One of the most aggravating things to me in this world has to be the absolutely rampant anti-intellectualism that dominates so many conversations and debates, and its influence just seems to be expanding. Do you think there will ever actually be a time when this ends? I'd hope so once people become more educated and cultural changes eventually happen, but as of now it honestly infuriates me like few things ever have.
“In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.
Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren.”
https://qz.com/967554/the-five-universal-laws-of-human-stupidity
I try my best to keep in check my stupidity thus offloading some of the work of the smart people. Unfortunately, I fail most of the time
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I’m fine with people who really just don’t know stuff. But they should really listen when you try to explain something to them.
* cough cough * flat earthers?
Most people don’t have the capacity so it makes them angry and mistrustful of anything that’s perceived to be “smart”. Maybe if one is a true intellectual they can make dumb down these concepts so that they can at least get a basic understanding of them.
Had a discussion about hydrogen cars on Lemmy the other day
The discussion involved:
- Easily provably wrong claims (“Hydrogen isn’t getting any support for the government, thats why it’s not succeeding”). 2 second google click, and article directly from government showing how they support it.
- Kept telling me that a HUGE part of the argument should be ignored (efficiency). Science doesn’t allow you to simply ignore parts of the debate. And, the efficiency difference wasn’t even a small amount (apparently the difference in efficiency was 30%-40% or more, so not a small amount).
- Character attacks against myself and any references I posted (oh, she’s a physicist, even they’re wrong sometimes).
- Conspiracy theories against battery companies or whatever
- Nitpicking arguments. I posted a youtube video, and 1 point was incorrect (or outdated). They pretended that invalidated the entire argument (and when i posted references which added credibility to a few of the other arguments, they just dismissed me).
- They kept saying “batteries are obsolete and are an old idea”. Water pipes are also old, but, they get refined constantly. Batteries are also evolving constantly. This is borderline common sense…
- They kept saying I wasn’t understandable or rambling or whatever.
The internet has emboldened people who barely passed school because on the internet, they’re anonymous and nobody knows who they are. People who know them however in real life would likely ignore their comments.
I think the problem is, its less time consuming to make up nonsense and shout over people, than actually provide accurate, well-referenced information
telling us how you argued with another idiot on the internet doesn’t really tell us much about anti-intellectualism
it honestly just looks like you’re one of the emboldened.
and now me too! maybe this framing isn’t the most helpful… not the “smartest” framing
If you can provide a way to approach that example differently, I’m open to suggestions. It’s an example of my experience, where my comment includes many of the common techniques they employ
Your comment is
- A character attack (point 3)
- You’re saying case studies and examples aren’t relevant to the conversation (point 2). That’s dismissing evidence.
Why isn’t my experience relevant, and why can’t we post our experiences? Are we required to simply say “yes” or “no” and not why?
Wow so you actually think this is evidence, okay. I’m not even sure how to approach this. I was pretty gentle with you and your character too. I was a fucking asshole to a Hexbear user in another thread.
It does come down to character though. By putting one person as “intellectual” and the other “anti” it’s creating a hierarchy between perspectives. So then the question is an ethical one, is it justified to dismiss another perspective based on XYZ. I’m guessing in this case, dismissing you is the “anti”, right? Based on whatever criteria you’ve chosen. But what happens if we select different criteria?
Congratulations on being an asshole. But being subtle doesn’t change anything (even Trump tried, and got a gag order).
What criteria would you pick to change character attacks, blatant assumption, dismissal of evidence (without counter evidence), incorrect comments, or marketing nonsense (like “water battery” or “greenwashing”) into intellectual arguments?
Anti-intellectualism comes alongside alienation from others. It has to. Being an intellectual is essentially saying “I trust the findings of academics and will adopt their consensus.” Nobody can learn about the whole span of the world, it’s too much information. But when you are convinced that collaboration is weakness and compromise is failure, you have to keep the world in your head, and the only way to do that is to maintain a really simplified internal diorama from which your “truth” is derived.
This is such a great take. I’ve never considered it like this
Thanks, I’m already thinking of ways I am off the mark though, like how things like race science and eugenics have been the “academic” position in the past.
I think properly working the academic consensus into your mind involves also understanding that it’s the product of people. It’s not that different from having some trust in institutions outside of academia too. There were people in the sciences fighting bitterly against those trends, and in the long run their position became standard.
Can we start with anti-I-Need-My-Dopamine-Hit-Every-10-Minutes?
Between people’s ever depleting attention span and our desire for acceptance on social media, I just don’t see how you can even begin to tackle “anti-intellectualism”.
Most people use these platforms to comment on a headline and never read the article. Perhaps we could all decide to use these platforms properly and use the downvote button to bury comments that, while funny or otherwise emotionally engaging, are clearly not accurate or providing value to the topic of discussion.
By upvoting funny comments and rewarding hive-mind mentality, we’re partly to blame for the lack of intellectualism.
Lemmy is far better than Reddit regarding the use of downvotes, but many people still use it as an emotional disagreement button rather than something used to hide useless/irrelevant content. I only downvote when somebody says something completely fucked or starts trolling.
I don’t think upvoting funny comments is necessarily wrong, but there is a lack of meaningful engagement a lot of the time.
Lemmy is far better than Reddit regarding the use of downvotes, but many people still use it as an emotional disagreement button rather than something used to hide useless/irrelevant content
I don’t know if I’d agree at all with the idea that Lemmy is any better, in my experience, people still use the downvote button as an “I Disagree” button 99% of the time. There’s less people here, so it’s less pronounced (you’ll get -9 instead of -300 for expressing an against-the-grain opinion), but the pattern is still just as present
Being stupid is a trend. People love being quirky.
A quirky trend that was observed by assimov 43 years ago?
That’s a hell of a trend
This smells like someone who considers himself an “intellectual” and is sick of people disagreeing with him.
What’s wrong with that? Just an example, imagine living in a world where most people consume animal products without second thought, despite the absolute moral atrocity that is committed as a result of it. You’d be pathetic to not be outraged at it. People should care about the consequences of their actions, but most people hypocritically selective in what ways they are.
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Wait til AI takes prominence. What effect on intellectualism that might have remains to be seen. As long as LLMs aren’t tailored to bias certain views, it may just lift humanity.
As soon as the AIs start saying it would make the most sense to equally distribute resources and having 10 people hoarding all the wealth is bad for the economy they’re going to get some adjustments real fucking fast.
Anti-intellectualism is a strategy employed by some rich people that control some mass media outlets to keep people away from being class conscious.
You’re absolutely fooling yourself if you think anti-intellectualism is a “rich people” thing. If rich people disappeared, anti-intellectualism would still exist
That’s not what my statement posits.
What does your sTaTeMeNt PoSiT exactly?
Is your first language English? I can help explain but need to know if you didn’t understand because of a language barrier or you read it too quickly.
I dislike this take. It assumes a conspiracy among a shadowy elite, which is the same tactic often employed by the anti-intellectual crowd. If we simply write off the problem with a hand-wavy solution based on a hunch, we’re no better than those we are discussing.
Some professors have actually done the methodical research to find out this is, in fact, true. There’s no shadowy elite there’s just an elite that has a policy towards this: https://www.amazon.com/Gatekeeper-Years-Economics-According-Times/dp/1594516820
I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed literal “anti-intellectualism”, perhaps that’s a thing around you ? People not caring/understanding the value of knowledge, sure, but deliberately opposing it… that sounds terribly dumb. Not sure what anybody would get out of it
In the run up to brevity people were literally saying “were tired of listening to experts” who were saying it would be a bad idea.
Were you not around for the last 4 years when half the country decided all doctors were working together and lying?
How about our populations response to climate scientists.
Or the universally agreed on hatred for any college degree that isn’t sufficiently marketable as “worthless”
The only way I can imagine saying you’ve never seen anti intellectualism is you don’t know what you’re looking for.
I don’t think I’ve seen this in France at least.
Were you not around for the last 4 years when half the country decided all doctors were working together and lying?
There is absolutely some (growing?) distrust in institutional knowledge, pharmaceutical labs, etc. but it’s far from being as strong as in the US (which is the country I assume you’re referring to?)
Anti intellectualism is a cornerstone of right wing politics which is gaining steam in lots of countries in Europe.
I have decided that it is safe to assume that everyone is an idiot, including me, and behave accordingly: act deliberately with an open mind, making no assumptions, and remain curious.
Frank Herbert’s Bene Gesserits had a tenet in which they remained mindful of the naivety of all people, including themselves, ostensibly to prevent allowing hubris to allow poor decisions.
Coming back around to my point: I think we’d all get along a lot better if we’d all agree we’re all stupid, but we can get better.
remained mindful of the naivety of all people, including themselves,… to prevent allowing hubris to allow poor decisions.
Not to spoil a 60 year old book, but didn’t they have a plan to genetically engineer a literal savior to mankind with hundreds of years of selective breeding? A little like the pot telling the kettle it’s too sure of itself.
I believe there is an evolutionary purpose to human stupidity though, and it’s the reason we’ve come so far as a species. Without writing a novel here, look up the concept of simulated annealing, which is conceptually related to natural selection. The short version is, when searching for a better solution to problem in a sea of functionally infinite possible solutions, if you only ever try solutions you can see that are categorically better than the solution you currently have, you will (with statistical certainty) end up in a local maxima. That is to say, without stupid people, no one would have ever looked at a cow udder and thought, “yeah, I wanna get in on that”, and as a result many humans throughout history would have gone without nutrients necessary for their survival.
I have no idea who first drank cow’s milk, that’s not the point, don’t @ me. The point is, stupid people try stupid stuff, many times it is just as stupid as it looked, but sometimes that stupid thing turns out to have previously undiscovered potential benefits which smart people notice, research, and help integrate into our society, resulting in others’ lives being better.
So to further simplify, stupid people are unwitting test subjects that the rest of humanity sometimes benefit from because they do dumb shit no one else would have thought to try.
I’m reminded of an episode from Stargate when one of the Asgardians, Thor I believe, was able to stop replicators from attacking his home world with the help of one of the main Earth characters, Sam. Thor needed someone of a less evolved/“stupider” species to help with the problem after none of the Asgard scientists could find a way. He said with compliment, “It was your stupid idea,” and Sam smiled back.
I think there’s this idea of historical tick-tock, that goes from faith or belief to enlightenment. It swings back and forth depending upon geopolitical development.
But that aside, I believe that after the digital revolution, getting people to believe bunk en masse became easier. This has amplified the grift economy, which in turn spreads disinformation, fronts logical fallacies as a debate method and puts bad faith arguments on a pedestal.
Take for instance that guy who illegally experimented on kids because he thought he had a better vaccine than the multi-purpose vaccine that was standardised. After he lost his medical practice he has been forced to rely on financing from conspiracy theorists and socialize with flat earthers because he is now an anti-vaccine icon.
He has to do that because his name is synonymous with malpractice and needs to play the part to feed his face.
This is just one example of the grift economy. For more, seep up “savage alpha male podcasts” to see an even harder grift.
