On Stupidity
Feeling ambitious, I've decided to attempt to tackle the chronic question : why are people so stupid ? If it's a case of TLDR, you can probably skip to the summary section safely enough.
The super-short version is that evolution has not exactly favoured the development of general, overall intelligence. It favoured those who were good at solving specific problems, which is not quite the same thing. Those who appeared confident of their ability to kill a mammoth probably did know quite a lot about mammoth-killing, because if they didn't they wouldn't survive long enough to reproduce. Confidence and knowledge once went hand in hand - in the modern world, there is far less selection pressure against over-confident idiots.
But evolution has given us a capacity for general problem-solving, and it is possible at least to some extent to be taught critical thinking. It doesn't always come naturally to us for very good evolutionary reasons, but one can become more intelligent through good teaching, though perhaps only to a point. People sometimes reach stupid conclusions even though they are genuinely very intelligent, so it's important to consider their thought processes before deciding if they are truly stupid or not.
Finally, expertise should be regarded as a sign of ability, not actual intelligence. In the same way you wouldn't regard a professional sports player as necessarily all that smart, so, perhaps, you shouldn't regard scientists as being particularly intelligent. People simply have different abilities and different areas of expertise.
Absolutely none of which has helped me to explain why this guy is biting a tiger's tail, so some work remains.
Drawing this to the particular attention of Christopher Butler and William Black, who I know spend a lot of time dealing with (possibly) very stupid people.
But... but... but evolution's just a theory!
ReplyDeleteThat is just a stuffed tiger. No harm will come to the tiger. But, the guy is gonna be toast. #runforrestRUN!!!
ReplyDelete"Dragons exist!"
ReplyDeleteBut they do! What were Siegfried and St George doing in the islands of Komodo is still a mystery, though.
That said, I do suspect someone named those big reptiles "dragons" for troll's sake, the same way someone is bound to put a teapot in solar orbit at some point.
Also, I remember one story where the dragons of legends "simply" were the dinosaurs. It would make sense, actually, if they found fossils. It would mean that dragons are - or rather were - real.
And it actually works pretty well as a myth: an age of aeons past, long before Mankind, when giant (and small) dragons roamed the Earth. An age that ended in apocalypse, when the world died in fire and storm and mountain waves and years of night, by the fall of a celestial body.
Note that as elegant as it is, I have no fact to back this hypothesis up.
(Though I don't have the heart to tell them that those fearsome, artistically licensed fire-breathing dragons are now KFC fodder.)
I always subscribed to the paradigm of the Laws of Stupidity.
ReplyDeletehttps://web.archive.org/web/20060424064936/http://mentalsoup.com/mentalsoup/basic.htm
Mark Ruhland I think it's a stuffed human. :D
ReplyDeleteElie Thorne Well, this particular individual really did think giant fire-breathing scaly lizards in relatively modern times...
Winchell Chung Those are excellent. I would add to the First Law that one also underestimates just how stupid people can be, as well as how many stupid people exist. Hence the continual surprise whenever a new "stupid people" story is doing the rounds.
I would further add to the Second Law that there is no lower limit on how stupid even the most intelligent person can be if they have not been taught correctly. However, there is an upper limit on how intelligent they can become, which is set by their basic genetic nature.
Rhys Taylor lol. It will look lovely in the tigers lair. Wonder if the tiger is gonna make a rug out of it or just mount the head on the wall?
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor Ah, I have nothing (but gene splicing) to respond, then.
ReplyDeleteAnother source of stupidity I just remembered, also, is genuine, clinical delusion. This can be pretty hit-and-miss.
If your delusion happens to match reality (Continents move! They MOVE, I tell you! [fictional example - probably]), few will notice. If it is hopelessly bizarre, it will be insanity (Humans evolved from Frogs ; The planet Hercolubus will cross Earth orbit in one year and make us all evolve toward a new plane of existance).
But if it is close enough to reality, it can be a source of stupidity (Earth is flat! X people are sub-humans!). Those people can be irresponsible (though they still are responsible for how they act based on that 'knowledge'), but they can cause others to follow them in their delusion, particularly when it is an otherwise intelligent and charismatic individual.
While many of those are harmless, and even otherwise good people, some extremes cases will be remembered as driving whole masses and nations to stupidity - and worse.
Rhys Taylor great job at nailing the underlying strata, this is a rather complex issue. I think you make a fine point about evolutionary factors that made great sense fifty or a hundred thousand years ago, which are still manifest today.
ReplyDeleteOn this particular incident:
Initially this individual didn’t seem to understand the artwork, and they expressed anger about it. So I pointed out the link on the page, thinking, well at least that should help him understand the work.
This only angered him further. I’m not going to repeat the back and forth, because it wasn’t really a very rational conversation.
This particular person seemed to think that all SF should conform to his favorite television shows, and nothing other was particularly interesting or relevant.
Which rather raises the question of why he was there commenting on my work.
There are people who appreciate compelling ideas, for my own part I research and offer the art I think interesting complete with the background research and information that goes into it. I create art for others who appreciate compelling ideas.
I recognize that ideas and research are not very important to some people, and that’s fine, they are welcome to just look at the pretty pictures. Or not, as they see fit.
However, if someone wants’ to argue, then I think they should know exactly what it is they are arguing about, first, as a prerequisite to even having the discussion.
As you might suspect, this didn’t play out particularly well in this case.
His response was
“I am not now, nor have I ever been, as cool as Spock, neither are you, and you should learn humility from that. I’m not interested in links to your technical bafflegarb, you only want to confuse me, it’s irrelevant, science doesn’t know everything.”
It was evident at this point I was not going to get anywhere with this individual.
I pointed out that this didn’t explain his anger and disdain, or why he was there on my page posting angry and passive-aggressive statements, I mean really, he was quite free to go look at any other art that pleased him.
His response was “You post your links everywhere and you think that makes you cool, and you think your art is so cool, I’m here to take you down a notch or two, so you know you’re not very important or impressive.”
I’m not a medical professional, so feel free take the following with a grain of salt, I could be wrong. This appears to be a species of pathological narcissism, this individual is observably excessively preoccupied with personal adequacy, power, prestige and vanity and projecting this onto others. Thinking he has to do something about it.
So, sure. I think my art is very good. Of course I do, otherwise I wouldn’t be sharing it.
I’ve run into several varieties of this kind of objection from different people in different contexts. As an example, just a few days back, I ran into this:
“Elon Musk doesn’t care about humanity. It’s all about his ego, he’s only interested in making a name for himself, he only wants to colonize Mars to impress people.“
Suppose that’s true. Does it matter? Does it mean the innovative things he is attempting are not important to the field of aerospace engineering? Does it mean he should be stopped?
Personally I don’t think so.
There are some very powerful social behavioral memetics at play in American culture (perhaps they are in play everywhere, I can’t say from experience) and these spill onto SF fan culture. There is tribalism, a fear of the other, of outsiders, and this comes coupled with the notion that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” It’s very common for people to conflate any display of knowledge with ego and be offended, because you’ve said something that they do not know, and do not know how to evaluate. Variant of this is the notion that researched knowledge is some kind of trick or conspiracy.
ReplyDeleteI’ve seen SF fans fire off a spray of television tropes in response to researched science, as a defense against scientific information. You wouldn’t think SF fans should feel threatened by scientific information, but it is evident that some do. I suppose that is the less-pretty side of fan loyalty, a tribalistic culture where expressions of the art based in science are anathema.
William Black On the "cult of ignorance thing", have a look at Zephyr's (deliberately not notifying said person) second comment on this post :
ReplyDeletehttps://plus.google.com/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/KGtb1KHy6Mh
There was simply way too much stupid in that and the other comments on that post so I just gave up and moved on. That particular comment ("scientists are like ancient Egyptian priests") incensed me to the point of not being capable of a rational response. It is a well-reasoned, erudite and utterly and wholly stupid thing to say. It makes me wonder why I bother doing science outreach in my spare time at all. Most of those posts take many hours - even tens of hours - of time I could spend doing other things. And I've lost count of the number of threads I've written about science not being a dogmatic process. Yet sometimes it's like scientists are barely perceived as human.
Through the power of the internet I've answered questions from the public in my office, in bed, in the pub, and in dingy nightclubs. I've participated in a ridiculous music video about Arecibo, photographed a potato for NASA, written a detailed wiki for my code which has a fairytale for a quick start guide. All the raw data for my project is available online after publication, and the papers are freely available to anyone through astro-ph without even registering. So is the code I use to analyse the data. What more can I do ? I just don't get it.
As far as I can see, the only plausible explanation is stupidity. Possibly in this case relating to the problem of learning through induction : this individual appears never to have interacted with a real scientist but selectively seen things through the media lens.
Rhys Taylor I'm not so sure.
ReplyDeleteA tangent: my website is to teach real science to science fiction fans and writers. All too often they get incensed because their favorite media science fiction is proven to be utterly realistic.
At this point they almost universally reject science with something along the lines of
[1] Einstein's Relativity is just a theory!
[2] Well those stupid scientists said that man would never break the sound barrier either, but they were wrong!
[3] It's only science fiction, who cares if the science is utterly false
all of which I get so often I put in a special page debunking these.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/respectscience.php
But look at the common thread. What they are all complaining about is science telling them You Can't Do That
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/respectscience.php#id--You_Can't_Do_That
You can't have a planet-city because of heat pollution, you can't have an FTL communication system because it creates causality loops, and so on.
So all of their defenses hinge on discrediting science and scientists, in other words, discrediting the things telling them You Can't Do That. Because they are going to believe that Star Trek is going to become real any day now, and you cannot convince them otherwise.
"Scientists are like ancient Egyptian priests" is just another way of discrediting the things telling them You Can't Do That.
Of course in the case of a troll, what they are trying to do is Sound Like An Erudite Know-It-All Even Though I Actually Know Diddly-Squat About Science.
Winchell Chung Very true, but I do think that learning by induction plays a large part in misunderstanding certain scientific conclusions. "Well it's cold here right now, and it was cold here last year, therefore global warming is a myth, therefore scientists must be deluded dogmatic fools to reach this conclusion; they must be agreeing with each other to avoid looking stupid and protect their research funding."
ReplyDeleteOne can then pick out examples of individual scientists saying, "this is impossible" and saying "well you were wrong before, so you might be wrong now" (or indeed examples of the consensus view being wrong/incomplete and then evolving) - especially when there is an emotional bias towards an idea ("wanna FTL drive !!!"). I would even say that's healthy to some extent - criticising the prevailing view is part of the scientific method. It only becomes a problem when it's taken too far, when ignoramouses insist that they understand what are really very complex issues and stop accepting the possibility that the experts might, in fact, be right.
Rhys Taylor That could be.
ReplyDeleteBut unfortunately here in the States most people don't care about having a reasoned debate, their priority is "winning" at any cost. Logical fallacies are not bad things to be avoided, they are vital weapons used to win the debate.
I would also add that this black-and-white thinking that seems (in my purely anecdotal experience) to be particularly common in America (you're either a capitalist or a Communist, a Creationist or an atheist) is incompatible with trust in science. A very few scientific results have been established beyond all doubt, but cutting-edge research is never like this. If you're lucky, it's a process of adding more evidence one way or the other. Often the two balance out, or, you find evidence that something else might be going on entirely. To anyone used to thinking in terms of right and wrong answers, perhaps it's no wonder the result is mistrust.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor I must be an oddity... or just odd. lol I believe in both science and creationism. But, I'm not real fond of the ideas around evolution. Maybe some day, I'll get there, but not any time this week. haha
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor I would not say black-and-white thinking is common in the States, mostly common among that segment of the population that is neophobe, as opposed to the neophiles.
ReplyDeleteSuch people tend not to deal well with ambiguity. And by definition neophobes hate change, so the self-correcting process of science fills them with alarm. They want things to be settled, not changing all the time.
And when the thing doing the changing is culture and society, they get even more upset. But they really don't snap until it is their kids to start embracing societal change. Their kids are supposed to be carbon copies of the parents, i.e., the parent's immortality. If the kids change suddenly the parents are facing an existential threat.
So the neophobes start tightening up, putting things on a short lease, beginning with making sure the classification system has reduced levels of shades of gray.
Its just that they have been reducing the gray for some time now, and it isn't slowing down the change one bit.
So by now they are going full black-and-white, inquisition, burn the heretic, yuh-either-for-us-or-agin-us, crusade in a frantic attempt to stem the tide and bring back the right and proper state of society as depicted in "Leave it to Beaver" and "The Andy Griffith Show."
Winchell Chung That's a great point ! I guess my model of mistrusting science works more for the probably unusual subset of people who are against mainstream science specifically, but who earnestly believe there are other, far less likely explanations/technologies. E.g. conspiracy theories, cold fusion was stopped by the guvunment, dark matter is just electrical forces, etc. I've got several followers like this. I even follow a few of them back.
ReplyDeleteSuch people, to me, do not appear afraid of change. If anything they seem to want more rapid change; they believe they are being controlled rather than fearing to lose their control. I guess it's the extreme opposite end of a neophobe view, but it too can lead to a very black-and-white view (or indeed vice-versa) : mainstream science is definitely wrong about everything, despite the fact that I'm typing this on the internet...
Ultimately, I suppose both ways of thinking boil down to control. The neophobes already have some form of control, they want to keep it. The conspiracy theorists think they haven't got any control at all, they want to acquire it. Both are afraid of being controlled, but from the opposite perspectives.
Updated the post a little :
ReplyDelete- Added a link to Winchell Chung's "Respecting Science" page under "Preferences"
- Added a rather pertinent quote in the "Fear" section and a summary of the reasons neopohobes and extreme neophiles distrust science
- Added some more discussion on what inductive reasoning can and can't explain in the "Summary" section.
As usual the post is far too long. I think I might start writing accompanying summary blog posts for those with less time to spare.