Over the past decade, I’ve felt like the world has become much dumber. Political decay once associated with a few countries such as Italy and Philippines has spread almost everywhere. But maybe that’s just me getting older and grouchier. Maybe the world is not any dumber than before.
Jonathan Haidt has a thought-provoking essay in The Atlantic entitled:
WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID
So it’s not just me. I have a few reservations with Haidt’s views on social media (as does Matt Yglesias), but the essay is well worth reading.
When dumb ideas are popular, sophisticated people look for deep explanations. Who gains and who loses from that dumb policy? But perhaps public choice models with special interest groups don’t provide the answer. Perhaps it’s just the stupidity, stupid.
This headline from Reason magazine caught my eye:
Congress Should Not Legalize Marijuana, Marco Rubio Says, Because Black-Market Weed Is ‘Laced With Fentanyl’
So given a choice between legal weed and black market weed, Senator Rubio prefers the latter because it’s laced with fentanyl. That’s seems like a pretty punitive attitude toward drug users. Yes, they are breaking the law, but do they actually deserve to die from a fentanyl overdose?
I suspect that there is an alternative interpretation of Rubio’s position, he is simply confused.
A third possibility is that Rubio is not confused, and that he is cynically exploiting the ignorance of voters. I’ve met many, many people who have told me that legalizing drugs is a bad idea because the drug trade is very violent. Sigh. . . .
But what makes you think Rubio is not one of those people? Intelligent people often hold dumb opinions.
In a previous post, I pointed out that low carbon energy sources like solar, wind, hydropower and nuclear are being held back because of objections by environmentalists. Maybe they are simply confused.
Matt Yglesias recently linked to a survey that has urban experts shaking their heads in disbelief:
There’s also a widely held belief that building more housing makes housing more unaffordable. Once again, here’s Yglesias:
What is the common thread in all of this stupidity? Things are not as they seem at first glance. You need to analyze a situation. Here is how things seem at first glance:
1. The Chernobyl disaster hurt the environment. Nope, it helped the environment so much that the area around Chernobyl is now one of Europe’s greatest nature preserves, full of wild animals.
2. Solar, wind and hydropower can hurt the environment. But the coal-generated electricity they replace hurts the environment much more.
3. The leafy suburbs of Long Island are better for the environment than the concrete jungle of Manhattan. Nope, Manhattan houses 2 million people using far less land and energy than does Long Island.
4. In cities where they are building lots of luxury high rises, housing is getting more expensive. Yes, but the net effect of the new construction is to slow the rate of increase in housing prices.
5. The drug trade involves a lot of crime and violence. Yes, but the crime and violence occur precisely because the drugs are illegal.
The moral of the story is that bad policy does not always result from nefarious special interest groups. In many cases, it’s simply a question of stupidity. If Jonathan Haidt is correct that the world is getting even stupider, then we might expect even more dumb legislation going forward.
PS. Partial drug legalization does not necessarily shrink the illegal drug trade. Complete legalization does (even with fairly high taxes), as we’ve seen with cigarettes.
READER COMMENTS
Kevin
Apr 16 2022 at 3:01pm
The Flynn effect (approximately 3 point IQ increases per decade, across the population) has reversed itself in many developed countries, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that it has occurred in the U.S., as well.
bb
Apr 16 2022 at 3:42pm
Kevin,
Wow. I both really want to and really don’t want to know the answer to this question!
Kevin
Apr 16 2022 at 3:52pm
We should be able to find out when the WAIS-V finally gets released. I believe it’s been in delay due to COVID-19.
Bb
Apr 16 2022 at 5:57pm
not certain about this but I believe one of the great things about the Flynn effect is that it is true across a variety demographic groups. Will be interesting to see if that’s true of the reversal.
Best case is obviously no reversal but we do seem to be getting dumber. Ugh.
Andrew_FL
Apr 16 2022 at 5:55pm
“Seen and Unseen” explains most of this.
Komori
Apr 16 2022 at 5:59pm
That “better for the environment” question is very poor, unless the results are leaving out a lot of explanation that was given previous to the question itself. After all, if homes are built further apart, there’s more room for green spaces (ie. the environment) between them. If you build very close together, you don’t. Where will the parks and greenbelts go?
I find it rather amusing to see Yglesias’ reaction to the poll, especially as it includes the “rural areas” section that should call attention to this. Where homes can be, for instance, miles apart, surrounded by hundreds of acres of “environment”. If the people responding are comparing that situation to suburbs with postage-stamp yards, what’s obviously incorrect about the answer “better for the environment”?
Scott Sumner
Apr 16 2022 at 6:03pm
Actually, there’s more room for green spaces when people live in high rise buildings.
robc
Apr 16 2022 at 6:18pm
Not in between.
Njnnja
Apr 16 2022 at 11:17pm
I’m sorry but this kind of thing is really just a cheap shot on a trick question. The most straightforward way for a layperson to understand the question is something like: on a 2 mile stretch of river, do you get more pollution if you put 1 million people on that stretch or 500 people. They would make the assumption that the number of people in the world is variable and you make the assumption that the number of people in the world is fixed. They make the assumption that local pollution is the metric to be concerned with; you assume the metric in the question is about efficiency and overall resource usage in a fixed population. And then you can get into all sorts of things about what is the margin in the long run or short run, such that it is totally reasonable for someone to say that a world with the population density of Southeast Asia would have worse environment than a world with a population density of Canada. You can disagree with that, but if the mental heuristic of people answering the question is that comparison (and I would bet that it is), then the heuristic(i.e. “stupid”) approach to the question isn’t clearly worse than the approach with different assumptions and margins that the bloggers prefer.
Rather than denigrate people by calling them stupid, you should try to steelman their argument and see if vague questions and unspecified assumptions such as above can lead to this kind of misunderstanding. And then clarify the question to fix it.
Scott Sumner
Apr 17 2022 at 7:02pm
That seems a truly bizarre interpretation of the question. So you are saying that when asked about the difference between houses built close together or far apart, we are supposed to assume the total population is different if built close together? Then why wouldn’t that be the question that was asked?
The public’s ignorance on this question has consequences. Many environmentalists support NIMBY policies out of a misguided belief they are good for the environment.
We have a lot of work to do in educating the public on this issue.
Jose Pablo
Apr 18 2022 at 4:11pm
“Working” on educating people does not get people more educated. For that you need people having the right incentives to learn.
So either “people” have to pass an exam on this topic and the results are relevant for their employability (and in this case they will forget everything after the exam) or the learning has to help them on their day to day lives.
None of this two apply to the subject you are referring to. That’s the reason why they were ignorant on the subject in the first place.
Jose Pablo
Apr 16 2022 at 10:19pm
One possibility maybe worth considering, is that the world is equally dumb but has become more “opinionate” (more media hosting politicians, more social media, more blogs …)
For a given level of high “human dumbness”, the more people opine the dumper they look.
Jose Pablo
Apr 16 2022 at 10:44pm
… more nonsensical surveys specifically designed to reveal people dumbness …
TGGP
Apr 17 2022 at 7:18am
The sophisticated version of the anti-drug argument might resemble what William Stuntz says is how police actually behave in “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice” (not that Stuntz approves): it is too difficult for police to solve homicides in inner cities, so the police use drug laws instead which are easier to get convictions for. Not discussed in his book is how Mexican cartels have shifted to kidnapping when that seemed a better source of money, or Bryan Caplan’s point that crime just doesn’t pay generally speaking and that the people who engage in it are irrational (hyperbolic discounters, as the late Mark Kleiman would put it). So some people are prone to committing such crimes and drug laws provide a way for police to go after violent criminals (while ignoring less violent participants in the drug trade), Evidence that this is not just a dumb person’s perspective being rationalized is that Singapore, which tends to have more sensible policies than other places, is very strict & anti-drug. But I think any real explanation would have to go into the history Stuntz discusses of policing now vs in the Gilded Age.
Scott Sumner
Apr 17 2022 at 7:06pm
You said:
“The sophisticated version of the anti-drug argument might resemble what William Stuntz says is how police actually behave in “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice” (not that Stuntz approves): it is too difficult for police to solve homicides in inner cities, so the police use drug laws instead which are easier to get convictions for.”
“Sophisticated” is the last term I’d employ for the sort of repressive policies you see in places like the Philippines.
As for crime, why did the murder rate in the US nearly double under alcohol prohibition? And why did it fall by almost that amount when Prohibition was repealed.?
Jon Murphy
Apr 17 2022 at 10:01am
I think “ignorance” is a better word than “stupidity.” All these matters you discuss are complex, subtle, and require careful consideration. “Ignorance” implies that people are unaware of the complexities and subtilties.* “Stupidity” implies that, even were they made aware, they’d be unable to comprehend and appreciate the complexities and subtilties. That experts can understand the complexities and subtilties better than a layman does not imply the expert is inherently more intelligent than the layman. We also run into a seeming contradiction: experts are, pretty much by definition, better informed of complexities in subtilties in their own fields than laymen. But, consequently, that also means they are relatively less informed about other fields. If “stupidity” is measured as lack of awareness of complexities and subtilties in other fields, then the expert is both intelligent and stupid.
*It’s worth noting that “ignorance” does not imply that if people were made aware of the complexities and subtilties, they’d still support/oppose a given policy. Personal values, conceptions of jurisprudence and virtue, and other factors still play a role.
Jose Pablo
Apr 17 2022 at 10:52am
Maybe you are right and it is more about “ignorance” than “stupidity”. But this would not explain the “increasing” part that the essay and the post suggest.
People “ignorance”, on the other hand, is a rational response. Most knowledge is totally irrelevant to them, so why bother with the effort to acquire it?
Afterall “experts” in non-scientific fields (like politics, sociology, economics …) are pretty bad at making predictions about the future (see Tetlock) … and can discuss endlessly about “predictions” about the past.
If thousand of hours of study does not allow you to predict the future any better (or even satisfactorily explain the past); keeping yourself ignorant (and saving all this time to eat, drink or making love) makes total rational sense.
Jon Murphy
Apr 17 2022 at 12:15pm
Sure it would. Why wouldn’t it? You provide an explanation why ignorance, as opposed to stupidity, explain the increasing: rational decision-making.
Jose Pablo
Apr 17 2022 at 1:42pm
But that “decision making” was equally rational 10 years ago, wasn’t it?
Jon Murphy
Apr 17 2022 at 2:29pm
The process, yes. But do not confuse the process with the result. That people make different decisions in 2022 than in 2012 does not imply they are “dumber.” Rather, it simply implies they face different costs and benefits.
Jon Murphy
Apr 17 2022 at 2:56pm
Before we go too far afield, I want to reiterate my main point:
Stupidity implies an inability to comprehend complexities and subtleties. Ignorance implies that a person can comprehend complexities and subtilties, but are not aware of them.
I reject the thesis that people are less able to comprehend complexities and subtleties now than they were in the past. Rather, I suggest that people are more ignorant (for whatever reason) of the complexities and subtleties.
I think ignorance, rather than stupidity, is the better explanation for two reasons:
First, we do not need to assume anything about a base level of comprehension (like one has to do with stupidity).
Second, ignorance is consistent with most of the literature on knowledge formation going back to at least Adam Smith.
The world is a highly complex place. As it gets more complex, one would expect the average person’s knowledge of the system to diminish, although their ability to comprehend may be unchanged.
Think of the mind like a tea cup. “Stupidity” would be the amount that the cup can hold. “Ignorance” would be the amount of liquid surrounding the cup. If you fill the tea cup up from a faucet, the cup can hold a certain quantity of liquid, but there is relatively little spillover. There is little “ignorance”. But if, instead, a firehose were aimed at the cup, then far more liquid would be outside of the cup. It would be incorrect to claim the cup holds less liquid simply because there is more outside of it.
Jose Pablo
Apr 17 2022 at 3:12pm
The “faucet vs the firehose” explanation for the increase in the level of ignorance is, I think, a valid one.
In any case, what we are talking about is not the “existing level of ignorance”, but the “level of ignorance that can be observed” (since, by definition, is the only thing that can be a matter of discussion).
I still think that the increase in the last 10 years of our ability to “observe” the existing level of ignorance also plays a role. This “ability to observe” has increase, at least, proportionally, to the amount of “opinions” that we collect/consume (that has significantly increased in the last 10 years)
Jon Murphy
Apr 17 2022 at 4:47pm
I agree wholeheartedly with the point of increasing ignorance and the “observed” nature. My objection was to the word “stupidity.”
Jon Murphy
Apr 17 2022 at 12:19pm
Tetlock also explains why “scientific”* fields are bad at making predictions too (see, eg, this paper here on the abysmal track record of epidemiology forecasting).
*As an aside, it is incorrect to classify politics, sociology, and economics as “non-scientific.” A science is (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.” Economics, politics, sociology do that.
Jose Pablo
Apr 17 2022 at 1:51pm
But then, by that definition, “scientific” is clearly a polysemic word since it applies, at the same time, to “sciences” that allow us to land a spacecraft on a predefined spot on a Jupiter’s moon and the “sciences” that do not allow us to know whether or not an increase in the inflation rate is “transitory” (as it used to be some months ago) or “not so transitory” as it seems to be now.
I find very confusing using the same word to refer to both kinds of “sciences”.
Jon Murphy
Apr 17 2022 at 2:28pm
Your example isn’t really one of polysemy, but of different levels of precision.
As an aside, economics does possess the tools to know whether inflation is transitory or not. Many economists were saying inflation wouldn’t be transitory. That some experts give bad advice or poor predictions does not imply the field as a whole is not scientific.
Jose Pablo
Apr 17 2022 at 3:01pm
Since the “transitory inflation” is a quote from the President of the Federal Reserve, it means that the “scientists” in charge of controlling inflation (arguably the most knowledgeable expects on the subject) were the ones giving “bad advice and making poor predictions”.
It is difficult to picture the “scientists” working at NASA or SpaceX making poor predictions on the “landing of the spacecraft” issue.
There has to be a significant difference in the “scientific quality” (as in “the ability to make accurate predictions”) of the tools that both of them are using.
Jon Murphy
Apr 17 2022 at 5:09pm
“Transitory inflation” is more akin to a medical diagnosis then a prediction. Given experts fail in medical diagnoses all the time, would you claim medicine is not a science?
It’s also worth noting that physicists can predict where a shuttle will land, but the confidence intervals can be quite wide, in some cases by many miles. When making predictions, there is always a trade-off between being accurate and being precise.
Scott Sumner
Apr 17 2022 at 7:08pm
Sure, ‘ignorance’ is a better term. The title was meant to be humorous.
Jon Murphy
Apr 17 2022 at 7:40pm
Oh I just got it. “It’s the economy, stupid.”
I feel stupid now lol
Josh Bedi
Apr 18 2022 at 6:02am
I’m not sure “ignorance” is the better term. I rather like your use of the word “stupid”.
In fact, Caplan’s concepts of rational irrationality and rational ignorance in the face of low probabilities of decisiveness can be used to explain all this quite well. I don’t think people just become stupid – they have to have an incentive to be stupid. There’s ignorance in the market too, but there are incentives to become informed or to outsource information. We outsource information in politics too (through political parties and interest groups), but we don’t have the same incentive to audit that information like we do in the market, because of low probabilities of decisiveness.
Of course, this all just kicks the can down the road regarding the question of why it seems we’re becoming more ignorant in politics. I think this is where explanations relying on social media become useful. If I don’t have an incentive to overcome ignorance or irrationality, or if I have an incentive to perpetuate ignorance or irrationality, high volumes of cheap information aren’t necessarily a good thing. In fact, high volumes of cheap information in such a circumstance would probably exacerbate any ignorance or irrationality already in the system.
Scott Sumner
Apr 18 2022 at 12:39pm
I’d put it this way. The average person has an IQ of 100. That’s highly intelligent relative to animals and really stupid relative to a person with a 200 IQ. I am intelligent relative to some people and stupid relative to others.
steve
Apr 17 2022 at 12:50pm
I doubt we are more stupid though it could be possible. I think it is more likely that with the internet and social media it is is easier for stupid people and ideas to get a platform. Also, there is very little direct discussion or comparison about the best ideas presented by those best able to present them. What you mostly see is someone picking the worst idea presented by the stupidest or most hypocritical person, assuming that person represents everyone in that particular tribe, and then people argue against that idea and person. Kind of a strawman but you also are throwing in a bit of ad hominem.
There is a whole industry devoted to finding and amplifying this stuff. You make tons more money doing it than straight journalism or news. We all do this because it can be kind of entertaining. It is nice to see that on a site like this it doesnt happen so often.
Steve
Mark Z
Apr 17 2022 at 8:40pm
I think this is correct. Until 20 years ago, few people ever made recorded public comments on politics. The few who did – mostly politicians – made carefully prepared and vetted comments in formal settings like speeches and press conferences. Now, everyone is constantly tweeting they’re ongoing unprocessed thoughts all the time. There’s a much lower filter on what we hear from people. If you followed pre-internet people around all day and recorded all the dumb things they said all day, we might find they weren’t any smarter. And as you say, it’s easier than ever to aggregate all the dumbest things anyone’s ever said than ever before to portray them as an idiot.
Maybe people are dumber, but a few examples of people saying dumb things on the internet isn’t convincing.
Phil H
Apr 17 2022 at 1:27pm
It seems likely to me that the individuals in the world aren’t any more stupid, but that people are weighing in on issues on which they have no understanding much more, so the quality of the average opinion has gone down. The last ten years has seen the rise of Twitter. Everyone said when Twitter appeared that limiting our opinons to 140 characters would lead to more stupidity and lack of nuance and… they seem to have been right.
But at the same time, lots more outstanding people are getting the opportunity to express themselves. So it may still turn out to be a net positive.
Jim Glass
Apr 17 2022 at 3:18pm
Yes, profound and wide ignorance among us all is the starting point of the visible problem. (If you think “among them”, you’re the problem.) This is compounded by a huge number of cognitive distortions and fallacies that seem to be hard-wired into all of us.
I once saw Daniel Kahneman be aksed: what’s the worst thinking error common to human beings? He said “We all have opinions about things about which we are fully ignorant. That’s not the problem. The problem is we fight over them.” The fighting goes: “I’m right, you’re wrong. Since you are wrong you must either be ignorant and need me to teach you, or be stupid and need me to control you for your own benefit. Or, if in fact you are as informed as me and as smart as me, you must be evil”. (I think of this latter as ‘the Krugman effect’, but I’m not always nice.)
The worst of all IMHO is the terrible ‘Eden’, fallacy: everything was once fine but is worse than ever now. We’re failing. Things are going backwards. But … hey, I had a Vietnam era draft card.
In my youth: the USA was losing a war making 60,000 of my peers dead plus another 150,000 wounded, the Communists owned Europe westward into Berlin, Paul Samuelson projected Soviet GDP would surpass the US’s, the Soviets had 25,000 nukes targeted at us ready to go, US campuses were closed by riots, soldiers shot students on campus, 70(!) race riots in one year forced LBJ to make national TV addresses pleading for racial peace (and to send 5,000 federal troops into Detroit), the next president price controlled the stagflation economy, then was driven from office for directing felonies from the White House, Arab oil embargoes forced me to gas up my 15-mpg car on alternate days by license plate number, waiting in line with its windows hand cranked down for air conditioning while I listened to my 8-track tape … need I go on? I sure can!
And everybody thinks things are bad today? Where’s the perspective?
Consider just the Covid Terror. In 2021 life expectancy fell to 76.6 due to Covid. In 1970 life expectancy was 71, in 1980 it was 73.7, in 1990 it was 75.4 …. just walking around happily was more dangerous than Covid.
With all these cognitive failures compounding our mass ignorance, its amazing that our ‘smart, rational’ civilization exists at all. Although being that it took 200,000 years to get here and still covers only perhaps 1/3rd of the world, maybe not.
Of course, none of this is new. But NOW add Social Media to all this.
It used to be the most ignorantly cognitively confused vented in bars or by the water cooler or whatever – largely solitary and invisible. Now they find each other on social media, organize, recruit, campaign, and the mass media in search of click-revenue drives traffic to them profiteering via algorithms that maximize ’emotional engagement’, reducing effective IQ correspondingly all around us, targeting them in political campaigns….
Scott Sumner
Apr 17 2022 at 7:10pm
Good comment.
Jim Glass
Apr 18 2022 at 10:16pm
Thanks. I can rant a bit sometimes.
For a simple example of how social media has reduced the IQ level of discussion, I give you Godwin’s Law. In the early days of the Internet, when discussions were on Usenet, this said that as soon as someone invoked Hitler or Nazis the discussion was over — or more to the point, that whoever did the invoking lost on the spot.
This really worked. In my time on sci.econ many invoker of Hitler/Nazis promptly wound up shunned or shamed. It really worked in the early days of blogging too. Then came Twitter … and this cultural norm of behavior was swamped and destroyed.
I just did a Google search for “MSNBC Trump Hitler” and got “775,000 results”. Of course, one doesn’t have to be Trump or a Repub to be Hitler or a Nazi now. One can be a left-wing feminist woman who sees a meaningful difference between biologically born women and trans women, and get called a Nazi.
As to “stupid”, it’s not plausible that people are either lower IQ or more ignorant than in the days when Godwin’s Law was honored — much less compared to 50 or 80 years ago. We’re no doubt smarter and much more informed than then.
But social norms of behavior matter, and the old ones are breaking down as social media conditions us to act like idiots — an “idiot” being a person who acts stupid without the excuse of being stupid, by my definition. We all do it, but used to try harder not to.
Social media algorithms are carefully constructed to engage quickly and emotionally, and now the NY Times and cable news networks calculatedly boost that for profit, all on every possible issue — and as emotions rise quickly thoughtful functioning IQ goes down, so the smart act dumb all over the place.
It’s the idiots, stupid!
alvinccente
Apr 19 2022 at 7:49pm
Jim – I think your memory has played you a bit false. Although many these days do seem to remember Godwin’s law as some kind of “you lose” provision, actually it was only observational: that if any on-line discussion goes on long enough, Hitler or the Nazis will be mentioned. Someone would be sure to use them as a reductio ad absurdum or for some other rhetorical purpose. You noted that Godwin’s law had again been vindicated when that reference appeared.
By the way, I agree with Scott that your original comment was excellent. I, too, remember those days, when there were no air bags in cars and they would rust out at 100,000 miles, there were no statins to reduce hardening of the arteries, my middle class home in Philadelphia and my college dormitory in Chicago had no air conditioning, etc., etc. These days are better in every way.
zeke5123
Apr 18 2022 at 9:27am
I think you are being too literal. It was a dumb poll question.
People, all other things equal, generally seem to prefer a little bit of space between houses and they generally like looking at green space on their property. There are premiums for larger size lots compared to smaller size lots, even though many larger lots don’t develop much.
So, people prefer X to Y. You ask them a question about Z (which everyone understands to be a good thing) so they pick X is better for Z than Y because they want more of X. It might be a manifestation of the belief that one’s preferred policy has no trade offs which is dumb. But I wouldn’t read too much into people’s view on environmentalism and housing off of this poll.
Scott Sumner
Apr 18 2022 at 12:40pm
Again, many environmentalists oppose density because they wrongly believe it bad for the environment. That’s a problem.
zeke5123
Apr 18 2022 at 3:37pm
But that presupposes environmentalists want to maximize the wellbeing of the environment. I think just like politics isn’t about policy, environmentalism isn’t necessarily about doing what is best for the environment. I think it is connected to Caplan’s social desirability bias. I think if you apply that heuristic (i.e., what sounds bucolic or natural is promoted by environmentalists as opposed to what is good for the environment) it explains environmentalists policy positions better than environmentalists are stupid.
Jose Pablo
Apr 18 2022 at 7:29pm
They are not “environmentalist”. They are anti-capitalist praising ruralism and opposing high density cities as a creation of greedy capitalists with the end goal of facilitating the alineation and exploitation of workers.
It is “convenient” (more that it is “ignorant”) for them to believe that areas of low-density population and, in general, “the rural way of living” are better for the environment.
The mix-up of “environmentalist” and “anticapitalism” is one of the main problems for the rationality of the whole movement (legal prohibitions are better than Pigouvian taxes, the problem are the big companies producing goods and services not the individuals consuming them, the solution is a bigger state and smaller private companies and, of course, rural is better than urban … you can find the “tic” everywhere …)
Aladdin
Apr 18 2022 at 11:06am
It all has a fairly simple explanation right? Information distribution has accelerated over the past 20 years to extremely high levels. Dumb people who can’t seem to manage that become dumber as a result. Smart people who know how to navigate it become smarter as a result. Its one of the great ironies of social media.
Monte
Apr 18 2022 at 11:52am
This is all perfectly explained by Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity and Carlo Cippola’s “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity”. Mass stupidity is a socialogical phenomenon made possible by social media on a scale never before witnessed. Be that as it may, freedom of speech, like a controlled burn that occasionally gets out of hand, should be preserved.
On the legalization of drugs, you’ll recall Milton Friedman’s open letter to former education secretary Bill Bennett, and Bennett’s response. As an advocate of legalization, did you find anything lacking in Friedman’s argument?
Monte
Apr 18 2022 at 9:35pm
How is it that this, my original comment, doesn’t get posted until almost 7 hours later (even though the time stamp shows 11:52), making me think it never got posted in first place? I hate repeating myself. It makes me feel…stupid.
Monte
Apr 18 2022 at 3:48pm
Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity and Cippola’s cult classic, “The Basic Laws of Stupidity”, provide good explanations of what you perceive to be the case. Mass stupidity is a phenomenon made possible by today’s social media platforms on an unprecedented scale. Even so, freedom of speech, like swailing that occasionally burns out of control, must be preserved.
On the legalization of drugs, you’ll recall Mitlon Friedman’s open letter to former education secretary Bob Bennett. As an advocate of legalization, what did you find lacking in Friedman’s argument, or conversely, Bennett’s response?
Gordon
Apr 18 2022 at 4:09pm
I found the result of the survey so mind-boggling that I went to the YouGov site to read the article discussing these results. And what the article said is that people’s immediate gut level reaction to cities like New York is to think of them as dirty and polluted (thanks to all the traffic congestion) and fail to consider the more efficient resource usage and the ability to walk or use transit. Rather than saying people are becoming dumber, maybe it’s an indication that people are more prone these days to use quick, emotional, and intuitive thinking about issues rather than applying careful thought. And given that politicians, pundits, and various entities know that it’s easier to sway people by appealing to their emotions, perhaps the vast majority have been conditioned to evaluate things emotionally and superficially rather than giving things careful thought.
Penny
Apr 18 2022 at 8:51pm
Humbly sharing my opinion.
I believe it boils down to superiority. Everyone want to be the expert. There are many niches of science,social media, technology, philosophy, etc. But life still boils down to existence and taking care of the fundamentals. Shelter, food, water, and clothing.
Now if all the technical toys that science, politics, healthcare have suddenly were to crash and burn, you’d be at square one. Making shelter, growing food, fining clean water, and ample clothing.
You say that the people other than yourselves are ignorant and stupid. Would you be able to go out and build your shelter, grow your own food, etc?
The logger who cuts timber, the farmer who smells his soil, the witchers that know where to find water and the sewer who can make clothing, would be completely fine. But the so called superior ones without that knowledge would be doomed. All the money in the world won’t matter. Survival will.
Every one is stupid or ignorant about something or another. Yet everyone pretty much know what they need. In that is where lies the answer of this poll question and other responses.
Fred Welfare
Apr 19 2022 at 11:13am
The issue over spacing does not address crowding. Obviously, as housing is closer, crime increases. Most crimes are domestic or between neighbors. This is not necessary, of course, but whether you consider the rate or the frequency of crime, crowdedness is a factor. As for pollution, if you consider that each human being has a footprint that impacts on the environment, whether you have 10 humans or 100 humans in a given area, you are going to have to deal with their total footprint. Why Americans seem to be saying is, “Spread out!” It may not stop the emotional abuse between people, but distance can alleviate the physical abuse.
Floccina
Apr 19 2022 at 2:04pm
I think people were stupider in the past but those making the decisions ignored them more.
It’s a Martin Gilens wishing playing and I bet he is not happy.
Knut P. Heen
Apr 22 2022 at 9:23am
The opportunity cost keeps rising. There is simply less time available for thinking through your views/ideas now than before.
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