Stupid!

Stupidity is on the move worldwide.

How smart is it to blow yourself up in hopes of having sex with 16 virgins in heaven?  They could be fat, old, ugly, and mean for all you know.

How smart is it to vote for a billionaire huckster whose main promise is to take away your health plan and the health plan of everyone else in your trailer park?

How smart is it to tell the world that you are so smart that you don’t need anyone in any intelligence agency to tell you anything about anything because your “gut” tells you all that you need to know?

How smart is it to shout down any speaker at your so called institution of “higher” education (Middlebury College for example) who is saying something you don’t understand or might disagree with?

One of the most favored routes into the country for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers is by water.  A famous entertainer/politician campaigned on a pledge to make America safe again. After election he immediately funds billions of dollars to build a wall along our borders while at the same time slashing the funding for the Coast Guard down to the bone.  How smart is that?

Stupidity.  It's on the move again.  In the Middle Ages when Christian religious zealots roved around killing each other by the millions because one group had a slightly different interpretation of some detail of one absurd dogma or another. How smart is that?

In a March 11, 2017, article in Psychology Today, Ray Williams describes the dumbing down of America in excruciating and embarrassing detail.  Our leaders, he writes, are  as “an angry lynch mob” fomenting a “rabid culture of anti-intellectualism” where “every fact is suspect…Rational thought is the enemy. Critical thinking is the devil’s tool.”

Whew!

An alien from outer space looking at this scene would have to conclude that, without a doubt, home sapiens is not too smart.

  [Wikipedia photo]

As it turns out, experiments have proven, that humans really are stupid and have been for a long time, but paradoxically, that is one of the key reasons for our evolutionary success.  Go figure!

How does that work?

It all starts with toilets at Yale.

[My  toilet]

Cognitive scientists, Philip Fernback and Steven Sloman, authors of “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” demonstrated that smarty pants Yale graduate students who claimed to understand how flush toilets worked actually had no idea about how these rather simple devices  really functioned. However, as it turns out, these students, as well as  all the other people in the civilized world, are still able flush their toilets.  This makes our world a better place. Imagine the streets of London in the days before Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet.  Out the window goes the chamber pot every morning. Have a nice day strolling to work.

 The beautiful Yale campus would be not so nice.

While we think we know how toilets, cars, iPhones, televisions, airplanes, etc. all work, we really have only the vaguest ideas.  We rely on the knowledge of other humans and we trust in that.  Soon we will be riding around in driverless cars.  Fernbach and Sloan call this the “division of cognitive labor.”  It makes our complex world work.  Without that we would be like chimpanzees in the jungle because, individually as opposed to collectively, we are not all that smart.  About  as smart as chimpanzees, but since chimpanzees don’t make use of the division of cognitive labor, they are still pooping all over the jungle.

Basically, it boils down to this.  We are collectively smart and individually not so smart. This works well with toilets and many other features of our civilization, but with politics, not so well.  When we piggyback on someone else's views about a political issue, trusting that they know what they are talking about, we may be making a huge blunder.

Politicians operate in gangs, known as political parties.  Everyone in the gang relies on others in the gang to help them know what the right answers are to complex questions such as how to provide heath care for the population.  The gang than takes a fairly uniform position on what we should do.

The problem is that most politicians don’t understand anything in detail about how governmental systems work.  It's a case of the blind leading the blind, and this is especially true of politicians (referred to in the past as “know nothings”) who just want to make it all go away, taxes, government regulations, the whole shebang. Fernbach and Stern point out that our cognitive division of labor can lead to a misplaced trust that can work against us with disastrous consequences.  Driverless cars with faulty programming.  The ultimate crash and burn.

In the political sphere, stupidity  is on a roll.