Asklemmy

“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

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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.

"the world" is not anti-intellectual, you just hang out with the wrong people

Anti-intellectualism is a strategy employed by some rich people that control some mass media outlets to keep people away from being class conscious.

This smells like someone who considers himself an “intellectual” and is sick of people disagreeing with him.

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

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.

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.

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.