Is the world becoming dumber?

In the 2006 film, Idiocracy, Corporal Joe Bauers, “the most average individual” in the entire military, is selected as a guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program but is forgotten. It appears that while he was asleep the general population dumbed down so much that he is now the most intelligent person around, becoming the president of the futuristic United States of America.

What was a satire in late 2006, became a reality less than a decade later when Donald Trump was elected president. For the first time in history, a clearly dumb person was the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet.

How come? Have the general population in the US become so stupid that half of the voters put a moron in the highest office?

This phenomenon, where once stable democracies are electing unfit, sometimes blatantly moronic politicians into office is not limited to the US (just look at the personas comprising the coalition parties in Israel, 2023). It seems the age of stupidity is upon us.

How have we devolved into this sorry state?

The History of Stupidity

History is littered with examples where stupid people or stupid actions have had a tremendous, long-lasting effect on humanity.

Take the teardown of the Berlin Wall for instance.

East Germany had decided to loosen up the travel restrictions. Günter Schabowski, an East German politician, was given the charge of bringing the relaxed rules into the information of the people of Germany by holding a press conference. On Nov. 9, 1989, Schabowski was given a piece of paper that he didn’t care to read before stepping up the podium. The speech was long and boring, but everyone was at once alerted when he started to talk about relaxation in travel rules between the borders.

Some reporters thought Schabowski was saying that the travel rules were being dropped completely. So, when some of them asked “When does that go into effect?”, Schabowski started to flip pages to find the answer. On realizing that he was making a fool of himself standing before the media unprepared with what he had to convey, he muttered, “Immediately, right away.”

As the press got the word out, glorifying East Germany’s decision to take down the Berlin Wall frenzy broke out, and in order to keep the situation curbed from going disastrous, the military held back, and the wall came down.

And we could go on, but you get the drift.

Nostalgia aside, the late 80s and the beginning of the 90s of the previous century were a hallmark of human rationality and intelligent decision-making. It was such an economically and politically stable period that even great minds like Francis Fukuyama were fooled by the relative calm and prosperity, stating (in 1989) that we have reached the end of history (a free copy of the original paper may be found here, not to be confused with the book The End of History and the Last Man which came later, in 1992, after Fukuyama has already earned his fame).

Clearly, he was wrong (and his era-sake Samuel P. Huntington was right – see Clash of Civilizations which was first introduced as a lecture in 1992, and further formulated in 1993).

Not only that history has not “ended”, it has spiraled downwards erasing decades-long human hard-earned achievements.

She Blinded Me with Science

At least one scientist thinks human beings are getting dumber.

Professor Gerald Crabtree of Stanford University recently posited that human intelligence peaked as far back as 2,000 years ago – basically because our survival back then depended on our wits. or as Ricky Gervais put it in one of his stand-up performances: “Let’s not ask the opinion of the average person, let’s first take the warnings off bleach bottles saying: DO NOT DRINK, for two years, then ask the average person”.

A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny,” Dr. Crabtree suggests, “whereas a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus and be a more attractive mate.

Prof. Gerald Crabtree

It seems our society, trying to be all-accepting and safe for everybody, has gone soft. Soft in the Darwinian way. As harsh as that may (morally) sound it’s a fact. It is much easier to survive in 2023, even when you are … well … stupid. It has to bear on human evolution, it’s a genetic and statistical truth.

But if stupidity is bad, why is it still around? How has it not been eradicated by evolution?

Stupidity. It’s Good For You.

The concept of “evolutionary advantages of being stupid” might sound counterintuitive at first. However, intelligence is a complex trait, and maybe (just maybe) it is okay to be stupid.

Let’s theorize.

Energetic Efficiency: One hypothesis is that maintaining a highly developed brain is metabolically expensive. A larger brain requires more energy to function, and in resource-limited environments, individuals with smaller, less energy-demanding brains might have an advantage in terms of energy conservation. Basically, think less-eat less.

Simplicity and Rapid Responses: In certain situations, quick, instinctual responses might be more advantageous than complex, deliberative thinking. For example, when facing immediate threats or survival challenges, an individual who reacts rapidly without overanalyzing the situation might have a better chance of survival.

Avoiding Overthinking: Complex cognitive abilities can lead to overthinking, hesitation, and anxiety in some situations. Less cognitively demanding individuals might make decisions more swiftly and confidently, avoiding the potential pitfalls of overanalyzing every option.

Social Dynamics: In some social contexts, exhibiting less intelligence might lead to better social integration. Highly intelligent individuals might struggle to fit in due to differences in communication styles or interests. Being less intelligent might allow someone to blend in and form stronger social bonds within their group.

Specialized Environments: In environments where specific traits are favored over general cognitive abilities, being less intelligent might confer advantages. For instance, in certain niches or specialized habitats, individuals with highly specialized adaptations might thrive even if their overall cognitive abilities are lower. Can you think about an environment where this is true?

Or as someone once put it, ignorance is bliss.

Lefties vs. Right-Wingers

Research about the difference in intelligence in relation to political opinions is fascinating. Again this may sound harsh and generalized but think about it for a second. Right-wing ideology (not to be confused with conservative) is mostly simplistic, there’s always a clear good vs. bad, simple solution to complex problems (e.g. Let’s build a wall, let’s banish those people, etc.), whereas lefties see the world in a much more intricate way. It would seem then, that right-wingers are stupid whereas the left ones are intelligent. Not so.

Hodson and Busseri (2012) found in a correlational study that lower intelligence in childhood is predictive of greater racism in adulthood, with this effect being mediated (partially explained) through conservative ideology. They also found poor abstract reasoning skills were related to homophobic attitudes, mediated through authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact.

When trying to figure out the issue of political-opinion-based-stupidity one has to consider the woke movement as well as the liberal progressives (mainly in the US). Those schools of thought have tangled themselves in such intricacies they have sailed into the realm of ad absurdum. Take identity politics for example. Is a tall black woman of Hispanic origin more, or less entitled than a caucasian transgender who grew up in a Portorican neighborhood? If you are smiling right now, you got it. It’s plain stupid.

It’s quite obvious then, that stupidity is not monochromatic, or in layman’s terms, you can be highly intelligent and stupid at the same time. Which calls for a better definition.

What is Stupidity

It would seem kind of stupid (pun intended) to dwell on the definition of stupid this late in the article. However, we must.

As stupidity has not been eradicated by evolution, nor can it be equated with intelligence, there must be something else defining it. In order to generalize, and hence be able to define it, we need to think about the above examples in concert, finding the common factor.

Let’s hypothesize (again).

Assumption 1: intelligence does not predict stupidity.

Assumption 2: political affiliation does not predict stupidity.

Assumption 3: complex/non-complex thinking does not predict stupidity.

Assumption 4: survivability did predict stupidity, however, it no longer does.

Is it about common sense then?

Common sense has been greatly missing in the last few decades. An elusive term as it is, people have abandoned that gut feeling sensation telling them what is right, what is plain wrong, and what should be or shouldn’t be done. Common sense is admittingly cultural and cannot be well-defined, however, one cannot deny that intuitive feeling of right and wrong in the presence of certain occurrences. Sometimes things just don’t feel right.

Is common sense a biological trait etched into our brains? Has it been developing over millions of years allowing us to survive? One cannot shake the feeling this is the missing factor that explains the distinction between the stupid and the wise. But wait, there’s more to it.

As there are multiple intelligences there must be multiple stupidities. It may be that the problem of generalizing stupid arises from the fact we are trying to define it as one thing, rather than split it into a number of stupidities.

I guess, everyone knows (or has known) a stupid person (usually more than one). Some are plain thinkers who cannot grasp complex situations, others are intelligent yet possess simplistic thinking, while a third type is repeatedly making stupid life choices. We tend to generalize all of the above types as stupid, never spending the time to discern the separate types (does that make us stupid?), however, if we dwelled on that for a minute we would clearly see that they are not one and the same.

Or is it that what we call stupidity is simply an outcome of the fact, that in this day and age, we can no longer discern truth from falsities?

Generative AI and the Age of Dumbness

Generative AI has been exploding during the last two years, starting with the eruption of ChatGPT, DALL-e, Midjourny, StableDiffusion, and LLaMa2 just to name a few. Those AI models are now generating texts that are almost impossible to discern from human creations. Texts generate images that are becoming more realistic as I write this article, as well as deep-fake video technology that can produce highly believable videos that have never taken place.

It is possible then, that we have abandoned common sense simply because it can no longer be applied to the flux of misinformation we are force-fed via the various data sources. The flood is so vast and engulfing that our brains are not adapting quickly enough, desensitizing themselves into a state of stupidity in order to keep up. If you cannot know anything anymore, why bother? After all the brain is a high-calorie-consuming piece of work, and the most rational way of dealing with an influx of irrelevant, undiscernible data is simply to … shut off.

But it’s not just the human brain that shuts off. AI models do too.

In a recent study where AI models were further trained on their own results, researchers found that the said models have quickly degraded, in layman’s terms, the more you fed the models with texts (or images) that were machine-generated the stupider they became. As the Internet is being filled with generated content (imagery, texts, video, and so on), providing this generated content back to the model training set would quickly be, paraphrasing Karl Marx (who argued in the nineteenth century that technological change would bring with it falling wages, declining profits, and hence, ultimately, the collapse of capital formation) the demise of the AI/data economy.

A Non-Optimistic Conclusion

In the Little black bag short sci-fi story, by Cyril Kornbluth, humanity has genetically devolved due to stupid people having more children. It is now (2450) in a state where the wise are rare and concerned for their safety should they be exposed as such. Their solution is to hide in plain sight.

Once leading scientists and doctors are posing as lab assistants and medical workforce to the current (stupid) “professors”. However, someone needs to keep society going, treat the ill, and keep machines operational, so they come up with a brilliant solution. Self-operating kits. One of those kits is a little black doctor’s bag containing various instruments that operate on their own, allowing even the dumbest person to conduct micro-surgery, and cure the ill.

I will not reveal the end of this story (you can read it here), just say that it makes one suspect the current direction humanity is going is not that far-fetched from Kornbluth’s dystopia, and 2450 never seemed as close as it does nowadays.