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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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