
I’m still interacting with you because I hope you realize that your dismissal of basically every accomplished person in society as a midwit might have more to do with your insecurities than the broad structure of society, and that your obsession with this insecurity is eroding your long-term relationships. I have old close friends who talk and think like you are in this thread, and their attitude toward others has turned them into lonely old men. It’s sad.
> 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.
I have not found that to be the case at all. In fact, I've often found the stupidest people I know tend to be the people who think "the stupidest people tend to be the most "intelligent"".
It's means to discredit intelligence and expertise and replace them with shouting loudly.
First, if you're going to use an initialism and the term, parenthesize the initialism, not the term, on the first occurrence.
Next, I think you're way over-applying the concept of IYI. Also, the concept smells. If it's true, then why doesn't it apply to Taleb himself? And if it does, how can we trust the concept?
He also tells you not to trust him. His life is basically giving advice. That's what his books are at their core level.
Also, anyone who idolizes Ron Paul needs to be met with a certain level of skepticism.
I don't think you should trust anyone who tells you to not trust expertise or intelligence. They're usually selling something they don't want you to think about.
Finally, "No" and "Yes" aren't rebuttals, they're refusals to engage.
I suspect 3 and 10 - the internet is more accessible to the masses and rather than becoming smarter when information was more available they mept their same patterns and they communicate more over it which makes it easier to notice when they were confined to say doing stupid stunts or staging innane protests for stupid causes. Remember when Jackass and Reality TV were considered the downfall of civilization? (Although there some may half-seriously blame Trump on the latter it is a matter of debate of how much he is considered a symptom vs a problem in himself.)
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.
It 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.
But if all other things are equal , we should be seeing more frequent intelligent debates too, which is not the case. In fact if you challenge someone at best you d get a downvote
There'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.
Yup! I've read a number of papers about this over the years, and it's a big chunk of this whole landscape. The old saw: you either pay for the product, or you are the product, is right on target here.
Gaining attention and clicks from a person is much easier if that person is afraid. And/or angry, among others.
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 something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis. Don't know if mental illness is going up or down - our understanding and perception of it has changed so there's hardly reliable data on it. I'd have to go through a similar thought process as this article. But I think it's a factor, beyond "new media". I suspect that the toxic politics in the US is a similar phenomenon, the way people are controlled by confirmation bias and can twist their way into believing "my guy good, other guy bad" under almost any circumstances.
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.
Yeah that crossed my mind as well. People who have so little understanding of the mechanics behind it all that they think it's impossible we've put anything in Earth orbit - how could ANYONE understand that?
In one case though I had someone say that I wasn't hitting satellites, I was hitting a solar-powered high altitude plane. When I pointed out that it would have to be going at 23 times the speed of sound at sea level and flying at 120,000 km, they said of course: technology is amazing. While in the same conversation claiming that satellites were impossible. At that point I stopped believing they even had basic common sense.
My conclusion about flat-earthers is that the vast majority are just trolling. There are probably also a fair number who get sucked in by the idea, but they aren't the ones out there making the arguments for it. The frustratingly persistent people who can come up with one outlandish argument after another are too smart to actually believe what they're saying.
I am not a mental health expert but I do not think of this type of persistent trolling as healthy behaviour. At the very least it is shitty and disrespectful behaviour towards someone trying to make a point using facts.
This thread also summarizes my experience pretty well.
To take this even further: I encounter in my day to day many instances of people making claims that are easily refuted with a quick online search. I have realized that correcting people over their lack of scientific knowledge is perceived as nitpicking and inappropriate. We got our incentives backwards. If we cannot speak up over misinformation to our peers, then they will spread faster than the truth.
Sadly, I've had to accept that in order to be perceived as a much stronger source of truth, I have to correct people less.
People often shut their minds if you try to prove they are wrong. It is much easier to ask to stop topic.
And truth often is boring. It is only one. At first I've told my son only truth how it works (Feynman style). Now I engage in making fantasies (Diskworld style). I present all fantasies (theories) as equal, some can be constructed by physics laws. The game is to find which one. All sorts of interesting questions arise.
What is the difference between plane and satellite?
Can airplane flew that fast through air?
Is meteor burning? What is its speed?
> 120,000 km
That's third of a distance to the moon. Not sure how you got it
Any sufficiently advanced technology (knowledge) is indistinguishable from magic -- Arthur C. Clarke
So people just see competing ideas as a choice between two forms of magic. Add in identity politics and hey presto, changing their mind means denying themselves (a rather difficult thing for most to do). Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence. My evidence is better because your evidence is just your opinion.
> Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence.
No, this isn't true. References to Dunning-Kruger need to die. I haven't seen a case yet where using Dunning-Kruger to explain behavior is not misinformation.
Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically. There was a positive correlation in people's ability to judge themselves, in the experiments. The only question was why the correlation wasn't higher.
> Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically.
It also demonstrated that the worst-performing individuals estimated themselves to perform MUCH better than they did, while the best-performing individuals expected to perform slightly worse than they did.
This comports with the average reference to the phenomenon ("stupid people think they're smarter than they are, smart people think they're stupider than they are").
The article you linked for some reason makes this comparison:
> So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. [...] they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good.
This is just categorically false, and the chart linked not one paragraph above completely torpedoes it. The bottom quartile of people thought that they would perform at around the 57th percentile. They clearly expected to perform better than more competent individuals.
Perhaps the author meant to write "not that [they] think they're better than competent people do", which would be correct, but the rest of the conclusions seem to follow off of this flawed reading of the data.
> The bottom quartile of people thought that they would perform at around the 57th percentile. They clearly expected to perform better than more competent individuals.
I think you’re misunderstanding what Dunning & Kruger presented, which is precisely why references to this paper need to stop. You cannot read literally into the graph as saying that the bottom quartile of people believed they were at the 57th percentile of ability, that’s not what the experiment measured.
Have you read the actual paper? The respondents were 1- all Cornell undergrads volunteering for extra class credit, 2- asked to rank themselves, not to rate their abilities, 3- asked about such “skills” as the ability to get a joke. It seems pretty wild that anyone ever took this paper seriously. The conclusions that it makes in it’s wordy prose are not supported by the data they present.
Take a little more time to understand Tal’s primary argument - that this paper most likely is measuring regression to the mean. Because these kids were asked to rank themselves, and they didn’t know how good their peers were, there is good reason to expect a correllation less than 1. Because the authors were barely out of undergrad school themselves at the time, and not studying statistics per se, there is plenty of reason to suspect that the methodology isn’t perfect ... beyond the fact that it wasn’t a random sample of the population, it studied all rich kids who (self-selected) needed extra credit, it included no difficult mental skills, and that followup papers have shown a complete reversal of whatever effect is there, when applied to more difficult skills like law or engineering.
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 common is that they reject the mainstream view, they reject the consensus. And in turn, they embrace outlandish explanations, and the communities around those, because it gives them a false sense of superiority. They know something the rest of the sheep don't!
So these two psychological defense mechanisms interact with each other, and when the information flow in society is increasing, the threshold for how smart you need to be to keep up also increases. So people in general probably aren't getting stupider, but they're getting more and more overwhelmed, which looks the same.
>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.
"Further studies demonstrated that cynicism is more likely to be a worldview endorsed by individuals with lower rather than higher levels of education (Haukkala, 2002; Stavrova & Ehlebracht, 2018) and intelligent individuals’ behavior was shown to be more likely to depart from the norms of self-interest (Solon, 2014). Higher levels of education and com-petence in a broader sense might help individuals detect and avoid potential deceit in the first place, thus reducing the probability of negative social experiences, which might in turn contribute to a more positive view of human nature (Yamagishi, Kikuchi, & Kosugi, 1999). Indeed a number of studies showed general cognitive ability to be negatively related to cynical hostility (Barnes et al., 2009; Mortensen, Barefoot, & Avlund, 2012) and positively related to trust (Carl, 2014; Carl & Billari, 2014; Hooghe, Marien, & de Vroome, 2012; Oskarsson, Dawes, Johannesson, & Magnusson, 2012; Sturgis, Read, & Allum, 2010)."
>Following this reasoning, high-competence individuals
might hold adaptable attitudes and recur to cynicism only
when it seems warranted, while their less competent counter-
parts might show more cognitive rigidity and—relying on the “better safe than sorry” heuristic—tend to endorse cynicism indiscriminately. Consistent with evolutionary principles, such a “better safe than sorry” strategy can prove
efficient when one lacks the ability to correctly identify the relevant features of the sociocultural context one is confronted with and determine whether cynicism is warranted or not (Brumbach, Figueredo, & Ellis, 2009; Gross, 1996). In
this sense, at lower levels of competence, holding a negative, cynical view as a default (assuming that people are guided by self-interest unless proven otherwise) might represent a more viable strategy than holding an overly positive view of others’ morality.
So the narrative is about competence and intelligence is a factor as it correlates with competence.
Consider substituting some words and the argument holds. Instead of 'intelligent' say 'uninformed in relevant areas' which would work well to defend non-tech-savvy seniors.
> cynicism should be a default strategy for everything you're not an expert in
This would indeed follow, but if we allow for a small number of trusted sources can mostly be resolved.
> cynicism should be a default strategy for everything you're not an expert in.
Cynicism is not the same thing as skepticism. Cynicism encompasses an abstract and often moral judgment about motivations and machinations, permitting you to draw conclusions without evidence. Skepticism is more about coming to terms with the contingent nature of truth, and can be a difficult skill to employ, particularly when you're presented with concrete choices and have to make real decisions--as opposed to merely opining on matters.
That doesn't follow. If I have to make a consequential decision involving finance or some other important commitment, I research it first. I'm not generally moved by the specter of opportunity costs or indeed sunk costs.
I think many neurotypical people suffer from the same information overload, in that they treat mainstream media news the same way that many conspiracy theory enthusiasts treat their "news": zero skepticism (someone I trust said it is true, so I will accept it as true, regardless of the quality of or existence of evidence).
Now obviously there's a significant difference in degree of accuracy between the two worlds, but then one shouldn't forget that they're not dealing with equally difficult stories to investigate, or have access to the same investigative resources. Regardless, the same illogical behavior can be observed in both types, and an overload of complexity & information sounds like a very reasonable explanation.
I think this theory is missing a component: the erosion of respect for experts. It at least seems like pre-internet, when people didn't understand the world around them they would default to trusting what scientists/doctors/researchers told them was true. But today, we've gone so far down the disinformation "fake news" rabbit hole that a large portion of the general public, at least in America, just straight up doesn't trust what actual experts have to say on many topics.
This is not just because of disinformation though. Now, it's easier than ever to second-guess your doctor and any other expert (and I know because I've done this, and even been right on occasion).
For example, every time someone worries about their health, they can sort through all possible diagnoses online, and convince themselves they have a certain sickness just because the symptoms match. A doctor will use Bayesian reasoning and conclude the problem is really a very common infection or something, but when the untrained mind is overwhelmed with information, Occam's Razor doesn't hold.
The same goes for everything else. Information is dangerous for those who don't know how to reason about it carefully and properly, which is most of us, in most fields.
well the experts were saying in March, 2020 that masks do not work and are not recommended.
I was basically attacked at work as being xenophobic and insular for saying if we are going out we should wear a mask. so where were your experts on that one? sure f*#!ed up that one.
> well the experts were saying in March, 2020 that masks do not work and are not recommended.
As I recall, at the time experts were saying "Don't recommend that everyone wear a mask, we have a shortage and need to save them for health care workers."
Experts haven't exactly done themselves any favors.
--------
"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus"
U.S. Surgeon General, February 29, 2020 [0]
--------
"Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself. Let's really underline that. Stigma is the most dangerous enemy."
Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of the World Health Organization, March 2nd, 2020 [1]
--------
Have the experts always been like this, and it's simply more obvious now that the world is much more interconnected? Or has the quality of experts gone down dramatically? Both?
I was very surprised to read your quote attributed to the U.S. Surgeon General, as it doe sound like a rather stupid thing to be saying.
So I Goggle it and sure enough he did say as much.
However, you did not post the full statement which means the context is lost.
With the full quote and the resulting context the statement makes perfect sense:
Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
With the full quote, the statement not to buy masks makes sense. There is no context that "They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus" makes sense outside of lying to the public, or gross incompetence.
How does that work when flat earthers actually weave elaborate "theories" about the physics and mechanics leading everyone else to conclude that it is round? It's not like they say it's flat and stick their fingers in their ears. They respond with plausible-sounding retorts that, while obviously untrue, often make sense in isolation. For everyone else, the explanation of "the earth is round and gravity goes brr" is far less cognitively intensive than all the mental gymnastics flat earthers engage in.
I don't think there is too much information. There are plenty of very busy people with very good grasps on the world. I think it's more that people don't give time to information, and prefer entertainment. People in the U.S. spend on average 4 hours a day watching TV, not reading newspapers.
I don't think that acting weirdly when confronted with your own irrationality is a sign of mental illness. Accepting that you were wrong is generally a hard thing. Admitting to someone else that you were wrong is similarly hard.
If you get totally and irrefutably proven wrong by someone you are having a heated argument with, that is doubly hard. In order to respond correctly you need to, within a very short time-span:
- Realize the argument makes sense
- Accept your entire world-view, with a great many other related things, is wrong
- Admit that you were wrong to someone who just a minute ago you were angry at, who you thought was making bad arguments, and someone you felt was attacking you.
Doing that in the span of 10 seconds is really hard. I could easily understand how someone would fail, and instead get even angrier at the person making the argument. This certainly is irrational, but it is not a sign of mental illness. It is a form of irrationality that I am ashamed to admit I also have sometimes.
I think a big deal in the on-line space. Is that there is barely a way to re-engage after a cool-down period. You can't come back to a discussion a few days later, having had more time to process.
Especially with conspiracy theories, the shift in worldview that is required to accept that it is wrong is massive, that isn't going to happen over the span of a minute. Heck, it seems unlikely to happen over the span of a day.
Yeah I could understand that. Depending on the forum though, I seem to see people have the same conversation repeatedly, like they're just as confident as they were before. Vicious cycle if that is what's happening - that they believe what they believed harder because it didn't feel good to feel wrong.
I think this is a hard mantra to put into practice sometimes. I definitely think many people who are not mentally ill sometimes do not abide by this mantra.
Whilst I agree that it is better to be wrong to be ignorant, there are plenty of times where I hate being proven wrong. Sometimes that does get the better of me.
I meant perception from outside. Person who is wrong and changes his mind is smart, brave.
Person who is making obviously unbelievable arguments still is wrong but also dishonest. It is fine for fun or trolls but if it meant to be honest discussion it gains nothing but distrust.
I would not be surprised to learn that flat earth theories started as satire online, but it slowly turned into a theory for people who didn't know any better. I would also not be surprised to learn that QANON simply started out as trolling and morphed into the weird following it now has.
In the case of q-anon, that is exactly what happened. 4chan trolls were throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what would stick. Q-anon happened to stick, and off the rails it went.
There's been a bunch of people who have had "control" over Q in the past few years. The current Q, Jim Watkins, is thankfully the laziest and most boring of them, and hopefully the entire thing fades away after the election.
> 4chan trolls were throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what would stick. Q-anon happened to stick, and off the rails it went.
It's just like how 100% of the memes are created on 4chan, the mechanism is the same, applicable from cat pictures to political propaganda. Since 2016 or so, there has been much talk about "weaponized memes" on 4chan that was mostly a meme by itself initally (I was a witness there in 2016), but based on the situation by now it's unfortunately surely a real thing, and even MIT Technology Review has an article [0]. It feels surreal. What an interesting time to be alive! A bunch of random grassroot web dwellers can create something out of nothing by natural selection and genetic exchanges, and by attracting conspiracy zealots in this process, it will eventually become big enough to make an impact on national politics.
20 years ago, it was a Sci-Fi plot. Although Usenet already foreshadowed many social aspects of online communities (I could find conspiracy materials even from the early ARPA archives), but nowhere influential.
One comment mentioned the changed perception of free speech before and after the 2010s, and this is an important contributing factor. Perhaps the society will learn to better adapt the new meme order in another decade.
> Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.
Since then, this has always been one of the most overused 4chan memes, with more than 100 variants of cute image macros. I always assumed it was a 4chan meme, and it was a huge surprise for me when I realized it actually came from Hacker News... Top 4chan meme from Hacker News?! It was beyond my imagination, I obviously underestimated the richness of cultural exchanges online.
And it was from a well-known x264/ffmpeg developer...
There is also an old 4chan truism from the 2010s for that, "It's Still Shitposting Even If You Are Being Ironic", also one of the most overused 4chan meme of all time, with hundreds of cute image macros [0].
Speaking of 4chan, I found its trolling and politics are extremely objectionable, yet there's a lot of psychology and sociology to be learned here, especially the mechanisms commonly found in an online community. QAnon is an excellent case study on how a self-organized online community can create an influential meme that eventually affected mass psychology.
Also vanity. There is something really comforting into thinking that YOU have it all figured out and know the truth and you’re smarter than everyone else around you. And if someone proves you wrong, well then you have to face the hard reality that maybe you’re not that smart. And that’s hard to accept.
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 a study that is repeated every year for the past decades, the percentage of people having irrational beliefs has remained constant. I don't remember the exact percentage but it was rather high. Something like 75%.
> 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?
When you put those kind of people in isolation and a high stress situation you get those kinds of behaviors.
> 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?
Totally agree. For example, climate change denial.
> When you put those kind of people in isolation and a high stress situation you get those kinds of behaviors.
The Puritans were by no means the only people of that time who had mainstream beliefs that we now consider delusional. You'd be hard pressed to find any significant body of people of that time who didn't.
> For example, climate change denial.
I would also say, climate change alarmism. Which, if you are inclined to disagree (you might not be, I don't know, but I suspect at least some people reading this will be), illustrates another aspect of the problem: it's hard to improve mainstream beliefs when there is not general agreement over how to improve them--which new beliefs should take the place of the ones that are claimed to be wrong.
> The Puritans were by no means the only people of that time who had mainstream beliefs that we now consider delusional. You'd be hard pressed to find any significant body of people of that time who didn't.
We will be mocked for sure in 300 years but OTOH witch hunts maybe weren't as mainstream all over Europe as you might think.
For example, in Europe between 1450 and 1750 35,000 witches were executed. Of those, only 1,000 were executed in Spain, Italy, and Portugal in 300 years which for sure were religious countries (I'm from Spain).
I'd be surprised if there wasn't some debate as to what caused those witch hunts. Was it societal paranoia or was it just a way for the church to exert their power?
> I would also say, climate change alarmism.
I don't know what you consider alarmism in this case, but the situation is certainly dire. I don't think it's far fetched to think that if we continue in business as usual, modern industrial civilization could be at risk.
As a small example, consider the wildfires of Russia in 2010 which triggered an increase in the global price of grain and many experts believe that fueled the Arab spring revolutions of 2011.
> witch hunts maybe weren't as mainstream all over Europe as you might think
I didn't say they were. I didn't say all societies of that time had the same wrong mainstream beliefs as the Puritans. I just said they all had some wrong mainstream beliefs.
> the situation is certainly dire. I don't think it's far fetched to think that if we continue in business as usual, modern industrial civilization could be at risk.
I disagree (to be clear, I disagree about the "civilization could be at risk" part, I'm not saying I'm in favor of just continuing business as usual--I think there are certainly things we could and should do better). But I don't want to hijack the discussion into a debate about climate change and what we should do about it. My only point here is that there is significant disagreement on this point, and the various sides (there are more than two) can't all be right since they hold beliefs that are inconsistent with each other, so clearly some widely held belief in this area is wrong, we just have no consensus on which belief it is, so society as a whole can't make a correction.
> 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.
Don't conflate 'religion' with 'arbitrary beliefs'.
Of course within religion there is going to be a lot of 'arbitrary belief', but that's not what it is essentially. 'Parables' etc. are a function of how it's communicated and propagated, ironically, for the 'dumber folks' who 'need something material to believe in' and for whom more abstract concepts don't provide solace.
Religion is a metaphysical perspective of existence, one based on spirituality from which we develop our humanity, morality etc. and none of that is irrational.
Our earliest civilizations often confounded civic norms, civil law, religion, faith, cultural history etc. into the same sphere, from that you get things like the Torah for example (i.e. 'The Law') which is like a legal code, moral code, civic code, national history rolled into one.
Since the Common Era (i.e. about Jesus' time) religion has developed into a more strictly moral and spiritual sphere, less so the core civic stuff, but it still lays at the foundation of all of our institutions ... especially ironically our University system, and partly medical systems depending where you're from.
Our current scientifically materialist 'belief' whereupon we are all merely bags of tiny particles, randomly interacting in accordance with a few 'known forces' - which almost by definition denies the very existence of things which we otherwise believe exist - like 'life', 'love', 'intelligence' etc. is a pretty bizarre bit of irrationality that we somehow don't bother ourselves much about.
Barack Obama along with the majority of our leaders of all kinds are religious and not in the Machiavellian 'fake' sense whereby he 'need to appear religious to get elected', so let's not write them off as idiots and contemplate maybe our crude and easy dismissal is too often misplaced.
Yes, ideological conformism and orthodoxy are going to appeal to certain groups, and that's nice point, but it would be confusing the issue.
And of course ... we all have some truly irrational beliefs.
> Religion is a metaphysical perspective of existence, one based on spirituality from which we develop our humanity, morality etc. and none of that is irrational.
Humans have been naturally selected to cooperate over millions of years. Religion only exists because we yearn the feeling of community which is biological and it only makes sense that a unified culture makes a group most likely to survive.
Also, any belief based on magical thinking (very present in religious people) is intrinsically irrational.
"Religion only exists because we yearn the feeling of community "
No, community is only part of it, and frankly, that we lived in communities beforehand is not relevant.
Religion is the 'foundational philosophy concerning nature of who we are' that transcends most other subjects - i.e. it's metaphysics at it's core.
The 'community' part arises only in the same way secular civic and legal issues arise in our own communities.
The misunderstanding is partly evident in your comment about 'very religious people'.
You're conflating 'people who say they are hardcore believers in XYZ' with necessarily 'very religious' people.
Fred Rogers - a trained priest, started 'Mr Rogers Neighbourhood' and did that for 50 years to help communicate more intelligent ideals to children. He didn't mention the word 'God' a single time on air, you wouldn't know directly that he was 'deeply religious'.
Fred was not 'anti science' or someone we might normally conflate with 'hyper religious'.
As I indicated, Barack Obama is religious. He literally worked for the Church for a few years at the start of his career. One might argue his whole career was a bit missionary. Certainly Jimmy Cater's life - and Presidency - was that.
They're also not what we would consider 'super religious' bent on 'magical thinking' - but Fred Rogers, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama are who I would think of for example when contemplating who are 'the most religious people'.
So in a way, the nature of the comment implies a kind of 'straw man' - plucking out those with the most specific and material orthodox 'beliefs' about a system, the kind for whom the parables are meant to be understood more literally because maybe they're not so capable of the more enlightened bits - and having them representative of 'the most religious' - which is a little unfair. The plebes are going to be prone to 'magical thinking' no matter what happens.
'Scientific materialism' as it applies to the nature of life etc. is a constant stream 'magical thinking' - the dissonance between 'physics' and 'morality' is a chasm completely too wide for anyone to seem to cross with sound thinking.
And finally - every modern politicized subject, even those adhered to by 'intelligent people' is chock full of 'magical thinking'.
I'm sure some practitioners have developed a philosophical understanding of it just as you can do with anything in life.
> You're conflating 'people who say they are hardcore believers in XYZ' with necessarily 'very religious' people.
It's the other way around. 'Very religious' people are 'hardcore believers'.
I suspect the root of blind belief is the same in both cases though. Most likely biological in nature.
In case it's not clear, I'm not saying religion is inherently bad, and I don't think religious people are completely irrational. What I'm saying is that religious belief is indeed irrational and fanaticism is bad (religious or not).
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.
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?
I really wish that you were right, but you should consider the possibility that it's you who is being naive. I've met a real-life flat-earther (a relative of mine, actually) who definitely was not trolling. From sufficient distance flat earth beliefs are not really that different from anti-vax. Both employ the same questioning of conventional science and fall back on plausible-sounding but discredited theories. Yet, I don't think anyone would call anti-vax a troll movement. There's also a political dimension to these movements that should not be overlooked. If you have time, I highly recommend this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
I'm not going to deny that trolls are definitely involved in Flat Earth, but I suspect that most of the adherents actually truly believe in it. The key thing to realize is that modern Flat Earth isn't just about Flat Earth; it's basically a (very heavily) syncretized modern Gnosticism. By that I mean that it combines several beliefs:
* Absolute dualistic cosmology: there is an Absolute Good and Absolute Evil locked in a titanic struggle in which humans are the pieces. The forces of Absolute Evil are expending every effort to knock us off the narrow path to Absolute Good.
* Gnostic notions of revelation: the path to salvation is mostly, if not entirely, dependent on the knowledge of the revealed truth of the universe. Acquiring this knowledge is difficult, and (following the above point) the forces of Absolute Evil are trying their best to prevent you from gaining it. But fortunately, those who have come before us can help us in the acquisition of knowledge.
* Evangelism: once you acquire the knowledge, you must (as a good person should!) turn around and save as many people as you can by educating them on the revealed truths of the universe. And if they look at you like you're a rambling lunatic or try to "fix" your knowledge, then clearly they must be agents of Absolute Evil trying to drag you down with them.
* The actual cosmology: [insert a mishmash of the cosmology [1] of several disparate religions here] and the Earth is actually flat.
These kinds of belief systems, with a variety of substitutions for the last bullet point, have been around for millennia. Flat Earth isn't even the first such system in my short Millennial lifetime. The actual beliefs of these systems are less important than the fact that you have the revealed knowledge, which is also why people seem to be able to move very quickly from one system to another (as Flat Earthers basically all jumped ship to Qanon).
[1] One of the things to draw attention to, from what I can tell, is that these sorts of beliefs tend to extract only the cosmological and supernatural beliefs from religion and ignore the moralist beliefs.
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.
I always assumed the flat earth thing was more of a troll/protest than a genuine belief, basically people just want to assert that "you can't force me to believe a certain thing". Even if in this case that certain thing is in the class of completely irrefutable facts, it doesn't really matter because they're just asserting their power to disagree. Like a toddler that gets in a mood where they just say "no" to everything. Trying to reason with that type of response is useless and it's also beside the point, the point is that they just want to exercise their free will. And they also probably are enjoying that it is frustrating other people.
A mental illness framing is kind of interesting though, I've never really thought about it like that. It implies that it could be treatable, which I'm not really sure is true. Can you "treat" a troll?
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).
> 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 giving an imitation at all.
> 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".
> "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
No, it isn't. We view the claim as absurd today only because we have the benefit of millennia of collection of evidence and arguments and theory that has established "the earth is round" beyond a reasonable doubt. But for a person who either does not have access to all that evidence and arguments and theory, or who simply refuses to believe them (and, as someone else upthread noted, it can be a valid heuristic strategy for some people to refuse to believe claims by other people that they can't understand for themselves, in order to avoid being taken advantage of), the claim that the earth is flat is not absurd, which means it's not prima facie false.
> We view the claim as absurd today only because we have the benefit of millennia of collection.
This premise is just historically false. Ancient civilizations knew full well the earth was not flat. More people in the history of mankind have known the earth is round than how to multiply.
> Ancient civilizations knew full well the earth was not flat.
Some did. Not all of them. The first one I'm aware of is the Greeks. Do you know of any earlier ones?
Also, the fact that particular intellectuals knew the Earth was round in a society does not necessarily mean it was common knowledge in that society, much less that it was such common knowledge that the average person would think it absurd to question it and would be able to explain why. The books we have from the ancient Greeks that give good arguments for the Earth being round were probably not read by more than a tiny fraction of the population. The earliest example I can think of of the roundness of the Earth being taught in a widespread fashion is the Christian church after it accepted the roundness of the Earth as dogma and taught it as such.
There's evidence in some Sanskrit texts that early Indian civilizations did, but they are probably contemporary to the Greeks.
But again, even superficial observations are sufficient. You don't really have to "trust" anybody or research anything. If anything, it's the belief in flat earth that requires extremely convoluted and unintuitive rationalizations.
Again, I understand this stuff is frustrating, because unwillingness to change one's mind in front of overwhelming contrary evidence is one of the worst possible behaviors.
They might believe the claim in the sense they'd pass a lie detector test, but I doubt it's because they find the argument genuinely convincing.
> early christians
This isn't true, either. Some early Christians might have stuck to a literal interpretation of the sacred texts, but the Church has strongly opposed that belief since the very beginning. I don't have any particular axe to grind, but this is really just a myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
That depends on what you consider to be superficial observations. The fact that there is plenty of evidence for ancient civilizations before the Greeks believing the Earth to be flat (for example, descriptions in their mythology) indicates to me that the observations needed to figure out that the Earth is round are not superficial. Sure, it seems like they are if you live in a society that already has the belief and can teach it to you. But that doesn't mean they actually are.
> this is really just a myth
The myth referred to in that Wikipedia article (which I fully agree is a myth) has nothing whatever to do with what I said, or with early Christians. You are attacking a straw man.
What I said, in fact, is stronger than the statements made in that Wikipedia article. The article only says that "scholars have supported" the view that the Earth is round since the 600s AD. I said that the Christian church had taught it since it accepted it as dogma, and that, AFAIK, was several centuries earlier than the 600s AD.
> They might believe the claim in the sense they'd pass a lie detector test, but I doubt it's because they find the argument genuinely convincing.
Of course it's possible that they are trolling or something more or less equivalent. I find it hard to believe that anyone is that good at trolling, but I admit I find it less hard to believe after spending years on the Internet. :-)
I don't feel attacked :) Some of these folks have indeed been randos from the Internet. Some of them are people that I've known well in real life and I'm convinced they genuinely think this. I could be fooled - I wouldn't know - but on my list of possible explanations, a desperate need for more attention than they otherwise get is high on the list.
I would suggest that it's possible this need is subconscious, and if they're believing nonsense because that need is so great, I'd consider that a mental illness.
> I would suggest that it's possible this need is subconscious
It's definitely possible. I'm saying I'd be more inclined to believe the "need" in question is a social need, rather than bad media/"fake news" influence.
Bingo. A study I can't find after trying on Google took people with objectively wrong opinions and payed them for accuracy. Magically, people corrected their own opinions when they had a financial incentive to do so.
I'd be curious about the inverse though: does the rate at which a random sample of the population is willing to tell you something incorrect if you paid them change significantly?
Look at how the Soviet Union functioned. You got a government salary as long as you looked the other way and pretended that obvious lies were the truth.
> Bingo. A study I can't find after trying on Google took people with objectively wrong opinions and payed them for accuracy. Magically, people corrected their own opinions when they had a financial incentive to do so.
Interesting. I'd like to read that study, if you ever figure out which one it was.
Meanwhile, I wonder if this was a case of people figuring out what the testers wanted to hear, rather than actually altering the beliefs they held.
So this is an interesting point and shouldn't be dismissed, it may be at the heart of irrational beliefs.
People can 'come to believe' what benefits them.
If an idea is truly exciting or engaging, or makes people feel special, or part of a 'group' esp. of 'special people' - it's just more likely we believe those things as 'factual'.
So in a way - though they would 'pass a lie detector test' and 'truly believe in a flat earth' - it's predicate upon all those things - it's an impassioned or subjective kind of belief.
They would act almost perfectly rationally if you asked them about some completely mundane subject like rocks rolling down a hill.
Our egos tend to believe it when we're told we are good, and tend to be dismissive when we are told we're bad at something, that right there is evidence we're not very objective about taking in data to begin with.
Yes, this is a better way to phrase what I was trying to say. They might actually believe it, but it's not because they find the arguments convincing. It's a "meta" issue.
> I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their arguments
I found the best thing to do is stop there. Just listen, observe, try to understand. Be patient.
Unless someone comes to you asking a question, you're unlikely to change anyone's mind immediately, and even if they are asking opinions often change slowly if at all.
When we tell people they're wrong, we push them away a little, and our sphere of influence diminishes.
> I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis.
The way i've heard it explained that makes the most sense to me: "people are convinced (rightly) that there is something wrong with our world and society, they just don't know what it is. Conspiracies provide answers and a framework to accommodate that feeling."
The opposite of knowledge isn't no knowledge, it's bad knowledge. The creation of a parallel reality is not so unreasonable response to nothing nothing about our current reality.
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.
Yeah, I think our schools have long done US students a disservice in underemphasizing “information quality” — how to deal with incomplete, ambiguous, questionable, and bad info. A very large fraction of tests in school reinforce that every question has only one right answer. The notion of minimizing error is seldom even imagined. Instead it's taught that all learning must seek only one goal: “knowing the one and only truth”. Yet all too often, competing facts are not mutually exclusive and can change with time.
And don't get me started on the poor coverage of concepts like “necessary” and “sufficient” in judging evidence in support of an assertion or model.
After working in science for the past 15 years (drug development), I've come to appreciate how little in medicine we know in absolute terms. With any system as complex as the human body, generally the best you can hope for is to be less wrong.
Aristotle’s Physics is a good example how common sense ridiculed in our society while it
> is to be properly understood as the physics of objects immersed in a fluid, air or water [1]
Kindergarten children can engage in physics, construct their theories. And only much later learn that space bodies move differently and how that knowledge can be applied to the world around us.
Throughout most of history people have believed wildly incorrect things, yet civilization carries on.
Unless you're an astronomer or involved in some pursuit in which the shape of the earth is of material consequence, it just doesn't matter.
Flat earthers find community and identity amongst other flat earthers, and that to them is of much higher significance than whether the earth is actually flat or not.
> Throughout most of history people have believed wildly incorrect things, yet civilization carries on.
Society has mostly been run by autocratic systems. If we are determined to make democracy work, conspiracy and anti-fact ideologies are existential threats.
Democracy has worked in the past because most members of said democratic societies believe largely the same things. They don't have to be the correct thing, they just have to be the same thing. This was easier when information was more tightly controlled and curated. The internet has opened us to a Babylonia of different belief systems, which is not so good for functioning civilizations. Free speech was easier to defend before the internet when it wasn't quite so free.
> The internet has opened us to a Babylonia of different belief systems
With all due respect, there is nothing 'new' about QAnon. It's the same recycled theories about santanic pedophiles tweaked slightly to fit new surroundings. I would argue a new banality of evil that Facebook/Instagram/Twitter provides, where dangerous lies reside right next to actual news and photos of people's kids.
One thing I have come to include in my mental model when interacting with people online is the existence of people who deliberately keep up the "stupid" facade, either with the intention of trolling (think 4chan) or with nefarious agendas, such a government-sanctioned trolling farms that we keep hearing about. This at least helps me rationalize away the worst parts of Twitter, Reddit, or Whatsapp shares.
Confirmation bias also explains a lot. I remember seeing many anecdotes about Trump before the 2016 election that felt quite possibly true but turned out to be false on further investigation. As if the true things were not exciting enough.
Moreover, I suspect that much of our perceptions, esp. on topics that we don't directly seek out, are based on just glancing at the continuous stream of clickbaity article titles that cross our feeds everyday without even clicking them. In isolation, they'd be harmless, but if the same articles appears across HN, FB, and Twitter, they make a mental impact. And these half-digested impressions then color our opinions when those topics come up in debate or discussions.
Or maybe it could be that, given their prior beliefs, the reactions to your arguments are, in fact, _rational_ in a Bayesian sense?
I think, with Bayesian probabilities, you can have a setup where, given the same data and two different prior distributions, you end up with two wildly different posteriors after updating the initial beliefs. Unfortunately, i don't have an example at hand but i remember there is a very interesting passage on this phenomenon in E. T. Jaynes "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science". Can anyone else expand on this?
The problem is actually economical IMO; Fools don’t have a skin in the game, and don’t lose anything from having false beliefs. They would be perfectly capable of discerning the nonflatness of Earth if their lives depended on it.
I believe that stupidity is and has always been widespread and in normal times the more intelligent ideas have the widest subscription, even among the stupid. But when leaders fail to [be open, be objective, act in good faith, stick to the truth], then even the stupid can detect that they are being played and they rebel and seek alternative facts. So my theory is that leaders are currently gaming the populous rather than leading them, and that this is so obvious to everybody that trust in leadership and institutions has gone out the window.
Scott Adams has recently asserted that about 90% of what we are being told is not true. I'm don't concur with Scott on that figure, but clearly even smart people have lost trust in leaders/institutions. When the news refuses to report on 25% of newsworthy stories because they either make Trump look good or Biden look bad... when the news claims it's perfectly safe to protest BLM issues in the streets during a coronavirus pandemic... when even judges are clearly acting in bad faith (Julian Assange extradition case, Michael Flynn case)... when the Supreme Court becomes (or is perceived as becoming) the arm of a political party rather than an objective trustable institution, then the populous loses faith in the leaders/rules/institutions and we get widespread rioting, violence, a hell of a lot of stupid ideas, and perhaps hopefully some positive changed buried within all that somewhere.
> leaders are currently gaming the populous rather than leading them, and that this is so obvious to everybody that trust in leadership and institutions has gone out the window
I agree with that assessment. My limited and probably wrong interpretation of history indicates that in general, behavior will now tend towards revolutionary.
My opinion is this is due to a reduced level of trust that we place in either each other or large companies/organisations. It is known among the business industry that trust is lower than it was historically. Companies and people are increasingly seeming to engage in shadier and shadier practices, or we're becoming more aware of it. This erodes the level of trust we place in each other, research bodies, governments, policing and science etc.
In addition, where someone with an extremist view might be considered an outgroup, historically their views might have been suppressed among their peers or shutdown. Now they can engage online with thousands if not millions of other people who believe in the same out group ideas, potentially strengthening their view point.
One of the interesting psychological discussions is around people with extremist views such as flat earthers. These individuals are often minorities or outcasts of society and as such, many of those with extremist views form bonds with like minded people and their relationships and well-being are tied to those relationships. What this means is that not only are they less likely to respond pragmatically to opposing viewpoints, but that they would struggle to actually change their ways given that their relationships are tied with this belief. And if they were to believe differently, they would have to say goodbye to those bonds.
In addition, where someone with an extremist view might be considered an outgroup, historically their views might have been suppressed among their peers or shutdown. Now they can engage online with thousands if not millions of other people who believe in the same out group ideas, potentially strengthening their view point.
Not only that but those with out-group positions are great for those with agendas and willing to play along. Anti-vaxers are fodder for anyone looking for angry nuts to turn loose on their enemies etc.
(although he puts his cutoff point at 25% of the angriest part of the population, with no value judgements on nuts. In the age of social media, it ought to be easy enough to generate memes along the lines of his survey questions to see who forwards 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 something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis.
> 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 something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis.
This thinking is dangerous. You open the doors to labelling every opinion that isn't considered rational or part of the status quo to be a product of mental illness.
e.g I find those AI generated pictures of people that look like real photos to be mildly disturbing. It is clearly irrational, however I don't think people could claim I am mentally ill because of it.
Currently there is a push to make racism a mental illness. I see no evidence of that at all. I've spoken to some people that have gone on the "Iron March" and they aren't mentally ill (tbh they are just losers IMO but they are pretty harmless as most of them are NEETs living with their parents).
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 most bizarre clips from social media, /r/choosingbeggars highlights the dumbest negotiation attempts, /r/trashy and /r/iamatotalpieceofshit are selected stories of bad behavior, /r/whatcouldgowrong and /r/instantkarma are videos of people making bad decisions and suffering the consequences, /r/publicfreakout is videos of people fighting. Contributors hunt for the most egregious examples to post to Reddit in the hopes of getting upvotes.
Twitter isn't much better: Topics spread on Twitter when they promote outrage or allow the reader to feel smugly superior to someone.
If you spend your days online consuming this content day in and day out, you're going to become convinced that the world is "stupid" and getting stupider. In reality, you're simply tapping into stupidity concentrators, getting bite-sized views of stupidity so you can react in astonishment and feel superior to stupid people doing stupid things.
I think COVID quarantine has worsened this, as people are getting even more of their worldview through social media feeds instead of actually interacting with people in the real world. If 90% of your insight into social interactions comes from clickbait social media sites selecting the most egregious stories and videos from around the world, of course you're going to think "stupidity is expanding". In reality, it's a sign that you need to revaluate your sources of information and move to platforms and networks where people are talking about something other than other people's stupidity.
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.
> I really think social media companies are deliberately promoting stupid and blatantly wrong beliefs. It's good for engagement.
I don't think it even has to be deliberate; the algorithms social media uses, by their very nature, are going to promote stupid and blatantly wrong beliefs, since so many people will enjoy mocking them and there will always be some believers willing to argue back and keep the discussion going indefinitely.
You could make a case that optimising for engagement - and getting stupidity - is a predictable outcome and therefore itself stupid.
Imagine what would happen if social media algorithms started promoting the opposite. Engagement would drop, but there might be some interesting second and third effects.
Unless these second and third order effects are more profitable than the first order ones, I don't see any incentive for social media companies to promote them.
Maybe social media are just tapping into the human need to have “fools” on the stage. It’s a pretty universal archetype. Silly fools, wise fools, serendipitous fools. Only the Jester can speak truth to the King sort of thing. Been around so long in so many places that it has to be useful for human culture...
Interesting take, although It can be the other way around as well. Both the fool and this social media behavior come from a motivation to distract from our own weaknesses, by pointing fingers at something else.
"...people will similarly jump in to correct the wrong belief."
This works really well when you have a question about something. If you post a question asking for answers or ideas you often get crickets. But if you post an idea that is clearly wrong you usually get lots of people jumping in to correct you.
+1. I have heard this idea a number of times and seen it in action but did not know that there was actually a "law" and a person credited with stating it.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
I, for one, don't forget. I suspect most stories in the paper are bullshit. It isn't even because the paper is agenda-driven, it's because the journalist is either lazy or simply has no idea what he's writing about and mangles what he was told about it, or he asked the wrong questions, etc.
Sort of like me being assigned to write an article about culinary arts :-)
P.S. For more decent articles about airplanes, Aviation Week is far better.
I can't believe the word "advertising" isn't in this thread yet.
It's simple. The dumber you are, the easier it is to sell something to you. Susceptibility to "influence" is a highly profitable trait, so it's selected. That's why the idiot networks need to aggregate as many fools together in one big writhing swarm of stupidity. Their revenue comes from advertising, and as long as that continues you should not expect it to get any better.
This realization may also lead to the solution: Don't regulate the content. Regulate the advertising.
The Just-world idea I really don't think gets the attention is deserves.
It's obviously everywhere but you see it in tech when people say company X deserved Y because they didn't do Z when they get Black-Hatted for instance.
> 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 most bizarre clips from social media, /r/choosingbeggars highlights the dumbest negotiation attempts, /r/trashy and /r/iamatotalpieceofshit are selected stories of bad behavior, /r/whatcouldgowrong and /r/instantkarma are videos of people making bad decisions and suffering the consequences, /r/publicfreakout is videos of people fighting. Contributors hunt for the most egregious examples to post to Reddit in the hopes of getting upvotes.
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.
> 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.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. A friend of mine and I spent a lot of evening hours talking about [loosely summarized] "where the internet was going" from 2010-2013. Unfortunately we seemed to be correct on many fronts, and it has made some faucets of technology almost unbearable.
While I definitely agree with this, I am baffled by the amount of sheer stupidity that does appear to be getting wider traction. I mean, QAnon basically started as a 4chan joke that I feel like even the originators thought was outlandish, and now you have successful Congressional candidates talking about it seriously.
IQ tests are being renormalized. Today's 100 may be last year's 99. Average IQs have gone up ~15 points since ~1950. Some evidence of slowing or reversing in the last 20 years.
stupidity concentrators so good. Always remember folks, you get good at what you do. I'd like to coin the term intelligence concentrators. We need some of those.
One of the best pieces of advice I have taken recently is "stop using anger as entertainment" (you can substitute "incredulity", "smugness" or "schadenfreude" for "anger" to make it more applicable to the websites you listed).
I don't disagree but I had one very miserable period in my life when schadenfreude (laughing at other people suffering) was my only entertainment. I was full well aware of it but couldn't change it due to chemical imbalances of the brain, plus being physically very weak (it's hard to change habits when your human battery is always at the 10% mark).
So again, I agree with the premise but statements like yours could be infinitely more helpful by suggesting ways to stop using these toxic motivators for fun.
> If 90% of your insight into social interactions comes from clickbait social media sites selecting the most egregious stories and videos from around the world, of course you're going to think "stupidity is expanding"
Agreed. Isn't this the majority of people though? And if this is in fact the majority of people, then doesn't it mean that stupidity is in fact expanding?
I don't think any of us are going to hit upon the end-all-be-all decisive proof either way, but I think there's value in considering how everyone perceiving it getting larger may be the definition of it getting larger.
Hasn't been my experience that most people are stupid. I mean yeah, most people I ever met were quite helpless in various semi-emergency -- or just unusual -- situations but that doesn't make them stupid. It makes them kind of pampered and not well prepared, nothing more.
I think what you describe can be attributed to our brain noting the negative things much stronger in its memory while it always writes off the usual / slightly positive events as "normal".
In short, we get outraged easily, but it's hard to make us positively impressed in a lasting manner, it seems.
I am convinced the world is "stupid", but it's not because I passively browse the front page of reddit more than I should. In fact, before you pointed out that it's mostly a stupidity concentrator (nice term btw), I didn't even notice that. When I read the front page of reddit I don't deduce the average intelligence of the participants by the most popular (mostly negative) posts of the day, I'm banking on the most upvoted posts being somewhat entertaining to me, nothing more.
What has convinced me the world is stupid is that as a whole we cannot get our shit together to deal with a global pandemic. You signal your intelligence when you show blatant disregard for the rules/law when you don't wear a mask when required. There are so many reasons why people do this (not knowing any better/not believing they work comes from lack of education), but it all stems from lack of intelligence (in my opinion). The fact that some parts of the world have effectively contained
while others are miserably failing, causing so many needless deaths, knowing what needs to happen to create this outcome, you can only conclude that as a whole, we are morons.
So yeah, I'm sure social media is definitely doing some damage, acting as a conduit for false information, spreading theories on 5G towers spreading the virus etc, but taking 5 watching some dumbass total his car via /r/idiotsincars because it was upvoted into /r/all does not make me feel hopeless, what makes me feel hopeless is getting on a tram, making a quick scan and concluding that I have to move into the next section because in the current one there are too many people not wearing a mask.
Your post has made me reconsider browsing /r/all though.. it is all pretty bland these days and /r/WCGW isn't entertaining as it was when I first found it
> You signal your intelligence when you show blatant disregard for the rules/law...There are so many reasons why people do this (not knowing any better/not believing they work comes from lack of education), but it all stems from lack of intelligence (in my opinion)
Coming from a country which had low enforcement of laws even before the pandemic(one of the reasons why it's still under "developing" category instead of "developed"), I doubt the disregard of law is due to lack of intelligence. On the contrary, the more intelligent/shrewd someone is, higher is their chance to get away disregarding the law(in these places). They are more selfish than stupid.
In every country I've been to I've seen the same levels of stupid. It's comforting to know that people aren't so different from each other.
But I think that what you are attributing to stupidity would be better attributed to culture, size, or strength of authority -- the countries that have handled the pandemic well score favorably in one of those attributes. Here in the 'states we are strongly individualistic and historically distrustful of government, and bad actors have been stoking those flames for a while so we are in a particuarly vulnerable state right now.
Now, in my opinion, stupidity is humanity's seeming refusal to not act more switfly about climate change, but I'm sure someone else would argue that's attributable to some other, er, attribute
'Stupid' is very subjective. Let’s take your example of the face masks. You (scientists including) call stupid whenever people aren’t wearing the masks. Others (also including scientists) might say that wearing a mask is stupid (because it’s weakening your immune system).
Another example. If you’d be living in the Middle Ages and there would be a growing group believing the earth wasn’t flat, you’d be called stupid. Now, it’s the other way around.
Either way, stupidity is very subjective when applied at an intellectual level.
At a more practical level, stupid would be a child that just heard their parents say not to touch the furnace but still touches it and burns itself. One could call it stupid, but it’s also a way of learning, exploring and getting experience.
"I'm banking on the most upvoted posts being somewhat entertaining to me, nothing more." - i do the same and i get stupider everytime it seems. i just watched for the first time on youtube "judge calls" which is basically video snippets of us american tv of judges sentencing ppl - i never knew such things existed before and i find its allowance on tv first and on youtube second pretty disgusting and inhumane.
Do you think that stupidity also is something which we’ve created a perfect environment for and which it can’t thrive ?
What were the consequences of acting foolishly and not concentrating 5000 years ago compared to today ? 50 years ago ?
Maybe you’d starve, maybe you’d get eaten by a lion, or ruin the hunt for food and your crops.
Today, that doesn’t seem relevant, you can spend all day believing in and talking nonsense and end up getting paid and receiving essentials. You won’t starve or freeze. You might even end up being the President of the United States by doing so.
I think you've made a sound point with good examples. The parts that do worry me are things where you wouldn't expect that to happen. For instance, in this post¹, you will see where many people have interacted with the comments. This is just the /r/bayarea subreddit so doesn't specifically select for 'stupidity'.
Now, set aside the actual proposition and read the comments. Most of them are trivially wrong about:
* What a California Ballot Proposition is
* What the role of the legislator is wrt ballot props
* The text of the proposition
Now, this would be a problem if the text was particularly hard, but it really isn't. Someone in the comments there pointed out that this was the same as the infamous Prop J and K pair where one raised taxes to provide funding for a thing and the other provided the thing but only if the funding was there. The funding failed, the thing passed. The thing never came to exist. Afterwards, on Reddit, I read commenters describing how they didn't know the two things were linked.
This is a pretty common pattern on forums like this. Even HN suffers from it where people avoid primary sources only to intentionally play telephone and get bad information which they then convincingly repeat. I've definitely seen folks confidently bullshit something they just learned from another comment instead of reading the primary source. As an amusing coincidence, one of these was about the ridesharing min wage law that Seattle passed. The primary source was very clear, but most comments argued about a thing that wasn't a failure mode of the actual law - but was a failure mode of a non-existent law that they had manufactured from thin air.
Or maybe this is the root cause? Seems like these stupidity concentrators would just yieldorw stupidity and make their consumers stupider, feeding back into more concentration of stupidity, etc.
I think COVID quarantine has worsened this, as people are getting even more of their worldview through social media feeds instead of actually interacting with people in the real world.
I think COVID is causing it, but in a much simpler way: by increasing stress levels which increases fast system thinking. Globalization and the rising pace of change have increased global stress levels over the past decades, which has caused people to take a defensive mental stance, do more fast system thinking and be less open minded. You saw the same shift towards extreme politics throughout the world, which for me means it is not about the issues, but about how people feel. COVID turned that dial up to 11. I see people freaking out in many small ways, and they mostly don’t seem to be aware they’re suffering from anxiety and it is affecting their thought process.
Social media is the cherry on top. When you are in the fast system thinking mode, it helps you to stay there. Selection bias, shallow interactions, shallow depth of information, all things that increase as you engage more with social media. That makes it more toxic to people already under stress. These people then are able to find each other online, form vocal groups and try to spread their anxiety around. And that’s how it can appear like things are getting worse while mostly they’ve never been better. And how it can seem like people are getting more stupid while really they’re getting more stressed.
I wonder if there's a 'shit rolls downhill' dynamic to the popularity of mockery content on Reddit.
Reddit's demographics skew very young, which means it's mostly used by people who have very little socioeconomic standing. People at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are subject to significant arbitrary humiliation at the hands of others (all entry-level jobs suck; so does being a student) and have no tools with which to fight back. People who are in this situation are likely to find catharsis in finding ways to see themselves--no matter how bad their personal situation is--as at least one step above someone else (hence the popularity of subs like /r/insanepeoplefacebook) and seeing abusive people being given their just rewards in ways the average Reddit reader cannot get away with (hence, the popularity of subs like /r/instantkarma).
I also wonder if there's a correlation between preferences for mockery content and the rigidity of social hierarchies in different countries. Japan, for instance, has a very rigid social hierarchy (meaning most people are subject to arbitrary abuse) and they had an entire genre of mainstream humiliation TV[0]. I'd be surprised if this kind of content is as popular in countries with flatter social hierarchies where sociopathic behavior directed at subordinates is less acceptable.
(As an aside, I haven't looked at Reddit's default subs for many years and it's shocking that they've crawled that far down into the clickbait gutter.)
306 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadBut 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 confirmed facts.
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.
1. Counts of unironic/unacknowledged logical fallacies - discussing psychology of loss aversion wouldn't be an example or even a strategic examination of loss aversion's performance and concluding it say has a niche. But stating it is better to not make an additional $10k without extra work or opportunity costs and pay a higher marginal tax rate on it? Flagged. 2. Claims which when examined closely are vacuous (having no meaning). 3. Unsupported claims which upon closer examination do not justify assertions but merely reassert more furiously. 4. Evasive chosen definitions that refuse to stay consistent as either specific or general in classifications.
One gap with it is a matter of hypotheticals and implications - even a theoretical model contrary to reality can be a demonstration against a hypothesis.
A fuzzier/snarkier example at a field level is a "SCI/Gen test" where even experts cannot distinguish noise from data indicates a lack of knowledge - although in a more positive sense it could just be a field's complexity being high such as description of a drug which interacts with proteins. I am no expert in it but given some infamously whimsical names they might not realize that a drug's complex organic compound that binds to the "Romero" prions wasn't a real specific subtype of prion without looking it up - let alone that the drug wouldn't bind with it let alone without unacceptable side effects.
There's often only one way to be right.
There's an infinite number of ways to be wrong
But, in general, it seems not unrelated to the phenomenon in which weird things are much more commonly encountered (due to the ability to see/hear/read about things happening to anyone, anywhere, anytime). Weird (and perhaps also stupid) floats to the top of the list of things to be perceived, and there is now an industry (or several) to bring them to us all the time.
Here are a few ideas not mentioned.
* Similar to #13. Expansion of rural broadband, mobile computing, and cell phone networks, combined with post-9/11 entrenchment/mainstreamization of fringe cable news and talk radio. That's a lot of "information" getting to folks with below-average formal education.
* It has always been somewhat unfashionable to call religious people "stupid", but the steady decline in religiosity may have led to gullibility in other areas of life, particularly politics and conspiracy theories (MAGA/QAnon/Fox News/4Chan) that we are more apt to call "stupid"
My money is on this. You wouldn't typically argue with a kid, but on the internet you probably are.
1: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/qanon-republican-par...
I think you'd be able to spot a 9-year-old attempting to engage in "discourse on the internet."
However, I think it's common to engage with people who are in their late teens to early 20s, who are at the point in their lives where their intellectual self-confidence has increased far beyond where their actual understanding is, but they've yet to realize that. They're fluent enough with adult language that they're hard to spot, but they've basically only absorbed one or two big ideas which they mistake for the gospel truth of everything.
It is easy to fall into misunderstood or outdated ideas. Sharing those ideas with others prompts them to correct any errors in thought as a service to you. In turn, they will receive similar corrections for their misunderstood and outdated ideas as they share them. Collectively, this improves the shared understanding of everyone. The foundation of education.
Spelling and grammar corrections come part and parcel in that. They are given because they equally want to be received. There is really no greater feeling than being able to learn something new, and realizing that you were spelling something wrong, to be able to spell it correctly in the future, fulfills that as much as realizing your understanding of some complex subject was off.
On that note, those of us involved in the software industry know that software testing is greatly benefitted from testing invalid inputs as much as valid inputs. When challenging your ideas, it can be equally useful to try and take an alternative perspective – invalid input, if you will – and see what kind of correction data is returned. If the correction data is poor, what was seemingly incorrect input may be closer to being correct than you originally thought. This can be just as useful in correcting your understanding as simply posting what you hold as being true.
The old adage about asking "How do I do X in Linux?" will yield no response, but stating that "Linux sucks! It cannot do X." will solve your problem nicely captures what online message boards serve. To try and apply a human element to who sits behind the "Linux sucks" statement misses the point.
I used to post online when I was 12. I wanted to be part of the conversation and feel like an adult. What usually happened is that people would label me a "troll" and tell others to ignore me. I would genuinely use the phrase "I'm just asking questions", and people would treat me like I was intentionally trying to inflame the situation.
You have to coach them into being more critical of what they read online.
If you're out and about and a person comes up to you and shouts about how the world is controlled by goats in cow suits, your brain will quickly assess the trustworthiness of this person. Is the person wearing clothes? Is the person rambling/coherent/visibly intoxicated? Are the person's eyes shifting around/manic looking? Does the person smell weird? (I am making up random examples, but I am sure there are many things that every person will look at to gauge trustworthiness).
Most of the above goes out of the window on the internet. Even the shouting part does not usually manifest itself into a website comment (ALL CAPS is less offensive than someone actually shouting in your ear/many people don't know the connotation).
Regardless, no harm in having a small arsenal of houseplants!
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/13/health/falling-iq-scores-stud...
The good news is the global CO2 levels probably aren’t high enough to be a severe problem yet (but it might still show up in the stats); the bad news is there is enough unburdened fossil fuel in the ground to make it into a big problem.
https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/co2-on-the-brain-and-the...
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?
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.
For instance, hyper political correctness always has ment a double speak word to me for “I want to be racist / misogynistic, but they don’t let me”
It’s not about mental superiority, imo it is about turning around polarization and hyperbole.
If you’re happen to be “mentally unfortunate” as you put it, I don’t see any lambasting going on. Feel free to give examples.
Edit : for clarity
I feel it is quite insidious and not many have a defense against it.
The way outlier theories and polarized content can now reach a crowd that was hitherto undreamed of. And people get swept up in it.
We must learn from this, but we as technologists should also put the cat back into bag, to make our algorithms not promote “stupidity” , and to educate people to discern information.
The real question is how to do we stop everyone else from piling on top of these people and turning them into high visibility punching bags (which in turn propagates the bad information further and actually makes some folks more sympathetic to the people who now appear to be bullying victims). And that's not a question of intelligence, but one of morals and ethics.
I do believe our best bet is to let science speak louder and put more weight into that. Both in our algorithms and into our debates. If people see some dude on a talkshow with an opinion vs an expert in a field, some equate that with both having equally valid and valuable opinions. Same if that happens on social. The presentation makes it seem both opinions have equal and valid weight.
That said, it’s a valuable discussion and a good incentive to really work harder and to do our research as technologists so we can be better at curbing the trend.
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 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.
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.
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.
Is it possible that becoming an MD might require a base level of mental capabilities and hard work? Is it possible that becoming a Harvard professor in their Math or CS department requires a big helping of skill, work, and luck? Is it possible that passing the Bar exam requires, if not a genius intellect, at least a base level of intellectual capability? Is it possible that all these people you disparage are actually just normal humans doing a pretty decent job at playing a small productive role in running society?
More importantly: do you feel this way about the actual people that surround you -- your significant other, your in-laws, your old school friends, your coworkers, etc.? If so, please talk with a therapist (or your grandmother) about these feelings. This isn't meant in any way as an attack or belittlement. It's meant as genuine advice. Feeling like everyone around you is evil and stupid isn't healthy.
> Is it possible that becoming an MD might require a base level of mental capabilities and hard work?
As an example of what I'm talking about, back in March/February all of the nurses and doctors I know were saying that Covid-19 was just the flu and that only medical professionals should wear a mask. I even reached out to one or two of them to try to give them more of a heads up. This was at the same time that videos were coming out of China with vast stadiums filled with sick people and where people were committing suicide rather than infect their family. Now all of those same medical professionals I know are saying that Covid-19 is extremely serious and that everyone should stay home when possible and wear a mask despite the fact that clearly the risk level is a lot lower now. Here where I live Covid-19 primarily attacks the GI like a typical stomach bug rather than as a serious respiratory illness.
> Feeling like everyone around you is evil and stupid isn't healthy.
Again you are imputing a black and white meaning to what I am saying when it was never said or implied. Certainly if one were living in Nazi Germany in the 1930s or the Soviet Union in the 1920s it would be reasonable for one to feel like generally speaking, "everyone around" was evil and/or stupid. Are things that bad here? Absolutely not however we are much closer to living in that kind of environment in the US than we were at the beginning of the 20th century.
You have a very typical midwit view on this. I do genuinely feel bad for people that are so naive.
This seems like the most likely explanation in your case.
More importantly, it also shuts down conversations. Behaving like you’re the only non-idiot in the room makes you an unpleasant interlocutor. Consider the possibility that the people you interact with and think are midwits are actually intelligent but are optimizing for “have as short an interaction with this unpleasant egomaniac as possible without being unpleasant myself”. Particularly irl.
I’m still interacting with you because I hope you realize that your dismissal of basically every accomplished person in society as a midwit might have more to do with your insecurities than the broad structure of society, and that your obsession with this insecurity is eroding your long-term relationships. I have old close friends who talk and think like you are in this thread, and their attitude toward others has turned them into lonely old men. It’s sad.
I have not found that to be the case at all. In fact, I've often found the stupidest people I know tend to be the people who think "the stupidest people tend to be the most "intelligent"".
It's means to discredit intelligence and expertise and replace them with shouting loudly.
No
> and expertise
Yes
> and replace them with shouting loudly
No
See: Nassim Taleb's IYI (Intellectual Yet Idiot)
Next, I think you're way over-applying the concept of IYI. Also, the concept smells. If it's true, then why doesn't it apply to Taleb himself? And if it does, how can we trust the concept?
He also tells you not to trust him. His life is basically giving advice. That's what his books are at their core level.
Also, anyone who idolizes Ron Paul needs to be met with a certain level of skepticism.
I don't think you should trust anyone who tells you to not trust expertise or intelligence. They're usually selling something they don't want you to think about.
Finally, "No" and "Yes" aren't rebuttals, they're refusals to engage.
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.
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.
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.
But I do believe the number of people who go around thinking everyone else is stupid is going up.
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.
Yes, there are more intelligent debates available for you to access than ever before.... but those don't get the million shares that stupid people get
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.
Yup! I've read a number of papers about this over the years, and it's a big chunk of this whole landscape. The old saw: you either pay for the product, or you are the product, is right on target here.
Gaining attention and clicks from a person is much easier if that person is afraid. And/or angry, among others.
That sounds plausible — kudos to the author for at least entertaining the possibility. Here's my hypothesis on why:
Marvin's Maxim: Every generation believes that the next generation is going to hell. Every generation is wrong.
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 something's gotta be going on their heads that makes them cling to this hypothesis. Don't know if mental illness is going up or down - our understanding and perception of it has changed so there's hardly reliable data on it. I'd have to go through a similar thought process as this article. But I think it's a factor, beyond "new media". I suspect that the toxic politics in the US is a similar phenomenon, the way people are controlled by confirmation bias and can twist their way into believing "my guy good, other guy bad" under almost any circumstances.
In turn, people reach out to conspiracy theories to simplify the world around them with obvious answers and explanations.
My theory, sort of.
In one case though I had someone say that I wasn't hitting satellites, I was hitting a solar-powered high altitude plane. When I pointed out that it would have to be going at 23 times the speed of sound at sea level and flying at 120,000 km, they said of course: technology is amazing. While in the same conversation claiming that satellites were impossible. At that point I stopped believing they even had basic common sense.
They become quite good at it as it follows simple rules.
To take this even further: I encounter in my day to day many instances of people making claims that are easily refuted with a quick online search. I have realized that correcting people over their lack of scientific knowledge is perceived as nitpicking and inappropriate. We got our incentives backwards. If we cannot speak up over misinformation to our peers, then they will spread faster than the truth.
Sadly, I've had to accept that in order to be perceived as a much stronger source of truth, I have to correct people less.
And truth often is boring. It is only one. At first I've told my son only truth how it works (Feynman style). Now I engage in making fantasies (Diskworld style). I present all fantasies (theories) as equal, some can be constructed by physics laws. The game is to find which one. All sorts of interesting questions arise.
What is the difference between plane and satellite?
Can airplane flew that fast through air?
Is meteor burning? What is its speed?
> 120,000 km
That's third of a distance to the moon. Not sure how you got it
Any sufficiently advanced technology (knowledge) is indistinguishable from magic -- Arthur C. Clarke
So people just see competing ideas as a choice between two forms of magic. Add in identity politics and hey presto, changing their mind means denying themselves (a rather difficult thing for most to do). Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence. My evidence is better because your evidence is just your opinion.
No, this isn't true. References to Dunning-Kruger need to die. I haven't seen a case yet where using Dunning-Kruger to explain behavior is not misinformation.
Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically. There was a positive correlation in people's ability to judge themselves, in the experiments. The only question was why the correlation wasn't higher.
https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...
It also demonstrated that the worst-performing individuals estimated themselves to perform MUCH better than they did, while the best-performing individuals expected to perform slightly worse than they did.
This comports with the average reference to the phenomenon ("stupid people think they're smarter than they are, smart people think they're stupider than they are").
The article you linked for some reason makes this comparison:
> So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. [...] they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good.
This is just categorically false, and the chart linked not one paragraph above completely torpedoes it. The bottom quartile of people thought that they would perform at around the 57th percentile. They clearly expected to perform better than more competent individuals.
Perhaps the author meant to write "not that [they] think they're better than competent people do", which would be correct, but the rest of the conclusions seem to follow off of this flawed reading of the data.
I think you’re misunderstanding what Dunning & Kruger presented, which is precisely why references to this paper need to stop. You cannot read literally into the graph as saying that the bottom quartile of people believed they were at the 57th percentile of ability, that’s not what the experiment measured.
Have you read the actual paper? The respondents were 1- all Cornell undergrads volunteering for extra class credit, 2- asked to rank themselves, not to rate their abilities, 3- asked about such “skills” as the ability to get a joke. It seems pretty wild that anyone ever took this paper seriously. The conclusions that it makes in it’s wordy prose are not supported by the data they present.
Take a little more time to understand Tal’s primary argument - that this paper most likely is measuring regression to the mean. Because these kids were asked to rank themselves, and they didn’t know how good their peers were, there is good reason to expect a correllation less than 1. Because the authors were barely out of undergrad school themselves at the time, and not studying statistics per se, there is plenty of reason to suspect that the methodology isn’t perfect ... beyond the fact that it wasn’t a random sample of the population, it studied all rich kids who (self-selected) needed extra credit, it included no difficult mental skills, and that followup papers have shown a complete reversal of whatever effect is there, when applied to more difficult skills like law or engineering.
The same kind of logic fuels conspiracy-minded people. The one thing they all have in common is that they reject the mainstream view, they reject the consensus. And in turn, they embrace outlandish explanations, and the communities around those, because it gives them a false sense of superiority. They know something the rest of the sheep don't!
So these two psychological defense mechanisms interact with each other, and when the information flow in society is increasing, the threshold for how smart you need to be to keep up also increases. So people in general probably aren't getting stupider, but they're getting more and more overwhelmed, which looks the same.
On conspiracy beliefs: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550611434786
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.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014616721878319...
"Further studies demonstrated that cynicism is more likely to be a worldview endorsed by individuals with lower rather than higher levels of education (Haukkala, 2002; Stavrova & Ehlebracht, 2018) and intelligent individuals’ behavior was shown to be more likely to depart from the norms of self-interest (Solon, 2014). Higher levels of education and com-petence in a broader sense might help individuals detect and avoid potential deceit in the first place, thus reducing the probability of negative social experiences, which might in turn contribute to a more positive view of human nature (Yamagishi, Kikuchi, & Kosugi, 1999). Indeed a number of studies showed general cognitive ability to be negatively related to cynical hostility (Barnes et al., 2009; Mortensen, Barefoot, & Avlund, 2012) and positively related to trust (Carl, 2014; Carl & Billari, 2014; Hooghe, Marien, & de Vroome, 2012; Oskarsson, Dawes, Johannesson, & Magnusson, 2012; Sturgis, Read, & Allum, 2010)."
So the narrative is about competence and intelligence is a factor as it correlates with competence.
> cynicism should be a default strategy for everything you're not an expert in
This would indeed follow, but if we allow for a small number of trusted sources can mostly be resolved.
Cynicism is not the same thing as skepticism. Cynicism encompasses an abstract and often moral judgment about motivations and machinations, permitting you to draw conclusions without evidence. Skepticism is more about coming to terms with the contingent nature of truth, and can be a difficult skill to employ, particularly when you're presented with concrete choices and have to make real decisions--as opposed to merely opining on matters.
I think "know[ing] you're not smart enough" inherently excludes you from belonging in the category of "less intelligent people".
One of the most defining characteristics of stupid people is that they think they're smart.
Now obviously there's a significant difference in degree of accuracy between the two worlds, but then one shouldn't forget that they're not dealing with equally difficult stories to investigate, or have access to the same investigative resources. Regardless, the same illogical behavior can be observed in both types, and an overload of complexity & information sounds like a very reasonable explanation.
For example, every time someone worries about their health, they can sort through all possible diagnoses online, and convince themselves they have a certain sickness just because the symptoms match. A doctor will use Bayesian reasoning and conclude the problem is really a very common infection or something, but when the untrained mind is overwhelmed with information, Occam's Razor doesn't hold.
The same goes for everything else. Information is dangerous for those who don't know how to reason about it carefully and properly, which is most of us, in most fields.
I was basically attacked at work as being xenophobic and insular for saying if we are going out we should wear a mask. so where were your experts on that one? sure f*#!ed up that one.
As I recall, at the time experts were saying "Don't recommend that everyone wear a mask, we have a shortage and need to save them for health care workers."
--------
"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus"
U.S. Surgeon General, February 29, 2020 [0]
--------
"Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself. Let's really underline that. Stigma is the most dangerous enemy."
Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of the World Health Organization, March 2nd, 2020 [1]
--------
Have the experts always been like this, and it's simply more obvious now that the world is much more interconnected? Or has the quality of experts gone down dramatically? Both?
[0] https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...
[1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcr...
So I Goggle it and sure enough he did say as much.
However, you did not post the full statement which means the context is lost.
With the full quote and the resulting context the statement makes perfect sense:
Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
If you get totally and irrefutably proven wrong by someone you are having a heated argument with, that is doubly hard. In order to respond correctly you need to, within a very short time-span: - Realize the argument makes sense - Accept your entire world-view, with a great many other related things, is wrong - Admit that you were wrong to someone who just a minute ago you were angry at, who you thought was making bad arguments, and someone you felt was attacking you.
Doing that in the span of 10 seconds is really hard. I could easily understand how someone would fail, and instead get even angrier at the person making the argument. This certainly is irrational, but it is not a sign of mental illness. It is a form of irrationality that I am ashamed to admit I also have sometimes.
I think a big deal in the on-line space. Is that there is barely a way to re-engage after a cool-down period. You can't come back to a discussion a few days later, having had more time to process.
Especially with conspiracy theories, the shift in worldview that is required to accept that it is wrong is massive, that isn't going to happen over the span of a minute. Heck, it seems unlikely to happen over the span of a day.
I think this is a hard mantra to put into practice sometimes. I definitely think many people who are not mentally ill sometimes do not abide by this mantra.
Whilst I agree that it is better to be wrong to be ignorant, there are plenty of times where I hate being proven wrong. Sometimes that does get the better of me.
Person who is making obviously unbelievable arguments still is wrong but also dishonest. It is fine for fun or trolls but if it meant to be honest discussion it gains nothing but distrust.
There's been a bunch of people who have had "control" over Q in the past few years. The current Q, Jim Watkins, is thankfully the laziest and most boring of them, and hopefully the entire thing fades away after the election.
It's just like how 100% of the memes are created on 4chan, the mechanism is the same, applicable from cat pictures to political propaganda. Since 2016 or so, there has been much talk about "weaponized memes" on 4chan that was mostly a meme by itself initally (I was a witness there in 2016), but based on the situation by now it's unfortunately surely a real thing, and even MIT Technology Review has an article [0]. It feels surreal. What an interesting time to be alive! A bunch of random grassroot web dwellers can create something out of nothing by natural selection and genetic exchanges, and by attracting conspiracy zealots in this process, it will eventually become big enough to make an impact on national politics.
20 years ago, it was a Sci-Fi plot. Although Usenet already foreshadowed many social aspects of online communities (I could find conspiracy materials even from the early ARPA archives), but nowhere influential.
One comment mentioned the changed perception of free speech before and after the 2010s, and this is an important contributing factor. Perhaps the society will learn to better adapt the new meme order in another decade.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/24/132228/political...
> Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.
- DarkShikari, Hacker News - in a comment on 4chan, 2009, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011498
A decade later, it still applies...
Since then, this has always been one of the most overused 4chan memes, with more than 100 variants of cute image macros. I always assumed it was a 4chan meme, and it was a huge surprise for me when I realized it actually came from Hacker News... Top 4chan meme from Hacker News?! It was beyond my imagination, I obviously underestimated the richness of cultural exchanges online.
And it was from a well-known x264/ffmpeg developer...
Speaking of 4chan, I found its trolling and politics are extremely objectionable, yet there's a lot of psychology and sociology to be learned here, especially the mechanisms commonly found in an online community. QAnon is an excellent case study on how a self-organized online community can create an influential meme that eventually affected mass psychology.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-still-shitposting-even-if...
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 a study that is repeated every year for the past decades, the percentage of people having irrational beliefs has remained constant. I don't remember the exact percentage but it was rather high. Something like 75%.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/SuperSense-Developing-Creates-Superna...
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?
Indeed, but those people were highly religious Puritans that emigrated to the New World because they were prosecuted in England.
https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/puritanism
When you put those kind of people in isolation and a high stress situation you get those kinds of behaviors.
> 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?
Totally agree. For example, climate change denial.
The Puritans were by no means the only people of that time who had mainstream beliefs that we now consider delusional. You'd be hard pressed to find any significant body of people of that time who didn't.
> For example, climate change denial.
I would also say, climate change alarmism. Which, if you are inclined to disagree (you might not be, I don't know, but I suspect at least some people reading this will be), illustrates another aspect of the problem: it's hard to improve mainstream beliefs when there is not general agreement over how to improve them--which new beliefs should take the place of the ones that are claimed to be wrong.
We will be mocked for sure in 300 years but OTOH witch hunts maybe weren't as mainstream all over Europe as you might think.
For example, in Europe between 1450 and 1750 35,000 witches were executed. Of those, only 1,000 were executed in Spain, Italy, and Portugal in 300 years which for sure were religious countries (I'm from Spain).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt#Early_Modern_Europe
I'd be surprised if there wasn't some debate as to what caused those witch hunts. Was it societal paranoia or was it just a way for the church to exert their power?
> I would also say, climate change alarmism.
I don't know what you consider alarmism in this case, but the situation is certainly dire. I don't think it's far fetched to think that if we continue in business as usual, modern industrial civilization could be at risk.
As a small example, consider the wildfires of Russia in 2010 which triggered an increase in the global price of grain and many experts believe that fueled the Arab spring revolutions of 2011.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/world/europe/06russia.htm...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/17/bread-f...
I didn't say they were. I didn't say all societies of that time had the same wrong mainstream beliefs as the Puritans. I just said they all had some wrong mainstream beliefs.
> the situation is certainly dire. I don't think it's far fetched to think that if we continue in business as usual, modern industrial civilization could be at risk.
I disagree (to be clear, I disagree about the "civilization could be at risk" part, I'm not saying I'm in favor of just continuing business as usual--I think there are certainly things we could and should do better). But I don't want to hijack the discussion into a debate about climate change and what we should do about it. My only point here is that there is significant disagreement on this point, and the various sides (there are more than two) can't all be right since they hold beliefs that are inconsistent with each other, so clearly some widely held belief in this area is wrong, we just have no consensus on which belief it is, so society as a whole can't make a correction.
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.
Of course within religion there is going to be a lot of 'arbitrary belief', but that's not what it is essentially. 'Parables' etc. are a function of how it's communicated and propagated, ironically, for the 'dumber folks' who 'need something material to believe in' and for whom more abstract concepts don't provide solace.
Religion is a metaphysical perspective of existence, one based on spirituality from which we develop our humanity, morality etc. and none of that is irrational.
Our earliest civilizations often confounded civic norms, civil law, religion, faith, cultural history etc. into the same sphere, from that you get things like the Torah for example (i.e. 'The Law') which is like a legal code, moral code, civic code, national history rolled into one.
Since the Common Era (i.e. about Jesus' time) religion has developed into a more strictly moral and spiritual sphere, less so the core civic stuff, but it still lays at the foundation of all of our institutions ... especially ironically our University system, and partly medical systems depending where you're from.
Our current scientifically materialist 'belief' whereupon we are all merely bags of tiny particles, randomly interacting in accordance with a few 'known forces' - which almost by definition denies the very existence of things which we otherwise believe exist - like 'life', 'love', 'intelligence' etc. is a pretty bizarre bit of irrationality that we somehow don't bother ourselves much about.
Barack Obama along with the majority of our leaders of all kinds are religious and not in the Machiavellian 'fake' sense whereby he 'need to appear religious to get elected', so let's not write them off as idiots and contemplate maybe our crude and easy dismissal is too often misplaced.
Yes, ideological conformism and orthodoxy are going to appeal to certain groups, and that's nice point, but it would be confusing the issue.
And of course ... we all have some truly irrational beliefs.
Humans have been naturally selected to cooperate over millions of years. Religion only exists because we yearn the feeling of community which is biological and it only makes sense that a unified culture makes a group most likely to survive.
Also, any belief based on magical thinking (very present in religious people) is intrinsically irrational.
No, community is only part of it, and frankly, that we lived in communities beforehand is not relevant.
Religion is the 'foundational philosophy concerning nature of who we are' that transcends most other subjects - i.e. it's metaphysics at it's core.
The 'community' part arises only in the same way secular civic and legal issues arise in our own communities.
The misunderstanding is partly evident in your comment about 'very religious people'.
You're conflating 'people who say they are hardcore believers in XYZ' with necessarily 'very religious' people.
Fred Rogers - a trained priest, started 'Mr Rogers Neighbourhood' and did that for 50 years to help communicate more intelligent ideals to children. He didn't mention the word 'God' a single time on air, you wouldn't know directly that he was 'deeply religious'.
Fred was not 'anti science' or someone we might normally conflate with 'hyper religious'.
As I indicated, Barack Obama is religious. He literally worked for the Church for a few years at the start of his career. One might argue his whole career was a bit missionary. Certainly Jimmy Cater's life - and Presidency - was that.
They're also not what we would consider 'super religious' bent on 'magical thinking' - but Fred Rogers, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama are who I would think of for example when contemplating who are 'the most religious people'.
So in a way, the nature of the comment implies a kind of 'straw man' - plucking out those with the most specific and material orthodox 'beliefs' about a system, the kind for whom the parables are meant to be understood more literally because maybe they're not so capable of the more enlightened bits - and having them representative of 'the most religious' - which is a little unfair. The plebes are going to be prone to 'magical thinking' no matter what happens.
'Scientific materialism' as it applies to the nature of life etc. is a constant stream 'magical thinking' - the dissonance between 'physics' and 'morality' is a chasm completely too wide for anyone to seem to cross with sound thinking.
And finally - every modern politicized subject, even those adhered to by 'intelligent people' is chock full of 'magical thinking'.
Not at all. Religion is simply a set of practices and beliefs.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religion
I'm sure some practitioners have developed a philosophical understanding of it just as you can do with anything in life.
> You're conflating 'people who say they are hardcore believers in XYZ' with necessarily 'very religious' people.
It's the other way around. 'Very religious' people are 'hardcore believers'.
I suspect the root of blind belief is the same in both cases though. Most likely biological in nature.
In case it's not clear, I'm not saying religion is inherently bad, and I don't think religious people are completely irrational. What I'm saying is that religious belief is indeed irrational and fanaticism is bad (religious or not).
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.
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?
Although, sometimes the irony seems just a bit too rich to be true...perhaps a Matryoshka troll?
* Absolute dualistic cosmology: there is an Absolute Good and Absolute Evil locked in a titanic struggle in which humans are the pieces. The forces of Absolute Evil are expending every effort to knock us off the narrow path to Absolute Good.
* Gnostic notions of revelation: the path to salvation is mostly, if not entirely, dependent on the knowledge of the revealed truth of the universe. Acquiring this knowledge is difficult, and (following the above point) the forces of Absolute Evil are trying their best to prevent you from gaining it. But fortunately, those who have come before us can help us in the acquisition of knowledge.
* Evangelism: once you acquire the knowledge, you must (as a good person should!) turn around and save as many people as you can by educating them on the revealed truths of the universe. And if they look at you like you're a rambling lunatic or try to "fix" your knowledge, then clearly they must be agents of Absolute Evil trying to drag you down with them.
* The actual cosmology: [insert a mishmash of the cosmology [1] of several disparate religions here] and the Earth is actually flat.
These kinds of belief systems, with a variety of substitutions for the last bullet point, have been around for millennia. Flat Earth isn't even the first such system in my short Millennial lifetime. The actual beliefs of these systems are less important than the fact that you have the revealed knowledge, which is also why people seem to be able to move very quickly from one system to another (as Flat Earthers basically all jumped ship to Qanon).
[1] One of the things to draw attention to, from what I can tell, is that these sorts of beliefs tend to extract only the cosmological and supernatural beliefs from religion and ignore the moralist beliefs.
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.
A mental illness framing is kind of interesting though, I've never really thought about it like that. It implies that it could be treatable, which I'm not really sure is true. Can you "treat" a troll?
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 insane, they are desperately lonely.
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 giving an imitation at all.
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".
No, it isn't. We view the claim as absurd today only because we have the benefit of millennia of collection of evidence and arguments and theory that has established "the earth is round" beyond a reasonable doubt. But for a person who either does not have access to all that evidence and arguments and theory, or who simply refuses to believe them (and, as someone else upthread noted, it can be a valid heuristic strategy for some people to refuse to believe claims by other people that they can't understand for themselves, in order to avoid being taken advantage of), the claim that the earth is flat is not absurd, which means it's not prima facie false.
This premise is just historically false. Ancient civilizations knew full well the earth was not flat. More people in the history of mankind have known the earth is round than how to multiply.
Some did. Not all of them. The first one I'm aware of is the Greeks. Do you know of any earlier ones?
Also, the fact that particular intellectuals knew the Earth was round in a society does not necessarily mean it was common knowledge in that society, much less that it was such common knowledge that the average person would think it absurd to question it and would be able to explain why. The books we have from the ancient Greeks that give good arguments for the Earth being round were probably not read by more than a tiny fraction of the population. The earliest example I can think of of the roundness of the Earth being taught in a widespread fashion is the Christian church after it accepted the roundness of the Earth as dogma and taught it as such.
There's evidence in some Sanskrit texts that early Indian civilizations did, but they are probably contemporary to the Greeks.
But again, even superficial observations are sufficient. You don't really have to "trust" anybody or research anything. If anything, it's the belief in flat earth that requires extremely convoluted and unintuitive rationalizations.
Again, I understand this stuff is frustrating, because unwillingness to change one's mind in front of overwhelming contrary evidence is one of the worst possible behaviors.
They might believe the claim in the sense they'd pass a lie detector test, but I doubt it's because they find the argument genuinely convincing.
> early christians
This isn't true, either. Some early Christians might have stuck to a literal interpretation of the sacred texts, but the Church has strongly opposed that belief since the very beginning. I don't have any particular axe to grind, but this is really just a myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
That depends on what you consider to be superficial observations. The fact that there is plenty of evidence for ancient civilizations before the Greeks believing the Earth to be flat (for example, descriptions in their mythology) indicates to me that the observations needed to figure out that the Earth is round are not superficial. Sure, it seems like they are if you live in a society that already has the belief and can teach it to you. But that doesn't mean they actually are.
> this is really just a myth
The myth referred to in that Wikipedia article (which I fully agree is a myth) has nothing whatever to do with what I said, or with early Christians. You are attacking a straw man.
What I said, in fact, is stronger than the statements made in that Wikipedia article. The article only says that "scholars have supported" the view that the Earth is round since the 600s AD. I said that the Christian church had taught it since it accepted it as dogma, and that, AFAIK, was several centuries earlier than the 600s AD.
Of course it's possible that they are trolling or something more or less equivalent. I find it hard to believe that anyone is that good at trolling, but I admit I find it less hard to believe after spending years on the Internet. :-)
I would suggest that it's possible this need is subconscious, and if they're believing nonsense because that need is so great, I'd consider that a mental illness.
It's definitely possible. I'm saying I'd be more inclined to believe the "need" in question is a social need, rather than bad media/"fake news" influence.
Works for a while, not forever.
Interesting. I'd like to read that study, if you ever figure out which one it was.
Meanwhile, I wonder if this was a case of people figuring out what the testers wanted to hear, rather than actually altering the beliefs they held.
People can 'come to believe' what benefits them.
If an idea is truly exciting or engaging, or makes people feel special, or part of a 'group' esp. of 'special people' - it's just more likely we believe those things as 'factual'.
So in a way - though they would 'pass a lie detector test' and 'truly believe in a flat earth' - it's predicate upon all those things - it's an impassioned or subjective kind of belief.
They would act almost perfectly rationally if you asked them about some completely mundane subject like rocks rolling down a hill.
Our egos tend to believe it when we're told we are good, and tend to be dismissive when we are told we're bad at something, that right there is evidence we're not very objective about taking in data to begin with.
I found the best thing to do is stop there. Just listen, observe, try to understand. Be patient.
Unless someone comes to you asking a question, you're unlikely to change anyone's mind immediately, and even if they are asking opinions often change slowly if at all.
When we tell people they're wrong, we push them away a little, and our sphere of influence diminishes.
The way i've heard it explained that makes the most sense to me: "people are convinced (rightly) that there is something wrong with our world and society, they just don't know what it is. Conspiracies provide answers and a framework to accommodate that feeling."
The opposite of knowledge isn't no knowledge, it's bad knowledge. The creation of a parallel reality is not so unreasonable response to nothing nothing about our current reality.
We all need something to hold on to.
And don't get me started on the poor coverage of concepts like “necessary” and “sufficient” in judging evidence in support of an assertion or model.
After working in science for the past 15 years (drug development), I've come to appreciate how little in medicine we know in absolute terms. With any system as complex as the human body, generally the best you can hope for is to be less wrong.
> is to be properly understood as the physics of objects immersed in a fluid, air or water [1]
Kindergarten children can engage in physics, construct their theories. And only much later learn that space bodies move differently and how that knowledge can be applied to the world around us.
Trust experiment not authority.
[1] Aristotle’s Physics: a Physicist’s Look https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/157866135.pdf
Unless you're an astronomer or involved in some pursuit in which the shape of the earth is of material consequence, it just doesn't matter.
Flat earthers find community and identity amongst other flat earthers, and that to them is of much higher significance than whether the earth is actually flat or not.
Society has mostly been run by autocratic systems. If we are determined to make democracy work, conspiracy and anti-fact ideologies are existential threats.
With all due respect, there is nothing 'new' about QAnon. It's the same recycled theories about santanic pedophiles tweaked slightly to fit new surroundings. I would argue a new banality of evil that Facebook/Instagram/Twitter provides, where dangerous lies reside right next to actual news and photos of people's kids.
Confirmation bias also explains a lot. I remember seeing many anecdotes about Trump before the 2016 election that felt quite possibly true but turned out to be false on further investigation. As if the true things were not exciting enough.
Moreover, I suspect that much of our perceptions, esp. on topics that we don't directly seek out, are based on just glancing at the continuous stream of clickbaity article titles that cross our feeds everyday without even clicking them. In isolation, they'd be harmless, but if the same articles appears across HN, FB, and Twitter, they make a mental impact. And these half-digested impressions then color our opinions when those topics come up in debate or discussions.
I think, with Bayesian probabilities, you can have a setup where, given the same data and two different prior distributions, you end up with two wildly different posteriors after updating the initial beliefs. Unfortunately, i don't have an example at hand but i remember there is a very interesting passage on this phenomenon in E. T. Jaynes "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science". Can anyone else expand on this?
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
I believe that stupidity is and has always been widespread and in normal times the more intelligent ideas have the widest subscription, even among the stupid. But when leaders fail to [be open, be objective, act in good faith, stick to the truth], then even the stupid can detect that they are being played and they rebel and seek alternative facts. So my theory is that leaders are currently gaming the populous rather than leading them, and that this is so obvious to everybody that trust in leadership and institutions has gone out the window.
Scott Adams has recently asserted that about 90% of what we are being told is not true. I'm don't concur with Scott on that figure, but clearly even smart people have lost trust in leaders/institutions. When the news refuses to report on 25% of newsworthy stories because they either make Trump look good or Biden look bad... when the news claims it's perfectly safe to protest BLM issues in the streets during a coronavirus pandemic... when even judges are clearly acting in bad faith (Julian Assange extradition case, Michael Flynn case)... when the Supreme Court becomes (or is perceived as becoming) the arm of a political party rather than an objective trustable institution, then the populous loses faith in the leaders/rules/institutions and we get widespread rioting, violence, a hell of a lot of stupid ideas, and perhaps hopefully some positive changed buried within all that somewhere.
I agree with that assessment. My limited and probably wrong interpretation of history indicates that in general, behavior will now tend towards revolutionary.
In addition, where someone with an extremist view might be considered an outgroup, historically their views might have been suppressed among their peers or shutdown. Now they can engage online with thousands if not millions of other people who believe in the same out group ideas, potentially strengthening their view point.
One of the interesting psychological discussions is around people with extremist views such as flat earthers. These individuals are often minorities or outcasts of society and as such, many of those with extremist views form bonds with like minded people and their relationships and well-being are tied to those relationships. What this means is that not only are they less likely to respond pragmatically to opposing viewpoints, but that they would struggle to actually change their ways given that their relationships are tied with this belief. And if they were to believe differently, they would have to say goodbye to those bonds.
Not only that but those with out-group positions are great for those with agendas and willing to play along. Anti-vaxers are fodder for anyone looking for angry nuts to turn loose on their enemies etc.
Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786278
(although he puts his cutoff point at 25% of the angriest part of the population, with no value judgements on nuts. In the age of social media, it ought to be easy enough to generate memes along the lines of his survey questions to see who forwards them.)
You may find these resources useful:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-s...
https://jamesclear.com/why-facts-dont-change-minds
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/words-matter/201810/...
https://ed.ted.com/best_of_web/hI9YSFHW#review
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/this-art...
This thinking is dangerous. You open the doors to labelling every opinion that isn't considered rational or part of the status quo to be a product of mental illness.
e.g I find those AI generated pictures of people that look like real photos to be mildly disturbing. It is clearly irrational, however I don't think people could claim I am mentally ill because of it.
Currently there is a push to make racism a mental illness. I see no evidence of that at all. I've spoken to some people that have gone on the "Iron March" and they aren't mentally ill (tbh they are just losers IMO but they are pretty harmless as most of them are NEETs living with their parents).
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 most bizarre clips from social media, /r/choosingbeggars highlights the dumbest negotiation attempts, /r/trashy and /r/iamatotalpieceofshit are selected stories of bad behavior, /r/whatcouldgowrong and /r/instantkarma are videos of people making bad decisions and suffering the consequences, /r/publicfreakout is videos of people fighting. Contributors hunt for the most egregious examples to post to Reddit in the hopes of getting upvotes.
Twitter isn't much better: Topics spread on Twitter when they promote outrage or allow the reader to feel smugly superior to someone.
If you spend your days online consuming this content day in and day out, you're going to become convinced that the world is "stupid" and getting stupider. In reality, you're simply tapping into stupidity concentrators, getting bite-sized views of stupidity so you can react in astonishment and feel superior to stupid people doing stupid things.
I think COVID quarantine has worsened this, as people are getting even more of their worldview through social media feeds instead of actually interacting with people in the real world. If 90% of your insight into social interactions comes from clickbait social media sites selecting the most egregious stories and videos from around the world, of course you're going to think "stupidity is expanding". In reality, it's a sign that you need to revaluate your sources of information and move to platforms and networks where people are talking about something other than other people's stupidity.
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.
I don't think it even has to be deliberate; the algorithms social media uses, by their very nature, are going to promote stupid and blatantly wrong beliefs, since so many people will enjoy mocking them and there will always be some believers willing to argue back and keep the discussion going indefinitely.
Imagine what would happen if social media algorithms started promoting the opposite. Engagement would drop, but there might be some interesting second and third effects.
This works really well when you have a question about something. If you post a question asking for answers or ideas you often get crickets. But if you post an idea that is clearly wrong you usually get lots of people jumping in to correct you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham
I don't find them particularly worse than the major mainstream media.
> If you've ever watched someone be completely wrong about something you know a lot about
This happens whenever I read a mainstream media article about something like airplanes.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
(edit: added link below)
taken from: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
Sort of like me being assigned to write an article about culinary arts :-)
P.S. For more decent articles about airplanes, Aviation Week is far better.
It's simple. The dumber you are, the easier it is to sell something to you. Susceptibility to "influence" is a highly profitable trait, so it's selected. That's why the idiot networks need to aggregate as many fools together in one big writhing swarm of stupidity. Their revenue comes from advertising, and as long as that continues you should not expect it to get any better.
This realization may also lead to the solution: Don't regulate the content. Regulate the advertising.
Its true. I think it appeals to our inner Just-world theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
It's obviously everywhere but you see it in tech when people say company X deserved Y because they didn't do Z when they get Black-Hatted for instance.
Scene from the movie Idiocracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Idiocracy&oldid=9...):
https://youtu.be/1hj_7U40z5I?t=19
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.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. A friend of mine and I spent a lot of evening hours talking about [loosely summarized] "where the internet was going" from 2010-2013. Unfortunately we seemed to be correct on many fronts, and it has made some faucets of technology almost unbearable.
IQ tests are being renormalized. Today's 100 may be last year's 99. Average IQs have gone up ~15 points since ~1950. Some evidence of slowing or reversing in the last 20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
So again, I agree with the premise but statements like yours could be infinitely more helpful by suggesting ways to stop using these toxic motivators for fun.
Agreed. Isn't this the majority of people though? And if this is in fact the majority of people, then doesn't it mean that stupidity is in fact expanding?
I don't think any of us are going to hit upon the end-all-be-all decisive proof either way, but I think there's value in considering how everyone perceiving it getting larger may be the definition of it getting larger.
I think what you describe can be attributed to our brain noting the negative things much stronger in its memory while it always writes off the usual / slightly positive events as "normal".
In short, we get outraged easily, but it's hard to make us positively impressed in a lasting manner, it seems.
What has convinced me the world is stupid is that as a whole we cannot get our shit together to deal with a global pandemic. You signal your intelligence when you show blatant disregard for the rules/law when you don't wear a mask when required. There are so many reasons why people do this (not knowing any better/not believing they work comes from lack of education), but it all stems from lack of intelligence (in my opinion). The fact that some parts of the world have effectively contained while others are miserably failing, causing so many needless deaths, knowing what needs to happen to create this outcome, you can only conclude that as a whole, we are morons.
So yeah, I'm sure social media is definitely doing some damage, acting as a conduit for false information, spreading theories on 5G towers spreading the virus etc, but taking 5 watching some dumbass total his car via /r/idiotsincars because it was upvoted into /r/all does not make me feel hopeless, what makes me feel hopeless is getting on a tram, making a quick scan and concluding that I have to move into the next section because in the current one there are too many people not wearing a mask.
Your post has made me reconsider browsing /r/all though.. it is all pretty bland these days and /r/WCGW isn't entertaining as it was when I first found it
Coming from a country which had low enforcement of laws even before the pandemic(one of the reasons why it's still under "developing" category instead of "developed"), I doubt the disregard of law is due to lack of intelligence. On the contrary, the more intelligent/shrewd someone is, higher is their chance to get away disregarding the law(in these places). They are more selfish than stupid.
But I think that what you are attributing to stupidity would be better attributed to culture, size, or strength of authority -- the countries that have handled the pandemic well score favorably in one of those attributes. Here in the 'states we are strongly individualistic and historically distrustful of government, and bad actors have been stoking those flames for a while so we are in a particuarly vulnerable state right now.
Now, in my opinion, stupidity is humanity's seeming refusal to not act more switfly about climate change, but I'm sure someone else would argue that's attributable to some other, er, attribute
Another example. If you’d be living in the Middle Ages and there would be a growing group believing the earth wasn’t flat, you’d be called stupid. Now, it’s the other way around.
Either way, stupidity is very subjective when applied at an intellectual level.
At a more practical level, stupid would be a child that just heard their parents say not to touch the furnace but still touches it and burns itself. One could call it stupid, but it’s also a way of learning, exploring and getting experience.
So even at this level, 'stupid' is subjective
What were the consequences of acting foolishly and not concentrating 5000 years ago compared to today ? 50 years ago ?
Maybe you’d starve, maybe you’d get eaten by a lion, or ruin the hunt for food and your crops.
Today, that doesn’t seem relevant, you can spend all day believing in and talking nonsense and end up getting paid and receiving essentials. You won’t starve or freeze. You might even end up being the President of the United States by doing so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude
Now, set aside the actual proposition and read the comments. Most of them are trivially wrong about:
* What a California Ballot Proposition is
* What the role of the legislator is wrt ballot props
* The text of the proposition
Now, this would be a problem if the text was particularly hard, but it really isn't. Someone in the comments there pointed out that this was the same as the infamous Prop J and K pair where one raised taxes to provide funding for a thing and the other provided the thing but only if the funding was there. The funding failed, the thing passed. The thing never came to exist. Afterwards, on Reddit, I read commenters describing how they didn't know the two things were linked.
This is a pretty common pattern on forums like this. Even HN suffers from it where people avoid primary sources only to intentionally play telephone and get bad information which they then convincingly repeat. I've definitely seen folks confidently bullshit something they just learned from another comment instead of reading the primary source. As an amusing coincidence, one of these was about the ridesharing min wage law that Seattle passed. The primary source was very clear, but most comments argued about a thing that wasn't a failure mode of the actual law - but was a failure mode of a non-existent law that they had manufactured from thin air.
¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/j6c4lv/im_a_softwa... it's deleted now but the same text as https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/06/im-a-software-engineer-at-...
What is the intuition that this runs counter to?
I don't see it as counterintuitive. It seems to me a reflection of human nature. I imagine people have always been that way.
I think COVID is causing it, but in a much simpler way: by increasing stress levels which increases fast system thinking. Globalization and the rising pace of change have increased global stress levels over the past decades, which has caused people to take a defensive mental stance, do more fast system thinking and be less open minded. You saw the same shift towards extreme politics throughout the world, which for me means it is not about the issues, but about how people feel. COVID turned that dial up to 11. I see people freaking out in many small ways, and they mostly don’t seem to be aware they’re suffering from anxiety and it is affecting their thought process.
Social media is the cherry on top. When you are in the fast system thinking mode, it helps you to stay there. Selection bias, shallow interactions, shallow depth of information, all things that increase as you engage more with social media. That makes it more toxic to people already under stress. These people then are able to find each other online, form vocal groups and try to spread their anxiety around. And that’s how it can appear like things are getting worse while mostly they’ve never been better. And how it can seem like people are getting more stupid while really they’re getting more stressed.
Reddit's demographics skew very young, which means it's mostly used by people who have very little socioeconomic standing. People at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are subject to significant arbitrary humiliation at the hands of others (all entry-level jobs suck; so does being a student) and have no tools with which to fight back. People who are in this situation are likely to find catharsis in finding ways to see themselves--no matter how bad their personal situation is--as at least one step above someone else (hence the popularity of subs like /r/insanepeoplefacebook) and seeing abusive people being given their just rewards in ways the average Reddit reader cannot get away with (hence, the popularity of subs like /r/instantkarma).
I also wonder if there's a correlation between preferences for mockery content and the rigidity of social hierarchies in different countries. Japan, for instance, has a very rigid social hierarchy (meaning most people are subject to arbitrary abuse) and they had an entire genre of mainstream humiliation TV[0]. I'd be surprised if this kind of content is as popular in countries with flatter social hierarchies where sociopathic behavior directed at subordinates is less acceptable.
[0] https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/japanese-game-shows_n_45...
(As an aside, I haven't looked at Reddit's default subs for many years and it's shocking that they've crawled that far down into the clickbait gutter.)