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Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses.


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Positivity     42.00%   
   Negativity   59.00%
The New York Times
SOURCE: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BHqzGLNyQHjDXhEc8/is-stupidity-expanding-some-hypotheses
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Summary

Those pomo philoso­phers were right all along.Stu­pidity doesn’t have stay­ing power, rel­a­tive to non-stu­pidity: 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.Poli­tics and con­sumer cap­i­tal­ism are mo­ti­vated to iden­tify and tar­get stupid peo­ple so as to take ad­van­tage of them, so they have cre­ated sys­tems that en­courage stupid peo­ple to self-iden­tify and make them­selves promi­nent so that they can be picked off; that I’m notic­ing this is just a side effect.Peo­ple have given up try­ing to un­der­stand things in this messed-up timeline and are just rol­ling with it; it’s a sort of in­tel­lec­tual learned hel­pless­ness that ap­pears as ex­pand­ing stu­pidity.Stu­pidity has its fash­ions, and the lat­est fash­ions are more in-your-face than they used to be.Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals that have be­come pop­u­lar in re­cent decades have cog­ni­tive side effects that are difficult to mea­sure in the in­di­vi­d­ual but cause no­tice­able effects in the ag­gre­gate.It’s real, and it’s prob­a­bly some­thing in our diet, for ex­am­ple…It’s real, and it’s prob­a­bly all that ex­tra CO2 in the at­mo­sphere.It’s real, and it’s prob­a­bly tox­o­plas­mo­sis meow.It’s real, and it’s prob­a­bly some other sort of change in our ma­te­rial en­vi­ron­ment (ex­clud­ing cul­tural changes).Back in the day, when a per­son had a stupid idea, they would be re­luc­tant to put it for­ward as their own. The smarter they are, the quicker they caught on to this and the bet­ter mimics they are, so this makes it look as though the smart peo­ple are be­ing re­placed by mo­rons, when re­ally it’s more a mat­ter of cam­ou­flage.The way we ed­u­cate chil­dren went se­ri­ously side­ways a while back, and so, yeah, stupid hap­pened.Newly-pop­u­lar me­dia and/​or its con­tent is some­how di­rectly dam­ag­ing to men­tal fac­ul­ties.Changes in me­dia/​com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy al­low stupid peo­ple to be much more promi­nent than they used to be and/​or com­par­a­tively muffle smarter peo­ple.So­cial me­dia dy­nam­ics erode rea­son­ing and truth-seek­ing while re­ward­ing cog­ni­tive bi­ases.The news me­dia were do­ing a bet­ter job than we re­al­ized in fil­ter­ing out crap and con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing new in­for­ma­tion in­tel­li­gently for us, and as the in­ter­net de­stroyed the busi­ness model be­hind in­tel­li­gent re­port­ing, we failed to come up with a sub­sti­tute in time to pre­vent idiocy from filling the void and it’s too big a job for in­di­vi­d­u­als to do with­out in­sti­tu­tional as­sis­tance.Any ideas on quan­tify­ing pre­vi­ous lev­els of ig­no­rance?

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