Today more people than ever are yearning for knowledge. Knowledge gives security. You then know what you place in this world is if you know how the world looks like. The problem starts when different actors start to abuse that needs, while those who believe them are incapable of differentiating between what is real and what feels good.

What then comes out of sticking to any sort of extreme thought/position/behaviour about something is then often wrong, and this might be seen as "stupidity".

Don't love any of the comments which says "I was thinking and the answer is probably [a completely random opinion]".

* https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/rmAbiEKQDpDnZzcRf/positiv...

Combine that with the permanence of the internet and you have a few right answers surrounded by a sea of things that range from almost right to complete nonsense.

I think B:9 is related. I really liked this article. A lot of the points made me go "hmmm".

The only thing that's made it appear worse than before is an increase in political polarization. That has made people less likely to believe that people with differing opinions are simply people with different views to them, and more likely to believe that people with differing opinions are simply wrong/stupid/malevolent. For every person out there wondering why people are so stupid, there are other people making equally valid observations about them.

Therefore the attention that would usually go to high quality content is now being spent in very low quality content.

We have to deal with this somehow, because this is not going to end well.

Elsewhere in the article the reader would learn that 75% of the people caught up in NRC were non-Muslims, and that NRC had been started before Modi became PM, by the previous government, under orders from the Supreme Court of India.

I honestly believe I became stupider by reading that article, and realized that the NYT is basically functioning as a tool to confuse people at this point.

Humanities have been devalued and coopted by advocacy and the university has made its mission to please the customer, which is an increasingly emotional fragile late teenager who has been taught to demand a safe space.

I could go on, we all could go on, and it’s not funny at all.

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

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

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

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.

My money is on this. You wouldn't typically argue with a kid, but on the internet you probably are.

"Lack of judgment"?

"Lack of knowledge"?

"Unintelligent"?

"Mental slowness in speech or action"?

Perhaps, "Lack of education"?

In a lot of the points, the author uses "smart" as the opposite of "stupid". Smart is also a vague word that comes up with multiple definitions such as "having or showing a high degree of mental ability", "stylish or elegant in dress or appearance" and "appealing to sophisticated tastes".

I have read the article multiple times, and it seems to me that it fires in all directions. It addresses environmental cognitive issues (air quality, etc.), education, political polarization, etc. In short, it lumps multiple issues under a personal interpretation of a vague (and rude) word.

I avoid the word "stupid". Not only is it vague but it is ableist because it creates and enforces systemic and institutional bias.

Is a lack of education the same as having temporary cognitive issues? Is it comparable to having a condition which decreases someone's cognitive ability permanently? What about people who are unable to grasp social intelligence? What about people who take beneficial drugs that happen to have mental fog as a side effect? Where is the line? To me, the answer is no. Those are all unrelated social issues that need to be addressed separately.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Regardless, no harm in having a small arsenal of houseplants!

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/13/health/falling-iq-scores-stud...

So I can at least say that I'm getting dumber.

But if I had to comment on the original article, I'd go with option B, no. 9. The internet has truly made stupidity more accessible and permanent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...

See also Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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

The negative technical tendency of industrial technology was weapons of destruction and machines for murder, which led us to world war 2, proving that the technical zeitgeist of industrial mechanics had surpassed its rationality and was no longer tenable. The negative technical tendency of information technology is the proliferation and rapid spread of misinformation which leads us to, well the present I guess.

But I do believe the number of people who go around thinking everyone else is stupid is going up.

I can't help but think that we 're lacking the genius giants for which the last century is notorious. Where are the kolmogorovs, the von neumanns, the einsteins, the fred sangers of the past ~40 years? Is there a big gap in the higher end of intelligence? What about the lower end of intelligence? If both are lacking that means we are indeed regressing to become average idiots.

I like to think we already live in idiocracy. People forget however that in that movie, the biggest idiot wasnt President Camacho, it was the people, the way-below-average joes, who are evenly distributed across the political spectrum. (In fact the blind belief that politics alone can bring progress is kind of dumb in itself). Could it be something in the way we eat? There is a well established and colossal drop in testosterone levels in the past ~50 years. After all we are just neurochemical intelligence generators.

(Also why is everyone focusing on social media? That's just a symptom)

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.

What if stupidity is neither expanding (in quantitative terms) nor not expanding (in that the same volume of stupidity is experiencing expanded impact, influence and importance)?

Many of the hypotheses on both sides of the original question could be true, but the lessons would be drastically different.

If roughly the same proportion of people are roughly engaged in the same level and variety of stupidity, but that stupidity has more social sway (pandering, bullying, exhaustion, laziness, opportunism, inertia, collective trauma and coping, probably a list longer than I could compile), focusing on the stupidity isn’t much more than an escape.

Obviously I’m biased toward my hypothetical. But I think “thinking” oriented exploration might want to spend some time on “what makes people react to things that are incorrect in a favorable way” and less time on defining what correctness is when there’s a wealth of literature on the latter and a great deficit on the former that isn’t dismissed as inherently biased in this kind of discussion.

This is a part of it to be sure. This line of thinking is becoming more and more popular and accepted as the only truth is that there is none. The enlightenment era scientific-liberal approach is rapidly disintegrating. But I don't think the pomo philosophers would actually think an entirely new meta-narrative would be constructed from their ideas. In fact their premise was that there are no true meta-narratives. But they've had parts of their ideas cherry picked to advance a new, illiberal agenda.

People aren't stupid. But there's little incentive to exercise one's intelligence, once the dopamine pathways get plowed the wrong way too many times.

So I think the idea that stupidity has increased is an illusion. The thing in the modern world is more that the tolerance for stupidity has decreased so we discover it more. The sad truth is also that each one of us believes in lots of stupid things but we are more interested in finding errors in other when in self improvement. Like Jesus said, "and why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?"

The universal adoption of information technologies like the smart phone has definitely not been the utopia many of us thought it would be. HOWEVER, there is no such thing as an illiterate teen any more.

For what it's worth, I think that's incredible progress for society as a whole.

Now we have to figure out how to provide universal quality education and prevent ignorance and misinformation from spreading. This is a different challenge that we weren't expecting to have to address.

Hopefully in 20 years we'll have addressed this issue as well and look back at the 2020s and be amazed that there were so many climate science deniers, flat-earthers, etc.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham

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/

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.

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.

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.

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

They become quite good at it as it follows simple rules.

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.

--------

"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...

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.

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-...

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.

> 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

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...

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.

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

I agree. In fact, while civilization has ameliorated many of the challenges to individual survival, that aspect has become much more acute.

> A smart individual can distill valuable information even when surrounded by propaganda while a dumb individual will still fall for a lot of propaganda even when surrounded by mostly correct information since they can't tell the difference.

I think that several things are going on here.

First, it has become increasingly difficult to distill and discern truth, in part because it has become more difficult to figure out what level of scrutiny any particular proposition merits.

Many of the proxies we have for trustworthiness are social and often co-opted by competing interests.

This also applies to the trustworthiness of scrutinizers.

I mean, anthropogenic global climate change is fairly well established at this point, at least in terms of mechanism and direction, but if you apply enough paranoia and squirt a bit you can discern a vested interest for doomsayers to minimize errors and collude in producing a false consensus.

The general public is more-or-less aware that enough money can either create a false consensus or cast 'reasonable' doubt at will (eg. globalization will lower unemployment and grow the economy, and smoking doesn't cause cancer).

So, given all that, a lot of people just fall back on tribalism (or more like "team-sport-ism") when allocating their limited time and attention in deciding who or what to trust vs. scrutinize, since no matter where you look you can find conflicts of interest (eg. the profit motive explains overprescription of OxiContin, so why shouldn't it explain pharma collusion to give people cancer and sideline cheap natural cures?).

It isn't that truth extraction is too hard per-se, it's the meta-task of choosing reliable sources as your starting point that has become impossible.

Needless to say it's somewhat pointless to just tell a flat-earther the earth is actually round.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Though I suppose a joke based off a typo is pretty low-effort.

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.

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".

- Adherence to norms doesn't necessarily take intelligence, it takes diligence. Those norms are mostly there as 'social rules' so that we all get along and prosper - and it's often difficult to tell 'which ones are important and not'. Sometimes norms are important merely as norms, i.e. 'standard modes of behaviour'. Language is like this - there's nothing inherently moral or 'good' about language but it helps immensely that we are all on the same page.

It doesn't take intelligence to break norms either, but it definitely takes intelligence to develop reasonable opinions about them. Doing so is risky and can appear 'foolish' - which is not stupid.

Sometimes we view arbitrary breaking of norms and 'not being serious' as stupid, when often it's not.

- People have always been stupid, but we now have the internet to highlight stupidity

- A lot of our own behaviours are influenced by emotional/ideological memes, which is why there are so many out and about, and even 'intelligent people' fall for them all day long. All major news outlets are written for a 'dumbed down' audience - which includes a lot of intelligent people.

- Ideology. Even smart people are utterly confounded and made stupid by their ideologies. Carl Marx said some smart things, but a lot of utterly stupid things that continue to be 'orthodox' in some groups. Every 'touchy subject' is piled upon with stupidity because there isn't any nuance allowed in the discussion.

My bet is on a variation of this. To some extent, we all target people to advance our goals, be it to get them hooked on our product, to get people to rally behind an idea or a policy we want, or perhaps to get ourselves elected to a public office.

Entities with more resources naturally invest more in this and have more advanced tools to get people do what they want. Most likely emotions work much better when targeting large groups of people than smartness and objective truth, so that's what we get.

I think it's nothing new, but the recent research advances and the ease of reaching out to people personally these day made it so that using people to accomplish your goals become probably the most powerful tool on the planet. Why build weapons or wage wars if you could just make people do what you want on their own will and also sing you praises along the way?

Is it really people on average are getting stupider - or just people on the internet? Because yeah, coherent discussion on internet has been on the decline ever since Twitter got popular.

I haven't seen people in my real life have become less intelligent, though many have become more skeptical and outspoken. People on the left are skeptical towards police and religious and financial institutions, and people on the right are becoming more skeptical of news media and academics. The real difference here, which is probably influencing the author's take - is that many liberals regard skepticism towards moral authority is seen as healthy, and skepticism towards intellectual authority as stupidity (and for others, it's vice versa)

It's not that clean cut though, both sides have actually fed into each other with this skepticism - which entrenches it further. I grew up watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Colbert Report every night. Sure they mocked politicians, but they mocked news reporters just as often. Fox News was a big chunk of it - but nobody was spared. I spent a decade watching talking heads from every network lie, get called out, and then lie some more.

Likewise, while many of the right line up to "support the police" - is there really any greater sign of distrust for authority than gun ownership? I've talked with plenty of gun owners, and the reasons most admit to owning guns are as follows:

1. They're worried they'll be in trouble and cops wouldn't respond in time to help them. 2. They're afraid the government will become tyrannical

In either case, those reasons betray the underlying belief that even at it's best - the government and it's officials (cops) are not more capable of enforcing personal law and order than an individual is, and at worst - violence might be required to stop government officials.

So sure it's weird, but in a way, this could just be what it's like when people of all backgrounds start to look more critically at flawed institutions. Many of these people are excited to see that others who are "waking up" (ie, realizing that things are flawed) and are feeding into that energy online. It's similar to a religious fervor like the great awakening. Once the novelty of it all has passed, people will either start working towards actual change, or they'll be distracted by something else.

According to Mirriam-Webster [1], definitions of "stupid" include:

-slow of mind

-given to unintelligent decisions or acts

-dulled in feeling or sensation

-marked by or resulting from unreasoned thinking or acting

So, from this, we would the population to make slow, unintelligent decisions. However, the Flynn effect indicates that average intelligence of the world's population is increasing [2]. To me, stating stupidity is increasing while intelligence is increasing is a contradiction, so I feel something else is at play, particularly with decision making.

Historically, the information a person could access was quite limited. Information was largely passed down orally, especially if you lived in a poor society. This information was hard-won and passed down over generations. Then technology allowed information to disseminate though alternative mediums (paper, radio, television, Internet, etc.). The primary benefit of these new mediums was their accessibility, and that feature--like it or not--is a double-edged sword.

To explore this, let's consider three scenarios:

1) A person only receives information that is true 10% of the time: this person will likely not survive into adulthood. If they do, they will likely cause harm to others.

2) A person only receives information that is true 50% of the time: would this person be able to make snap decisions? Likely not, as they would need to analyze every aspect of a situation. On a long-enough timescale, they might be able to figure out specific situations, but it's unlikely they will do a good job.

3) A person only receives information that is true 90% of the time: this person should do reasonably well. Their fast decision-making processes are well-tuned and reinforced by feeding in information known to be of very high quality.

To draw the (inevitable) connection to machine learning: would you train a reinforcement learning model with training data where 50% of the labels are wrong? Of course not!

My theory is that today, much of the information people receive by default is low quality; it doesn't generalize well. Novel situations are difficult to assess because people didn't develop good heuristics for analyzing it. For example, sometimes the best decision is to just say "no" and move on (for example, cutting out negative people from your life). But if a person is perpetually in a zone of undecidability, decisions becomes far harder to make. As a result, more situations pile up, creating additional decisions, creating additional problems, ad infinitum.

Just my two cents here. And please do not overlook the irony inherent in this post. :)

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stupid

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

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.

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"

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This seems like the most likely explanation in your case.