“It isn’t artificial intelligence I’m worried about, it’s human stupidity that concerns me,”. (AI academic Neil Jacobstein)
Stupidity is fascinating.
Not because I think I am so much above that with my superior intelligence, far from it. I also do, think and say stupid things. For me the fascination comes from the irony of how little we admit to it.
How much we think, like a terminal disease, that it can affect everyone else, just not us. It’s the blindness and the denial that rattles. Imagine if we would all just admit, “yeah, I’m stupid, it’s true”. Sadly there won’t be much left.
Stupidity is relative. It’s also temporal. We can be heard saying “oh I’m so stupid” if we forget a friend’s birthday, miss an appointment, drive into another car because we were staring at sunset, or slam like a bug into a glass door thinking it’s open (this is my specialty). This are fleeting moments absent-mindendness, and yes, slight dumbness. They happen to the smartest people.
But this is not existential stupidity, the stupidity that follows us through life where we think we are much more evolved, informed and entitled to spread around our pinion, than it’s really true.
A fancy term for this is Epistemic Arrogance. This is the overestimation of what we know. “When confidence in one’s knowledge and ability to know becomes excessive”. https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/06/03/against-epistemic-arrogance/
This happens because we might be complete egomaniacs or simply because we “underestimate uncertainty by compressing the range of possible uncertain states” (“Black Swan”, N.N. Taleb)
Back in 2011 the comic strip “SMBC - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal” [Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Gender] printed a simplified interpretation of the more respectable, scientifically researched Dunning-Kruger effect (this is a cognitive bias of overestimating your own knowledge and abilities). The more layman version of this bias is called “Mount Stupid”.
Basically there is a sweet spot in our quest of knowledge and experience, where we grossly overestimate our own abilities and we feel entitled to hand out opinions and advice. This is Mount Stupid.
The hope is that for most people this is a temporary trip that then drops off into what’s also called “The Valley of Despair” before launching into Enlightenment (via the “Slope of Hope” - not shown on the picture).
At all costs, make sure you come down from that Mountain and don’t pitch your flag there!
https://stratzr.com/only-jump-of-the-cliff-when-you-know-you-can-swim/
Another variation of this mountain climb, includes another trap to watch out for - the “Fraudster’s Cavern”. This hides below the way To Enchantment (or Mastery) and is an easy detour to make. Most of us know this as the Imposter Syndrome. The more you know, the more you think you still need to know and the less you think you are qualified.
This curve carries a relevance in endless fields and scenarios, not just stupidity. It’s directly bound to decision making, to resilience and to creativity!
You can experience this with learning an instrument or a language. When I was learning German, the first weeks went fairly easy. I had the smug feeling I was gifted. A few months later, and lasting years, I was neck high in the muddy grounds of the Valley of Despair (always made worse by the rain of perfection). SO HARD. I still haven’t found enchantment with German, but I stopped caring about perfect and am somewhere on the mastery slope.
Mount Stupid comes often to mind in the COVID19 media deluge. From February onwards we have been attacked with a wide range of numbers, statistics, population ratios, year on year comparisons, graphs of various beauty and complexity. Even logarithmic ones! It’s a information revolution.
I was truly impressed initially at how much data science and analysis was applied to this crisis and communicated publicly. And then came the mountain.
The world suddenly filled with expert statisticians, epidemiologists, virologists. So many people threw around their opinion like a wet towel in your face. Everyone had an opinion on death rates, testing, over-exaggerated danger, media control etc. Of course, people should be critical, should question, should cross-check news sources. But important is to be aware that no-one really knows anything for sure.
And for those of us, who have found their way down from the mountain (or think they have!!), important is to avoid arguing with people who are happy to stay on top of the mountain (sadly, these are often in the very high echelons of global power).
Mark Twain is always a good companion for such discussions.
“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
Even Superman has bad days…
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