Before we move on from our recent topic:

Define "Stupidity." 

 

We often tend to cavalierly toss words around with scant or nil attention to their proper lexical (denotative and connotative) specifications, particularly when the words are pejorative. I can be as culpable as the next person.

 

But, during my adjunct tenure teaching collegiate "Critical Thinking" I reflexively admonished my students that many "arguments" founder straight away owing to inadequate attention and consensus reqarding the materially salient definitions of key terms.

In courts, counsels and judges know such up-front agreement as "stipulation."

What does Google ("AI") say about "stupidity" of late? 

 

 OK, WHAT OF THIS UK BEAUT?

 

 Yeah...

 

THIS BOOK IS A 5-STAR MUST-READ (see prior post)

 

THE AUTHOR CONCLUDES

… Perhaps it just isn’t true that book reading in particular and literacy in general are essential for intelligence. Maybe there is more to intelligence than is dreamed of in this literacy-venerating philosophy. Perhaps, that is to say, all these ostensibly stupid kids responsible for dragging down average US intelligence aren’t so dumb as suggested. Just possibly, in not reading Moby Dick and Shakespeare, but instead making TikTok videos and crafting Instagram stories, they are manifesting intelligence, only not of the kind measured by IQ tests. 

True, this is an unexpected, perhaps even stupid, thought to encounter in a book. Book writers generally come to praise literacy rather than bury it – if only out of self-interest. This book, then, might not only be a history of stupidity but also be an addition to it. But, really, I am only elaborating here a thought we encountered earlier in the book, namely that the psychologist Edwin G. Boring was more sage than he realized in suggesting the limitations of IQ tests. His remark is worth repeating: ‘Intelligence as a measurable capacity must at the start be defined as the capacity to do well in an intelligence test. Intelligence is what the tests test.’ If IQ tests measure cognitive skills predicated on literacy, then any form of intelligence we may care to imagine that is not predicated on literacy will be ruled out, perhaps even considered to be a kind of stupidity. Just possibly, though, a post-literate, non-literate America might be more intelligent than a literate one. Equally, the cognitive skills for which IQ tests test may not be the only ones that the intelligent have and the stupid – poor deluded boobs – lack.

In this context, it is amusing, to put it mildly, that the World Population Review, which published the data on declining average American IQ tests in 2024 on its website, added this caveat. ‘To be completely fair and transparent, the intelligence quotient is not the most accurate way of determining someone’s intelligence. After all, it is nearly impossible to fully calculate someone’s intellect because it is not a variable that is numerically represented. Instead, IQ scores are a way of trying to put a number on someone’s intelligence.’ If you’re reading this in New Mexico thinking how terrible it is you live in the US’s most stupid state, even though you’ve been doing all you can to skew that data by translating Proust into Sanskrit and inventing spaceships that go faster than the speed of light, take succour: even the people publishing the research don’t really believe that intelligence – whatever it is – is measured very well by intelligence tests. 

Professor Dombrowski’s worries about the reasons for the fall in American average intelligence have led to a growth industry in indicting purportedly rising stupidity. That growth industry’s business model requires that Voltaire and Schopenhauer were wrong: stupidity is not so much an ineradicable feature of humanity as something living, growing. The American writer Lance Morrow declared in the Wall Street Journal in 2021:

We live in a golden age of stupidity. It is everywhere. President Biden’s conduct of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will be remembered as a defining stupidity of our time – one of many. The refusal of tens of millions of people to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus will be analysed as a textbook case of stupidity en masse. Stupid is as stupid does, or, in the case of vaccination, as it doesn’t do. Stupidity and irresponsibility are evil twins. The slow-motion zombies’ assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 was a fittingly stupid finale to the Trump years, which offered duelling stupidities: Buy one, get one free. The political parties became locked in a four-year drama of hysteria and mutually demeaning abuse. Every buffoonery of the president and his people was answered by an idiocy from the other side, which in its own style was just as sinister and just as clownish.

Morrow was wrong about one thing: the Capitol riots weren’t the finale to the Trump years. In January 2025, Trump was sworn in at the Capitol, where his followers had rioted four years earlier, inaugurating another four years of idiocy – or so the president’s detractors might suggest. 

Morrow’s account is a common journalistic trope: in the Daily Telegraph Janet Daley lamented ‘the Age of Stupid’, citing both Trump and Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, while David Rothkopf wrote for the Washington Post under the headline ‘America’s golden age of stupidity’ about the first Trump administration, offering a clear definition: stupidity is ‘the wilful disregard of knowledge – regardless of motive’. Such stupidity is an ‘unwinnable proposition . . . because those who battle facts are at war with reality’. Stupidity thus constitutes a distinct form of failure; separate from, but likely aiding and abetting, political, ethical, and other shortcomings. Stupidity also amounts to a useful tool in electoral success: those who disconnect from the truth are not constrained by it. 

All these articles suggesting that we have reached Peak Stupid have one thing in common: they are themselves stupid. Who knows if this is a golden, silver, or even bronze age of stupidity? We are, as a species, surely too dim to know what the future holds. It is quite possible that as we crest one summit we see a beguiling prospect ahead of us, half shrouded in the mists of fatuity. The peak of stupidity remains ahead. And so we continue on what we think is our ascent, higher and higher, too stupid to realize that we’re really going down not up, that in truth we are progressing deeper and deeper into the unplumbed depths of witlessness. 

In his ‘The Discovery of the North Pole’, Karl Kraus satirized the idea of the human mind becoming enlightened and eradicating stupidity by means of superior technology and willpower. The discovery of the North Pole, he wrote, was ‘inevitable. . . . It is an idea graspable by all brains, especially those no longer capable of grasping anything. The North Pole had to be discovered some day, because for centuries the human mind had penetrated the night and the fog in a hopeless struggle with the murderous elemental forces of stupidity.’ We think that the Enlightenment involves progress only because we are too stupid to consider another possibility, that it does the opposite. As Kraus puts it: ‘When people were travelling in mail coaches, the world got along better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way?’

Of course, Kraus’s perspective risks the opposite error: not so much faith in the unalloyed good of progress as the equally stupid idea that life was ever better than it is now or that progress necessarily means its opposite. Kraus’s sense was that the evolution of stupidity is unstoppable. Technological change, quite possibly, stupefies rather than liberates us. Maybe, instead, the truth is more subtle: it both liberates and stupefies us. The worst-case scenario is that it liberates, stupefies, and then replaces us. That, at least, is one of the more benign outcomes when the forces of human stupidity do final battle with the tooled-up bots of artificial intelligence. So how should we greet this prospect? 

In another essay, ‘In Praise of a Topsy-Turvy Life-Style’, Kraus wrote about the benefits of sleeping in. He even quoted King Lear: ‘Take vantage, heavy eyes, not to behold this shameful lodging.’ In the age of stupidity, he seems to suggest, it’s best to shut one’s eyes to the parade of witlessness. The shameful lodging is the incessant gush of information, a gush that has only multiplied since Kraus’s death in 1936, when it was largely confined to the morning and evening newspapers. He wrote: 

Anyone who has observed for a time how disgracefully these events debase themselves before curiosity, how cravenly the course of the world adapts itself to the increased need for information, and how in the end time and space become forms of perception of the journalistic subject, turns over in bed and goes on sleeping. . . . Hence I sleep in broad daylight. And when I wake up I spread the whole paper shame of mankind before me so I might know what I have missed, and this makes me happy.

Maybe Kraus’s smug daily lie-in is a sort of wisdom: in the face of the world’s stupidity, as brought home to us every morning (or now, in our internet-enabled case, every moment), better to roll over and go back to sleep. But that is what stupidity wants. Indeed, a lifestyle of willed unconsciousness is a manifestation of stupidity. In the face of growing stupidity, keeping oneself from the fray and deluding oneself thereby that one is less stupid and more morally perfect than the witless parade of lesser mortals is not just the height of folly but also deeply stupid. If the triumph of evil only requires that good men do nothing, then the triumph of stupidity requires only that good people close their eyes and roll over. 

None of this should suggest that stupidity does not, on occasion, have a valuable social function, nor that we should try to eradicate it from human life. Consider the case of Sunny Balwani, the chief operations officer of Theranos, the Silicon Valley company that promised to offer fast, cheap blood tests from a single drop of blood but was later exposed as a fraudulent business. As reported in John Carreyrou’s book about the Theranos scandal, Bad Blood, Balwani, God bless him, was often out of his depth during engineering discussions. ‘To hide it, he had a habit of repeating technical terms he heard others using,’ wrote Carreyrou. During one meeting, Balwani latched onto the term ‘end effector’. which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Balwani, though, misheard: he didn’t hear ‘end effector’, he heard ‘endofactor’. For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to endofactors, while his colleagues exchanged ironic glances with each other. At the next meeting with Balwani two weeks later, some colleagues brought a PowerPoint presentation titled ‘Endofactors Update’. 

Balwani didn’t realize he had been pranked by his colleagues, who went on to make up other purportedly technical terms that he, in his ignorance, picked up on and used in meetings. Nor, perhaps, did he realize why they were laughing when he left the room. 

Balwani was unwittingly demonstrating the Dunning–Kruger effect, which posits that people overestimate their intelligence and make fools of themselves as a result. He was demonstrating something else: how another person’s stupidity can bring people together. Stupidity, that’s to say, was a scar for Balwani, but a joy for everybody else in the room. There’s a lesson in this story: in difficult times, we need stupidity, arguably more than intelligence, to cheer us up. 

Quite possibly, I have become Sunny Balwani’s soulmate. As I’ve written this book, indeed, I’ve often wondered if I am displaying the Dunning–Kruger effect, trying to show off my intelligence while really demonstrating my stupidity. After all, what could be more stupid than writing a history of stupidity? My only consolation is that, like Balwani, I may have entertained you with my witlessness. If so, you’re welcome. 

If not, then, given you’ve got to the last sentence of this book, who really is more stupid – you or me?

Jeffries, Stuart. A Short History of Stupidity (pp. 282-287). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

The humor, man. Thought I was gonna break a rib laughing.
 

ENDOFACTORS UPDATE.