"Is Stupidity Expanding?"

Is stupidity expanding? That’s the question David Gross asks:

“It feels to me that in recent years, people have gotten stupider, or that stupid has gotten bigger, or that the parts of people that were always stupid have gotten louder, or something like that.”

This blog is only about the “No, stupidity is not expanding” reasons.

 

Frequency illusion: Aka Baader–Meinhof phenomenon:

“The frequency illusion is that once something has been noticed then every instance of that thing is noticed, leading to the belief it has a high frequency of occurrence.”

 

Diversification: Everyone can express their views easily:

“What used to look like non-stupidity was actually widespread conformity to a common menu of foolishnesses… (Today) there is increasing diversity in foolishness. Divergent fools seem more foolish to each other when in fact we’re all just as stupid as we’ve always been.”

 

Dispersal rates: In the pre-Internet era, private views remained limited in their spread. Now, they get expressed in public forums and are very visible:

“Non-intelligent forms of communication (a) are more amplified than they used to be, (b) more commonly practiced than they used to be.”

 

AI chat bots that pretend to be real people:

“People aren’t getting any stupider, it’s just that the artificial intelligence of the bots I’m mistaking for people on-line isn’t all that good yet.”

 

“It’s me, not them”:

“They’re not getting stupider; I’m just getting more conceited.”

 

Old order, new order:

“There is no truth, only power. What I’ve been interpreting as truth and rationality has been my own attempt to align my thinking with the political clique that was in power when I was being educated. What I’m interpreting as rising stupidity has been the collapse in power and status of that clique.”

 

The “what’s retained” bias wrt earlier times:

“There’s a sort of survival of the fittest in which vast amounts of expressions are being produced all the time, most of which are stupid and fall away, but the ones that aren’t stupid are more likely to survive in memory and to be maintained in the historical record. This biases things to make it appear that the proportion of non-stupid expressions was lower in the past than it really was.”

 

Thought-provoking points indeed.