Stupidity Update

Interesting New Yorker article.

The current political situation makes this “a good time to write about stupidity,” Jeffries writes. When he notes that a central trait of stupidity is that it “can be relied upon to do the one thing expressly designed not to achieve the desired result”—or “to laughably mismatch means and ends”—he makes “stupid” seem like the perfect way to characterize our era, in which many people think that the key to making America healthy again is ending vaccination. Meanwhile, in a recent issue of New York magazine—“The Stupid Issue”—the journalist Andrew Rice describes troubling and widespread declines in the abilities of high-school students to perform basic tasks, such as calculating a tip on a restaurant check. These declines are happening even in well-funded school districts, and they’re part of a larger academic pattern, in which literacy is fading and standards are slipping.

Maybe we are getting stupider. Still, one of the problems with the discourse of stupidity is that it can feel reductive, aggressive, even abusive. Self-humiliation is still humiliating; when we call one another stupid, we spread humiliation around, whether our accusation is just or unjust. In a recent post on Substack, the philosopher Joseph Heath suggested that populism might be best understood as a revolt against “the cognitive elite”—that is, against the people who demand that we check our intuitions and think more deliberately about pretty much everything. According to this theory, the world constructed by the cognitive élite is one in which you have to listen to experts, and keep up with technology, and click through six pages of online forms to buy a movie ticket; it sometimes “requires the typical person, while speaking, to actively suppress the familiar word that is primed (e.g. ‘homeless’), and to substitute through explicit cognition the recently-minted word that is now favoured (e.g. ‘unhoused’).” The cognitive élites are right to say that people who think about things intuitively are often wrong; on issues including crime and immigration, the truth is counterintuitive. (Legal procedures are better than rough justice; immigrants increase both the supply and the demand for labor.) But the result of this has been that unreasonable people have hooked up to form an opposition party. What’s the way out of this death spiral? No one knows…

An excellent read. Goes to this recently published book.

 

 

Wild. Wicked British humor.

 

Recall my earlier post on "A Recipe for Idiocracy?" 

 

FRIDAY UPDATE: THE DAY IN STUPID

 

“You're expected to get the FIFA Peace Prize, Mr. President," CNN's Kaitlan Collins told Trump at a Kennedy Center event on Friday. "What would you say to people who say that prize might conflict with your pledge to strike Venezuela?"

"Well, I think the Peace Prize, I mean, I settled eight wars," Trump replied. "I don't know that I'm getting it. I haven't been officially notified. I've been hearing about a Peace Prize, and I'm here to represent our country in a different sense."

"I can tell you I did settle eight wars and we have a ninth coming, but in which nobody's ever done before, but I want to really save lives, I don't need prizes. I need to save lives, and we're saving a lot of lives. I've saved millions and millions of lives, and that's really what I want to do, and I also want to run a great country, and the United States right now is the hottest country anywhere in the world, and one year ago, we had a dead country, and now we have the hottest country anywhere in the world."

"gormless" "The Oaf of Office"

The current political situation makes this “a good time to write about stupidity,” Jeffries writes. When he notes that a central trait of stupidity is that it “can be relied upon to do the one thing expressly designed not to achieve the desired result”—or “to laughably mismatch means and ends”—he makes “stupid” seem like the perfect way to characterize our era, in which many people think that the key to making America healthy again is ending vaccination. Meanwhile, in a recent issue of New York magazine—“The Stupid Issue”—the journalist Andrew Rice describes troubling and widespread declines in the abilities of high-school students to perform basic tasks, such as calculating a tip on a restaurant check. These declines are happening even in well-funded school districts, and they’re part of a larger academic pattern, in which literacy is fading and standards are slipping. —Joshua Rothman