I don't like the word “stupid”. It carries a moral judgement and in the context of this post is never defined. I don’t see any falsifiable claims made here.
The author seems to be projecting their own above average intelligence onto other people. He’s imaging their inner world to be somewhat like his when it’s anything but.
> but they’re intelligent when it comes to their own lives and the areas they work and spend time in. We should expect the average person to struggle with factual questions about abstract ideas and far-off events, but not so much about what’s right in front of them day to day.
This is cosmically untrue. My cleaners can’t work my vacuum. I’ve spent a year constantly re-explaining it. They can’t put the oven racks back the way they found them, just force them in the wrong way around every time. No number of reminders seems to help. My landscaper could not work out he had our landscape wiring crossed, spent days coming back replacing bulbs, digging up wires and replacing them, randomly rewiring sections. 5 minutes with a multi-meter and I had it solved. I know a nurse who thinks deoxygenated blood is blue.
The average person tries to memorize a handful of things from someone smarter and then stays in their lane. That’s fine, I don’t think we should call them “stupid” but capable thinkers and problem solvers they are not.
runjake
I'm glad I'm not the only one who had a similar disagreement with the article.
I try to frame it in my head that people aren't generally stupid, but that we do a lot of stupid things. Or we don't do things (eg. read, or think critically) that adds to our level of stupidity.
It's perhaps a privilege of being above-average intelligence, but these days I try to focus less on being smarter and more on being less stupid. I seem to get more bang for the buck.
I'm still pretty stupid, though.
My own anecdote:
I worked with a guy on military aircraft. He was a radar technician. He went to school for it. I also went to school for it. The school was pretty hard with a decently high washout rate, including a lot of 2 year EE graduates, for some reason.
One day, we're working on the flight line on a radar issue and he says something pretty stupid, but we're kind of buddies, so I ask him to elaborate.
Long story short, his belief was that radar tracked other (jet) aircraft airspeed by reading the reflections bounced off of the other jets' turning pistons and calculating airspeed by how fast their piston assembly rotated.
I was completely taken aback by the multiple levels of stupidity. If you think through it a little, there are multiple levels of fail there. I then had to explain how this particular system actually worked and work him through the ludicrousness of each step of his beliefs.
How he 1.) fabricated this elaborate theory from the relatively simple section of training ("measure latency of returned energy transmissions"), and 2.) made it through tech school without washing out, I'll never know.
bpt3
Stupid is an insult, but there is a clinical equivalent that all of the people you mentioned would meet (unfortunately).
The author seems to be pretending these people don't exist, and I think you made a good guess as to why.
leereeves
> I know a nurse who thinks deoxygenated blood is blue.
That's hard to believe. Any nurse has drawn blood from veins and seen deoxygenated blood with their own eyes.
nitwit005
Nurses still believe all sorts of medical myths, unfortunately.
nitwit005
We tend to think about intelligence in terms of capacity, but "stupidity" is generally more about emotion and self control. I suspect every gambling addict has the brain power to figure out they have a problem. It's not a fundamentally complex issue. That doesn't mean they stop.
Students are often fully aware their use of ChatGPT is a bad idea. Like the gambling addict, that doesn't mean they stop. Forcing yourself to do your schoolwork has always been difficult, and they've been given a way out.
latexr
> Students are often fully aware their use of ChatGPT is a bad idea.
Often and fully aware? I sincerely doubt it. I’d bet it’s only a tiny minority of students who use ChatGPT who think it’s a bad idea.
Unlike the gambling addict, they can’t feel the immediate repercussions of their actions. Those will only be available in hindsight, long after they can correct.
michaelt
> I don’t know how you could assume this is useful unless you assume the average person is really stupid. Would you feel comfortable telling a stranger this? Would you be able to say it in a way that isn’t demeaning?
Something I've noticed from time to time in my career is the following:
1. Someone does something they know perfectly well they shouldn't have done, but they think they won't get caught.
2. They get caught.
3. They feign ignorance or confusion about the rules, hoping to lessen their punishment.
4. The organisation takes their claim of ignorance seriously, and introduces incredibly patronising training/rules/signage.
A person who doesn't notice this happening could easily get the impression their peers have room-temperature IQs.
datameta
Personally, when I find myself fully aware of acting against my best interest (especially repeatedly), "stupid" doesn't seem to be totally out of place.
I don't find the author's argument, that students who essentially skip learning via LLM could avoid fairly being labeled "stupid", particularly convincing.
Not that I think it to be a particularly useful label, but I don't find awareness of self-sabotage to preclude one from such a label.
This is similar to how I believe the label "smart" alone does not carry much use.
readthenotes1
Much of what we are supposed to learn in a classroom is irrelevant and some of it is just down right wrong.
Getting the job will depend more upon the grade and the network then it does upon any one homework assignment...
Is it stupid to do something perfunctorily when there is no direct evidence that a huge time& effort investment is going to pay off?
datameta
If students' optimization function is getting hired, what happens to the quality of skill and knowledge of grads?
As far as we know there is no direct competitor in learning to doing it repeatedly, in different ways. Now whether a mixture of structured and truly unstructured learning is superior is another discussion.
harmmonica
May be triggered by the three branches of government example, but I think those types of details matter, not in a vacuum of "oh there are three branches of gov in the US, how very nice!" but it seems pretty important when there are folks who talk about how great the US had been in the past, and how we should get back to being that country, and simultaneously think it's ok to ignore, for example, a judicial order (as if the checks and balances of the three branches aren't an important part of what used to (and still does?) make the country what it has been/is).
And people being knowledgeable about what they do day in and day out seems like a good example of people being really good at habituation, but that's not "not stupid." Stupid is when people do the same things day in and day out and then use that as a crutch to say there's no other way to do that thing even when there's evidence in front of them that contradicts what their habituation has led them to believe. I guess you can read the first example as a political statement, but I'm not trying to make one, and the second one applies to everything under the sun, I think.
All that said, I think the author is only saying that when someone uses "most people are stupid" as an excuse but I don't think most folks actually ever say "most" people are stupid. Instead they point out that a decent enough chunk of people are stupid and that's enough to cause some issues.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying I'm not one of the stupid ones. Sometimes I am for sure
qsort
Those quizzes are completely worthless. There's no way 53% of the population doesn't know that. It was probably worded weirdly or set up in a way that tricked people.
Another one that made the rounds recently was the one where they asked people to estimate what percentage of the population is trans, and the median answer was like 20%. There is no way this captures actual beliefs held by real people, it's a number so unaligned with basic reality that the only thing it points to is a flaw in the test.
My working theory is that a good chunk of the interviewees are uncomfortable being asked nerd shit like this and they just say whatever they think will make the game stop.
jahewson
That people over-estimate the size of minority groups is a well known research finding [1]
As for the 53% stat, dude just go to Walmart and talk to regular people [2]
I really like this approach, but I tend to use a slightly modified version that is along the lines of "explain me why an intelligent person would do [dumb thing]".
I think this phrasing is more welcoming for a healthy discussion.
kerblang
If I assume people often don't bother to check the veracity of claims made by AI chatbots, am I assuming those people are stupid?
andymasley
Hi I’m the author, I agree people believing AI hallucinations is a big problem and will edit the post to clarify
mgh2
No, maybe just time or cognitive load efficient
_se
Stupid answer, there is nothing efficient on any axis about blindly consuming incorrect information.
mgh2
Yet most people do it because our brains evolved that way (yes, might be survivial bias)...
bpt3
I think we're uncovering the reason why we say most people are stupid...
roland35
Maybe saying "most people are stupid" is wrong. I know even medieval peasants had to be knowledgeable about a lot to farm and survive.
However, I do believe most people are uncurious. Since information is so cheap, it seems many people just reach for what feels good and doesn't risk their existing worldviews.
pmg101
Right but that is actually a strategy that makes a lot of sense. You will likely fit in well with your peers and you will likely feel comfortable with your beliefs and "knowledge".
Maybe we could call it a local maximum, personally, although something of a disaster, societally.
fredfish
I don't think having a lot of information is intelligence. Plenty of medieval peasants were stupid and a small percentage could combine information into new things for the idiots around them to repeat. During a short period copied behavior traveled less well and it was more obvious how stupid the median person was.
roland35
I'd argue that an idiot peasant who sees something that works and adopts it is smarter than the anti science people we have yammering on social media right now!
fredfish
Petrol protectionism or religious fervor both have a risk of an overall suboptimal while delivering substantial relative benefit to specific groups and their members if they can maintain the absurdity.
pogopop77
"Be curious, not judgemental" -- Ted Lasso (via Walt Whitman?)
mcphage
That’s one of my favorite scenes of the show :-)
bcrosby95
No human is 100% rational and if someone points this out it doesn't mean they're calling people 'stupid'. Most people don't want to insult others, so putting words in people's mouths like this is an easy way to 'win' an argument that no one really cares about.
disambiguation
"smart" could be defined as: the act of consistently making good decisions - which can further be defined as: effective optimization towards an outcome. (defining the outcome is itself a matter of making a "good decision")
This requires all of: being aware of a given problem, being sufficiently informed of the relevant context (which is further a matter of curiosity, discerning between trustworthy sources, and robust sense making), and finally caring enough to apply any attention and effort to the issue in the first place.
In this regard, almost everyone is "stupid' about everything most of the time. If anyone manages to achieve "smartness" it's usually in a very narrow decision space.
In terms of AI and education, the problem is: the path of least resistance is an optimal one - at least in a greedy sense.
The usefulness of the tool and "smartness" of the user are irrelevant to the core issue - general education is rapidly eroding. This is strongly correlated to (if not outright caused by) the ongoing rapid changes in technology.
The issue is that structured education originally meant: relying on your own wits, which in turn strengthened them. No cheat codes allowed.
This is no longer the case. Not only because of students using AI, but because "the path of least resistance" applies to educators and administrators as well.
Technology will change but educating people remains a fundamental good - to that end, institutions must adapt to make sure every student gets the proper enrichment they deserve. Get cheat codes out of education.
djoldman
The referenced study is quite the doozy:
> We assigned participants to three groups: LLM group, Search Engine group, Brain-only group ... to write an essay. We recruited a total of 54 participants...
> We used electroencephalography (EEG) to record participants' brain activity in order to assess their cognitive engagement and cognitive load, and to gain a deeper understanding of neural activations during the essay writing task. We performed NLP analysis, and we interviewed each participant after each session. We performed scoring with the help from the human teachers and an AI judge (a specially built AI agent).
> We discovered a consistent homogeneity across the Named Entities Recognition (NERs), n-grams, ontology of topics within each group. EEG analysis presented robust evidence that LLM, Search Engine and Brain-only groups had significantly different neural connectivity patterns, reflecting divergent cognitive strategies. Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support...
And then: "...in this study we demonstrate the pressing matter of a likely decrease in learning skills based on the results of our study."
I'm not sure "likely decrease in learning skills" is quite right here.
I'd rather have teachers assume stupidity than malice when it comes to student utilizing AI to essentially skip their learning.
mlhpdx
Most people aren’t knowledgeable about specific facts, and that’s why they are impressed by people (or things) that sound like they are.
ASalazarMX
Knowledge is not intelligence, and if people are gullible by what they don't know, it's more of a psychological than intellectual problem. We rarely process our emotions in a healthy way, instead reverting to instinct when we feel our social standing threatened.
Although you could say we're idiots in the emotional sense.
ranger_danger
What impresses me is empathy and humility.
lostpassagain2
So if i understand it correctly now, "If it is meassureable than there is a use."
And "If there is a use, there may be a product."
So, "Than if there is a product, people may use it, and after an unknown time they are likely or not to judge it, or say something about - if they like."
Had I get "been 'a human'" that wrong before ?
While saying "That i didn't get it before, if someone meant 'infinite' that instead ment 'unmeassureable', or?"?
...not?
Edited: Typo
blobbers
I think most Americans do not understand what is a healthy food and would think of a "balanced" meal of carbs, protein and fat, with fat being bad circa the 1960s line of thinking.
"I think most people know what’s considered healthy food. They maybe wouldn’t be able to perfectly break down ideal ratios of macronutrients, but they have a rough idea. The average person whose bad diet is making them unhealthy would probably be able to point to the bad diet as part of the problem. If I walked up to the average person and asked them to make an ideal meal plan for themselves to be maximally healthy, I think most people would do a decent job."
This is why most of america is stuck in diabetes land. I bet you most americans couldn't tell you the difference between if something is high in carbohydrates or fat.
atmavatar
A small detail you're missing is that in the US, sugar (usually in the form of corn syrup) is added to everything.
Example: I'd bet many people who are at least gen X grew up with PBJs as a staple food. It seems healthy enough: bread, peanut-butter, and a little jelly. However, today there's sugar added to the bread, sugar added to the peanut butter, and most certainly sugar added to the jelly, far beyond what it was when growing up.
If you aren't really careful when at the grocery store or making food from scratch, you can easily end up consuming a lot more sugar than you realize.
maverwa
And just to add to your point: an European with the same level of knowledge and curiosity (me, an overweight unhealthy European) would not think a PBJ is healthy at all. For me, at least the PB and the J sound like „basically pure sugar“. We make the same misjudgments about other foods, but it’s entirely learned behavior. What I mean is: these judgments are rarely objective, but always subjectively derived from learned behavior.
csa
> For me, at least the PB and the J sound like „basically pure sugar“.
As a side note, there is good peanut butter that is just roasted peanuts and salt. It’s pretty damn healthy — much more balanced and healthier than most breads or jellies.
It also tastes really good. If anyone reading this hasn't had peanut better which is just peanuts and salt, go buy some. Regular peanut butter doesn't taste good afterwards.
peanut-walrus
Three points:
1) Even the obvious claims (and often especially these) deserve scientific verification.
2) Most people are dumb is not because they are missing the relevant information, but because they are failing to act upon the information.
3) The real magic is understanding and being able to predict higher-order effects. And then taking action which steers everyone towards a more desirable outcome.
People will keep eating junk food and writing essays with AI despite knowing that this will lead to unhealthy bodies and minds. Does this make them stupid? Yes it does. Knowledge is the ability to apply information and conversely stupidity is the inability to do so. Most people are indeed stupid and the only way to fix this is to change the system they are part of so they are no longer incentivized to make the stupid choices.
dkarl
"Stupid" is used as shorthand for a lot of things, one of which is, "likely to act in a self-destructive manner when better alternatives are available." With that in mind, I have to disagree with this:
> they’re intelligent when it comes to their own lives and the areas they work and spend time in
Are people likely to get fat when they have easy access to a bunch of cheap food that is optimized for overconsumption?
Are kids likely to skip all necessary and/or useful preparation for adulthood, given the opportunity to watch porn or TikTok instead?
Are people likely to believe pseudoscience influencers over mainstream medical advice?
If you dig into these examples, you can explain each of them in more specific and illuminating ways. "Stupid" is just shorthand for the fact that we're not perfect rational optimizers of anything, including our own happiness.
(I think people twist themselves into knots trying to avoid using pejorative words like "stupid." I appreciate the good intentions, but I don't think it's necessary. I'm stupid a lot in my own life. Everybody is stupid sometimes. We're human beings.)
qsort
> we're not perfect rational optimizers of anything
"Perfect" is too strong an hypothesis, but none of those behaviors are irrational per se.
People would rather be fit than overweight, but that's not the choice on the table. You can either make sacrifices now to be fit X time from now, or eat that ice cream and suffer later. The rational choice depends on the relative value you put on those things (and your discount rate, if you want to get really technical).
Taking the "wrong" side of the tradeoff could certainly qualify as being stupid, and as you note all of us would turn out to be plenty stupid if we started rigorously analyzing our choices, but this is a matter of people claiming to have preferences they don't actually have, as proven by the only thing that matters: their behavior.
dkarl
If you assume that people's preferences are revealed by their behavior, then you are assuming there is no stupidity. You're starting from that conclusion.
However, you could also choose to believe their regrets, when they look back on their own choices and say that the pleasure than they gained from them did not repay the misery they suffered because of them.
If you choose to disbelieve their regrets, then maybe you would agree to label their regrets as stupid?
qsort
Regrets are mostly irrelevant to this discussion. A "regret" is either:
- I now have information I did not have at the time I made a choice that binds me now.
- I changed my mind.
Whether I believe it or not makes no difference because it contains no information.
As an aside: none of this is supposed to invalidate the experience of people having regrets, or struggling with addictions. If I see a friend getting drunk every night I won't go "ah, yes, they are correctly maximizing their utility according to their own discount rate and inter-temporal budget constraints".
They are separate conversations, though, and we can have the kind of conversation where I help you solve problems or the kind of conversation where I just listen to you. They don't tend to mix well.
dkarl
Regrets are not irrelevant when people face the same decisions over and over and make choices that they previously regretted.
sorokod
People choose short term gains over long term losses.
Consuming junk food and using LLMs to do homework are examples.
When it happens at scale one could call this stupidity.
andymasley
I mean I say in the post I think it's bad that people are using LLMs to cheat.
kazinator
> This article is presuming that students are somehow blind to the idea that copying work from other places means they don’t actually learn.
Where is the article doing that? I.e. assuming that the students are sleep-walking into not learning?
It's obvious to the rhetorical everyone that students are using AI to cheat, and that they know that because of that they are not learning, and that they don't give a shit.
mecsred
I like this litmus test generally, but I think it applies mostly to self aggrandizing behaviour. "Most people are dumber than a threshold I consider intelligent" kind of vibe. I do think humans are stupid though, as in all of us, including myself and people I like. We just sometimes make terrible choices despite our best intentions, and by a strict definition that's pretty stupid.
thomassmith65
This is different than the question "Are you presuming most people are more stupid than you?"
It makes my skin crawl to say this*, but the answer for most people on HN is probably "yes, they are."
* both because people in tech are prone to Paul Graham style 'nerd martyr' arrogance, and because I often read views that disappoint me here and I do not like to admit that an intelligent person can hold them
wagwang
You're falling for the is ought fallacy. Moral views are completely orthogonal to intelligence.
thomassmith65
I'm really not that sentimental. I don't expect everyone to have the same set of values that I do.
What gnaws at me is when someone has a system of beliefs that, to my mind, seems based on nonsense.
nickff
>"Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it." -Descartes
thomassmith65
The phrase "common sense" actually is a pet peeve of mine.
In politics, it's a red flag because it is often used to defend bad policies that only appear good when one doesn't have the fortitude to understand the better policy.
username332211
And the rejection of common sense is often used to defend ideas so bad that one has to put serious intellectual effort to create arguments for them.
A lot more "intellectuals" defended Pol Pot and Milosevic compared to ordinary chums. The denial of the Cambodian genocide was known as the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia".
thomassmith65
There's some truth to that, but I'm not sure it's an argument for the phrase 'common sense'.
I can't think of a position on anything that someone couldn't twist into an appeal to 'common sense'
There are different cheap rhetorical devices that some intellectuals use. I don't like that either.
heikkilevanto
Why is such a rare thing called common sense?
- myself
username332211
Why does it make your skin crawl?
By a mathematical necessity, half the people can say “Yes, most people are stupider than me." without lying.
thomassmith65
It bothers me for a few reasons.
Journalists have spilt a lot of ink recently about arrogance in the tech community. They point out tech figures who mistakenly think their aptitude in one knowledge domain means they know better than experts in other domains.
That's one reason.
username332211
That's even worse. Journalists are infamous for writing articles and having opinions on things they know nothing about.
To produce plausible sounding statements on a complex topics without regard to their actual truth is almost a necessity for the opinion journalist (the predominant type of journalist of the modern era).
To be criticized for intellectual hubris by that class should be meaningless.
thomassmith65
That wasn't an appeal to authority (as embodied, I guess, by journalists). I wanted to introduce the idea, without claiming it to be some novel insight of mine.
I would argue that "most" implies more than a bare majority. Say, 75%?
jahewson
majority != most
rekrsiv
Presuming most people are stupid is arrogant, all people do stupid things, all the times, by necessity: It's the most energy-efficient way to figure out what's actually important to learn. All of us, without exception, start out quite stupid.
Toby1VC
I agree with you. People is very smart. And Tik Tok is micro lessons, condensed varied knowledge (accelerationism) - It can be at least but short video formats also lead to treachery.
cjbgkagh
Roughly half of the population is below average intelligence, if defining the average IQ at 100 with a 15pt standard deviation, I would consider anyone under 115 to be rather dim. I think society is heavily stratified based on intelligence so drawing on the average of the people an intelligent person meets would give a false impression of the average intelligence of the general population which includes people an intelligent person is unlikely to meet. Sadly when I worked in large scale behavioral analytics the unavoidable result that fell out practically every study was that indeed most people are stupid. Reality wasn't designed with our moral sensibilities in mind.
kazinator
> they’re intelligent when it comes to their own lives and the areas they work and spend time in
Is that enough, though?
Sure, lab rats are intelligent in navigating their mazes to get to the reward.
BobaFloutist
Most people are stupid. Most people are also quite smart. It's complicated.
edude03
I think the student example is wrong but I'm struggling to articulate why - here's my attempt:
Students often cheat because they claim "they won't need to know this in the future", but school isn't about memorizing facts as much as learning how to research, learning how to communicate, learning to manage their time etc. When I think of someone who's "smart" by my definition, I would expect them to have all these skills that these students are (semi purposefully) avoiding.
Furthermore, - and this might be the sleepwalking bias - the conclusion that "I won't need to know this" is subtly against their best interests, because imagine for example, you spend $200,000 and 10 years to go to medical school, you "cheat" on everything, and pass only to find out, that DRs aren't in demand anymore because AI knows everything (and more that) you would have learned in school, so now the lay person just uses that instead. Wouldn't you have preferred to avoid wasting your time and do something niche that the AI doesn't know instead?
And of course - what are students typically doing instead of learning? TikTok, instagram, fantasy football, youtube shorts - all things that "we as a society" have decided are brain rot.
So it's hard to say that someone who choses things against their best interest for no real upside, who hasn't learned the skills to survive in society is smart by whatever definition
wturner
Most people are smart from within the narrow confines of their own interests and beyond that simply don't give a shit. People conflate "intelligence" and values all the time.
jfengel
We should expect the average person to struggle with factual questions about abstract ideas and far-off events, but not so much about what’s right in front of them day to day.
But it's the former metric that I care about.
The average person gets through their day, and that's great. I don't interact with them about that. It does not affect me one way or the other.
Their opinions about "abstract ideas and far-off events" do affect me. That's clearest every couple of years, when they vote (or fail to). In between, the results of their opinion are imposed upon me by literal force. The government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and those elections determine what is "legitimate". Just the threat of violence is sufficient to drastically affect my life.
I don't expect people to be experts. Democracy rests on the proposition that reality puts a thumb on the scale. If ignorance is randomly distributed, and the experts mostly agree, then you'll get the right choice most of the time regardless.
That's a pretty nifty proposition. It means that nobody has to designate who the experts are, which is fraught. But that presumption of ignorance being randomly distributed is dubious. People can easily become convinced of very bad ideas, and there are no good options for dealing with that.
bpt3
I wrote a separate comment about this, that using your language can be summarized as: I think the distribution of ignorance is decreasing, and I think interactions across that distribution are also decreasing, and I think that's a problem for society.
You nailed one of the biggest concerns I have in the face of that, which is that we all have an equal say in how our society is ruled, despite clearly not being equally equipped to make good decisions. Of course, all the alternatives to that method of governance seem to be worse, so...
Michelangelo11
The author's point seems to be: "It's not that they don't know it's bad. They know, and they do it anyway. The fact that they know shows they're not stupid."
Umm, OK? I still don't get why, in the author's view, they do the bad thing on purpose, and why that is not stupid. (Perhaps the author might make say that doing a stupid thing doesn't make someone a stupid person, or something to that effect -- but, even if so, I don't see any sign of that argument in TFA.)
bpt3
Because it allows him to handwave away the harms produced by something he strongly supports.
People advocating for drug legalization do the same thing for example.
jrflowers
I love all these bait and switch AI articles. Every blogger that writes essays that appear to start with one premise and ends with “I like those chat bots they are good” is very smart and contributing greatly to the quality of the internet
kotaKat
And they always double-end on an “everyone that straight-up hates AI is an asshole and should burn in hell”, as this one does too.
andymasley
Hi I’m the author, pretty confused about how you can come away with this reading. I say at the end that a lot of AI criticism is correct, there’s just this specific type I think is lazy
jrflowers
You literally say that you lose respect for people that don’t agree with you about chat bots.
Seeing that your essay is about people’s presumptions about one another, and you say that you lose respect for people based on their chat bot opinions without a lick of self-awareness around the topic of the essay it can be concluded that your overall thesis is that people that don’t like chat bots like you do are inherently less worthy of respect.
andymasley
I say in the post I lose respect for people who specifically claim that a billion people are using an app that adds absolutely nothing to their lives each week, not people who dislike chatbots for other reasons (hallucinations etc.). So I think a lot of people are getting a lot of misinformation from TikTok, and I think it’d be better if TikTok didn’t exist, but I’d consider anyone who said that TikTok is completely useless to its users to be pretty goofy. I feel the same about chatbots.
Brb writing twelve hundred words about how nobody is dumb except for the people that don’t like the chat bots that say I’m a good boy
andymasley
I say in the post I lose respect for people who specifically claim that a billion people are using an app that adds absolutely nothing to their lives each week, not people who dislike chatbots for other reasons (hallucinations etc.). So I think a lot of people are getting a lot of misinformation from TikTok, and I think it’d be better if TikTok didn’t exist, but I’d consider anyone who said that TikTok is completely useless to its users to be pretty goofy. I feel the same about chatbots.
bpt3
There's the objective definition of stupid, which can approximately be defined as: is your measured IQ too low to be acceptable to the US military?
Then there's the more subjective ones, such as:
1. Does it appear this person has fully thought through the short term and long term ramifications of their actions?
2. Would I have done that specific thing in that specific scenario?
3. Would a member of my peer group reasonably concluded the same thing?
The author seems fixated on subjective definition 1, claiming that people should be assumed to have made decisions rationally and thoughtfully and that people are too harsh on those who lack specific domain knowledge.
I'm not sure why he thinks that all the empirical evidence we have of what I will summarize as nutritional illiteracy in the US should ignored or that high school and college students (two groups with a well documented history of ignoring long term consequences of their actions) should be assumed to be rational, thoughtful agents, but my only guesses are that he has never interacted with any of these people or that he doesn't care because this is just a leaping off point for his defense of AI (my money is on the latter).
Subjective definition #2 seems to be what most people use, which I feel is unfair.
I added subjective definition #3 because it's one I've talked about with my friends a lot. Due to the removal of human interaction from most menial tasks (self checkouts at grocery stores, delivery of most goods via Amazon, etc.) and the fact that everyone I work with and nearly everyone I live near has at least one advanced degree and a high income, I literally can go weeks without interacting with a single person with an IQ of less than 115, which must skew my definition of stupid somehow, and I believe I am far from alone in this bifuraction of society.
IMO, contemplating that would be a much more interesting article than creating a very self-congratulatory method to chastise those who aren't all-in on AI as our future.
Akranazon
It always bothers me when someone says, "that's so obvious, what's the point in doing a study on it?"
> What are these results actually telling us that the average person doesn’t already know?
Nothing. It's a trivial claim, but does this imply we should not research it?
An enormous amount of effort in the hard sciences is dedicated to proving/stating:
* Claims that on their face appear trivial - like 1+1=2, or the "two points determine a line" postulate
* Things that seem obvious and hardly worth stating - like the pigeonhole principle, or laws of associativity/commutativity/distributivity
* Seemingly redundant re-phrasings of the thesis (every theorem, once it clicks)
But these sorts of mathematical rules become increasingly non-obvious when combined with each other. There is a reason the hard sciences works like this: you want to arrange knowledge hierarchically. You need to have a foundation of knowledge in order to do anything more complex.
The social sciences don't work like this, but they should. Whenever someone proves obvious things, they get told, "why are you wasting time proving that? Everyone already knows that." But psychology, with its replication crises, has a long way to go before it becomes like a hard science. You need to accumulate a hierarchy of proven foundations.
gampleman
Seems to me that a good rule of thumb in the replication crisis in Psychology was that if an articles claim seemed kind of “obvious” (where you would like the OP almost wonder why they bothered researching it), then the experiment would replicate. Conversely, if the result was really “interesting” (as in surprising or unexpected), chances were that it would fail to replicate.
I guess that isn’t so surprising as most of us deal with people constantly and so our intuitive understanding of human psychology is actually pretty good.
But it does prove the value of constructing the scientific theory painstakingly and carefully out of tiny claims rather than trying to do something bombastic.
svachalek
Things everyone "knows" are often not known at all, they are just assumed.
stephenmac98
How many people drive their car daily or near daily?
How many people are good drivers?
The ratio of those two values shows, in my experience, that a lot of people are not very good at things they spend a lot of time doing, and are generally unaware of their own shortcomings
The average American spends 4.2 hours a week in the car. A typical 40 year old american has driven around 50,000 miles. For someone to continue to be bad at driving after that much experience, it must be a fundamental limitation on their capabilities for learning, thinking, or understanding. Drive to work any given day in Denver and you will see that a large number of people suffer from those fundamental limitations.
This article seems to present a world where most people the author interacts with can think critically about a complex topic, and are interested in learning or improving themselves. I wish I lived where the author lives, because I have had multiple jobs across multiple countries and never encountered an average population like the author describes.
jebarker
My impression driving around Denver is that far more people are choosing to drive dangerously/poorly than are doing so because they're inherently incapable of driving. Much like the author suggests, if you ask most people specific questions about good driving they'd probably get them correct. The fact that people then choose to drive poorly has more to do with lack of care/respect for others on the road, impatience and entitlement.
ritz_labringue
I don't think I agree with the premise. Sure there are lots of car accidents in absolute terms, but given how many people drive and how error-prone driving inherently is, most people are actually pretty decent drivers
miketery
Driving is not error prone, cars rarely break in unexpected ways.
People driving and making decisions are error prone.
A simple test is to watch how people turn. Do they turn early potentially hitting the curb or cutting it too close to pedestrians. Or do they increase their radius by turning late? The latter are better drivers.
Edit: here are more tests,
- do they signal
- do they cutoff others
- do they let those who signal in
- do they drive too slow or too fast for the given road and conditions
- do they have an awareness of all cars around them
- do they block the passing lane
- do they maintain a reasonable distance behind other cars
- do they let emergency vehicles pass
etc.
nemacol
> and are generally unaware of their own shortcomings
> it must be a fundamental limitation on their capabilities for learning, thinking, or understanding
You said it yourself. Assuming people are doing something without being mindful and purposefully trying to improve then 50k miles on mental autopilot it is not a surprise that someone wouldn't get better at driving.
Without a desire to improve and/or being involved in a process that would give feedback then there will be no growth.
timewizard
Define "better?"
Making decisions that are better for the collective group?
Or making decisions that are better for them individually?
I think most of you assume the former when you should really expect the latter. Viewed through that lens both the set of problems and solutions should be obvious.
saghm
I feel like this hinges on the definition of what it means to be "bad" at driving; by definition, I'd argue that the average driver is average at driving, and around half of people are above average at it. If you think most people are bad at driving, I feel like the conclusion is "driving is hard", because there's not any secret set of platonic ideal drivers in real life to compare them to. Trying to measure by an objective metric like how many accidents a driver gets into can be useful, but drawing conclusions from that like "most people are bad at driving" won't be very meaningful for a similar reason to the ones the article dissects; the evidence is measuring something much more specific than the broad principle you're asserting.
(For what it's worth, I'm making this argument as someone who _is_ a bad driver, and that's a large part of why I don't drive anymore!)
dexwiz
Bad drivers are a poor example. Driving is an inherently social activity. It involves subconsciously predicting other people's behaviors. Each region has its own definition of what is the norm. This includes things like acceptable speeding, lane switching behavior, average distance between cars, etc. When reality differs from expectations, we label them as a bad driver.
But are they a bad driver? Maybe. Or maybe they are driving according to another region's expectations. So any time you see a bad driver from another region, or you are the one in another region, stop and think is it really bad, or just unexpected?
For this reason I ignore all claims of "People from X are terrible drivers." No, they just drive differently.
cjs_ac
The driving example is interesting, because I think there are two different groups of people assessing the 'goodness' of their driving and others' driving by two different standards. One group thinks a 'good' driver is one that is skilled at driving a car; the other group thinks that a 'good' driver is the one that does the 'nice' thing in any given situation. The 'skilled' drivers look at the 'nice' drivers and think that the 'nice' drivers are unskilled and display little interest in reaching their destination. The 'nice' drivers think the 'skilled' drivers are dangerous.
ihartley
I think the 50k miles estimate is probably pretty low given the average miles insurance companies assume most people drive per year is closer to 10k. Conservatively, that would place it closer to 200k miles by age 40.
I've always assumed the reason people don't get better at driving with that much experience is the reason people don't get much better at most of the things they do: they've never pushed themselves to the limit of their capabilities. While this can be dangerous in a car, it can be even more dangerous when you're put in an unexpected circumstance with no ability to respond calmly and correctly.
sunrunner
Is there something here about the role of (and lack of in this case) deliberate and intentional practice?
4.2 hours a week in a car doesn't imply that any of that time is spent doing things that may make one a better driver (by whatever standard we're measuring this), it's just repetion of the minimal amount of driving skill that's enough to get you by.
If it's not possible to increase one's skill in anything without practicing things that are just on the edge of capability then no amount of regular, unsupervisied driving without any critique targeted towards improvement is going to help.
rizzom5000
> Is there something here about the role of (and lack of in this case) deliberate and intentional practice?
Something like 50% of college graduates in the US are considered functionally illiterate, despite an enormous number of opportunities for intentional practice; and despite presumably knowing, at least somewhat, of the benefit of attaining more advanced literacy.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10928755
When I think of poor drivers, I think their incentives to become a good driver are much higher. After all, their own lives and the lives of their loved ones are at risk.
anonymars
Agreed. A friend of mine used the adage, "practice doesn't make perfect; practice makes permanence"
Unless you are striving to continuously improve, experience per se does not guarantee improvement
timewizard
> and are generally unaware of their own shortcomings
You don't see your own here? Are you honestly sitting on the side of the road and intentionally evaluating drivers according to some criteria? Or are you just allowing yourself to notice that which inconveniences you?
Do you ever take time to notice how _convenienced_ you are? How cooperative other drivers can be? How often the rules get followed even though there is no one around to enforce them?
> the author interacts with can think critically about a complex topic
People can. They let their emotions get in the way and they simply choose not to. Frustratingly they never seem to notice when this happens. They remember that they _can_ make rational decisions so they assume _all_ their decisions are rational.
The author seems to be projecting their own above average intelligence onto other people. He’s imaging their inner world to be somewhat like his when it’s anything but.
> but they’re intelligent when it comes to their own lives and the areas they work and spend time in. We should expect the average person to struggle with factual questions about abstract ideas and far-off events, but not so much about what’s right in front of them day to day.
This is cosmically untrue. My cleaners can’t work my vacuum. I’ve spent a year constantly re-explaining it. They can’t put the oven racks back the way they found them, just force them in the wrong way around every time. No number of reminders seems to help. My landscaper could not work out he had our landscape wiring crossed, spent days coming back replacing bulbs, digging up wires and replacing them, randomly rewiring sections. 5 minutes with a multi-meter and I had it solved. I know a nurse who thinks deoxygenated blood is blue.
The average person tries to memorize a handful of things from someone smarter and then stays in their lane. That’s fine, I don’t think we should call them “stupid” but capable thinkers and problem solvers they are not.
I try to frame it in my head that people aren't generally stupid, but that we do a lot of stupid things. Or we don't do things (eg. read, or think critically) that adds to our level of stupidity.
It's perhaps a privilege of being above-average intelligence, but these days I try to focus less on being smarter and more on being less stupid. I seem to get more bang for the buck.
I'm still pretty stupid, though.
My own anecdote:
I worked with a guy on military aircraft. He was a radar technician. He went to school for it. I also went to school for it. The school was pretty hard with a decently high washout rate, including a lot of 2 year EE graduates, for some reason.
One day, we're working on the flight line on a radar issue and he says something pretty stupid, but we're kind of buddies, so I ask him to elaborate.
Long story short, his belief was that radar tracked other (jet) aircraft airspeed by reading the reflections bounced off of the other jets' turning pistons and calculating airspeed by how fast their piston assembly rotated.
I was completely taken aback by the multiple levels of stupidity. If you think through it a little, there are multiple levels of fail there. I then had to explain how this particular system actually worked and work him through the ludicrousness of each step of his beliefs.
How he 1.) fabricated this elaborate theory from the relatively simple section of training ("measure latency of returned energy transmissions"), and 2.) made it through tech school without washing out, I'll never know.
The author seems to be pretending these people don't exist, and I think you made a good guess as to why.
That's hard to believe. Any nurse has drawn blood from veins and seen deoxygenated blood with their own eyes.
Students are often fully aware their use of ChatGPT is a bad idea. Like the gambling addict, that doesn't mean they stop. Forcing yourself to do your schoolwork has always been difficult, and they've been given a way out.
Often and fully aware? I sincerely doubt it. I’d bet it’s only a tiny minority of students who use ChatGPT who think it’s a bad idea.
Unlike the gambling addict, they can’t feel the immediate repercussions of their actions. Those will only be available in hindsight, long after they can correct.
Something I've noticed from time to time in my career is the following:
1. Someone does something they know perfectly well they shouldn't have done, but they think they won't get caught.
2. They get caught.
3. They feign ignorance or confusion about the rules, hoping to lessen their punishment.
4. The organisation takes their claim of ignorance seriously, and introduces incredibly patronising training/rules/signage.
A person who doesn't notice this happening could easily get the impression their peers have room-temperature IQs.
I don't find the author's argument, that students who essentially skip learning via LLM could avoid fairly being labeled "stupid", particularly convincing.
Not that I think it to be a particularly useful label, but I don't find awareness of self-sabotage to preclude one from such a label.
This is similar to how I believe the label "smart" alone does not carry much use.
Getting the job will depend more upon the grade and the network then it does upon any one homework assignment...
Is it stupid to do something perfunctorily when there is no direct evidence that a huge time& effort investment is going to pay off?
As far as we know there is no direct competitor in learning to doing it repeatedly, in different ways. Now whether a mixture of structured and truly unstructured learning is superior is another discussion.
And people being knowledgeable about what they do day in and day out seems like a good example of people being really good at habituation, but that's not "not stupid." Stupid is when people do the same things day in and day out and then use that as a crutch to say there's no other way to do that thing even when there's evidence in front of them that contradicts what their habituation has led them to believe. I guess you can read the first example as a political statement, but I'm not trying to make one, and the second one applies to everything under the sun, I think.
All that said, I think the author is only saying that when someone uses "most people are stupid" as an excuse but I don't think most folks actually ever say "most" people are stupid. Instead they point out that a decent enough chunk of people are stupid and that's enough to cause some issues.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying I'm not one of the stupid ones. Sometimes I am for sure
Another one that made the rounds recently was the one where they asked people to estimate what percentage of the population is trans, and the median answer was like 20%. There is no way this captures actual beliefs held by real people, it's a number so unaligned with basic reality that the only thing it points to is a flaw in the test.
My working theory is that a good chunk of the interviewees are uncomfortable being asked nerd shit like this and they just say whatever they think will make the game stop.
As for the 53% stat, dude just go to Walmart and talk to regular people [2]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-think-mino...
[2] https://youtube.com/shorts/e8s9-Qnx-_0?feature=shared
I really like this approach, but I tend to use a slightly modified version that is along the lines of "explain me why an intelligent person would do [dumb thing]".
I think this phrasing is more welcoming for a healthy discussion.
However, I do believe most people are uncurious. Since information is so cheap, it seems many people just reach for what feels good and doesn't risk their existing worldviews.
Maybe we could call it a local maximum, personally, although something of a disaster, societally.
This requires all of: being aware of a given problem, being sufficiently informed of the relevant context (which is further a matter of curiosity, discerning between trustworthy sources, and robust sense making), and finally caring enough to apply any attention and effort to the issue in the first place.
In this regard, almost everyone is "stupid' about everything most of the time. If anyone manages to achieve "smartness" it's usually in a very narrow decision space.
In terms of AI and education, the problem is: the path of least resistance is an optimal one - at least in a greedy sense.
The usefulness of the tool and "smartness" of the user are irrelevant to the core issue - general education is rapidly eroding. This is strongly correlated to (if not outright caused by) the ongoing rapid changes in technology.
The issue is that structured education originally meant: relying on your own wits, which in turn strengthened them. No cheat codes allowed.
This is no longer the case. Not only because of students using AI, but because "the path of least resistance" applies to educators and administrators as well.
Technology will change but educating people remains a fundamental good - to that end, institutions must adapt to make sure every student gets the proper enrichment they deserve. Get cheat codes out of education.
> We assigned participants to three groups: LLM group, Search Engine group, Brain-only group ... to write an essay. We recruited a total of 54 participants...
> We used electroencephalography (EEG) to record participants' brain activity in order to assess their cognitive engagement and cognitive load, and to gain a deeper understanding of neural activations during the essay writing task. We performed NLP analysis, and we interviewed each participant after each session. We performed scoring with the help from the human teachers and an AI judge (a specially built AI agent).
> We discovered a consistent homogeneity across the Named Entities Recognition (NERs), n-grams, ontology of topics within each group. EEG analysis presented robust evidence that LLM, Search Engine and Brain-only groups had significantly different neural connectivity patterns, reflecting divergent cognitive strategies. Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support...
And then: "...in this study we demonstrate the pressing matter of a likely decrease in learning skills based on the results of our study."
I'm not sure "likely decrease in learning skills" is quite right here.
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1
Although you could say we're idiots in the emotional sense.
And "If there is a use, there may be a product."
So, "Than if there is a product, people may use it, and after an unknown time they are likely or not to judge it, or say something about - if they like."
Had I get "been 'a human'" that wrong before ?
While saying "That i didn't get it before, if someone meant 'infinite' that instead ment 'unmeassureable', or?"?
...not?
Edited: Typo
"I think most people know what’s considered healthy food. They maybe wouldn’t be able to perfectly break down ideal ratios of macronutrients, but they have a rough idea. The average person whose bad diet is making them unhealthy would probably be able to point to the bad diet as part of the problem. If I walked up to the average person and asked them to make an ideal meal plan for themselves to be maximally healthy, I think most people would do a decent job."
This is why most of america is stuck in diabetes land. I bet you most americans couldn't tell you the difference between if something is high in carbohydrates or fat.
Example: I'd bet many people who are at least gen X grew up with PBJs as a staple food. It seems healthy enough: bread, peanut-butter, and a little jelly. However, today there's sugar added to the bread, sugar added to the peanut butter, and most certainly sugar added to the jelly, far beyond what it was when growing up.
If you aren't really careful when at the grocery store or making food from scratch, you can easily end up consuming a lot more sugar than you realize.
As a side note, there is good peanut butter that is just roasted peanuts and salt. It’s pretty damn healthy — much more balanced and healthier than most breads or jellies.
Here is one that is very common in the US:
https://www.costco.com/kirkland-signature-organic-peanut-but...
1) Even the obvious claims (and often especially these) deserve scientific verification.
2) Most people are dumb is not because they are missing the relevant information, but because they are failing to act upon the information.
3) The real magic is understanding and being able to predict higher-order effects. And then taking action which steers everyone towards a more desirable outcome.
People will keep eating junk food and writing essays with AI despite knowing that this will lead to unhealthy bodies and minds. Does this make them stupid? Yes it does. Knowledge is the ability to apply information and conversely stupidity is the inability to do so. Most people are indeed stupid and the only way to fix this is to change the system they are part of so they are no longer incentivized to make the stupid choices.
> they’re intelligent when it comes to their own lives and the areas they work and spend time in
Are people likely to get fat when they have easy access to a bunch of cheap food that is optimized for overconsumption?
Are kids likely to skip all necessary and/or useful preparation for adulthood, given the opportunity to watch porn or TikTok instead?
Are people likely to believe pseudoscience influencers over mainstream medical advice?
If you dig into these examples, you can explain each of them in more specific and illuminating ways. "Stupid" is just shorthand for the fact that we're not perfect rational optimizers of anything, including our own happiness.
(I think people twist themselves into knots trying to avoid using pejorative words like "stupid." I appreciate the good intentions, but I don't think it's necessary. I'm stupid a lot in my own life. Everybody is stupid sometimes. We're human beings.)
"Perfect" is too strong an hypothesis, but none of those behaviors are irrational per se.
People would rather be fit than overweight, but that's not the choice on the table. You can either make sacrifices now to be fit X time from now, or eat that ice cream and suffer later. The rational choice depends on the relative value you put on those things (and your discount rate, if you want to get really technical).
Taking the "wrong" side of the tradeoff could certainly qualify as being stupid, and as you note all of us would turn out to be plenty stupid if we started rigorously analyzing our choices, but this is a matter of people claiming to have preferences they don't actually have, as proven by the only thing that matters: their behavior.
However, you could also choose to believe their regrets, when they look back on their own choices and say that the pleasure than they gained from them did not repay the misery they suffered because of them.
If you choose to disbelieve their regrets, then maybe you would agree to label their regrets as stupid?
- I now have information I did not have at the time I made a choice that binds me now.
- I changed my mind.
Whether I believe it or not makes no difference because it contains no information.
As an aside: none of this is supposed to invalidate the experience of people having regrets, or struggling with addictions. If I see a friend getting drunk every night I won't go "ah, yes, they are correctly maximizing their utility according to their own discount rate and inter-temporal budget constraints". They are separate conversations, though, and we can have the kind of conversation where I help you solve problems or the kind of conversation where I just listen to you. They don't tend to mix well.
Consuming junk food and using LLMs to do homework are examples.
When it happens at scale one could call this stupidity.
Where is the article doing that? I.e. assuming that the students are sleep-walking into not learning?
It's obvious to the rhetorical everyone that students are using AI to cheat, and that they know that because of that they are not learning, and that they don't give a shit.
It makes my skin crawl to say this*, but the answer for most people on HN is probably "yes, they are."
* both because people in tech are prone to Paul Graham style 'nerd martyr' arrogance, and because I often read views that disappoint me here and I do not like to admit that an intelligent person can hold them
What gnaws at me is when someone has a system of beliefs that, to my mind, seems based on nonsense.
In politics, it's a red flag because it is often used to defend bad policies that only appear good when one doesn't have the fortitude to understand the better policy.
A lot more "intellectuals" defended Pol Pot and Milosevic compared to ordinary chums. The denial of the Cambodian genocide was known as the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia".
I can't think of a position on anything that someone couldn't twist into an appeal to 'common sense'
There are different cheap rhetorical devices that some intellectuals use. I don't like that either.
By a mathematical necessity, half the people can say “Yes, most people are stupider than me." without lying.
Journalists have spilt a lot of ink recently about arrogance in the tech community. They point out tech figures who mistakenly think their aptitude in one knowledge domain means they know better than experts in other domains.
That's one reason.
To produce plausible sounding statements on a complex topics without regard to their actual truth is almost a necessity for the opinion journalist (the predominant type of journalist of the modern era).
To be criticized for intellectual hubris by that class should be meaningless.
Is that enough, though?
Sure, lab rats are intelligent in navigating their mazes to get to the reward.
Students often cheat because they claim "they won't need to know this in the future", but school isn't about memorizing facts as much as learning how to research, learning how to communicate, learning to manage their time etc. When I think of someone who's "smart" by my definition, I would expect them to have all these skills that these students are (semi purposefully) avoiding.
Furthermore, - and this might be the sleepwalking bias - the conclusion that "I won't need to know this" is subtly against their best interests, because imagine for example, you spend $200,000 and 10 years to go to medical school, you "cheat" on everything, and pass only to find out, that DRs aren't in demand anymore because AI knows everything (and more that) you would have learned in school, so now the lay person just uses that instead. Wouldn't you have preferred to avoid wasting your time and do something niche that the AI doesn't know instead?
And of course - what are students typically doing instead of learning? TikTok, instagram, fantasy football, youtube shorts - all things that "we as a society" have decided are brain rot.
So it's hard to say that someone who choses things against their best interest for no real upside, who hasn't learned the skills to survive in society is smart by whatever definition
But it's the former metric that I care about.
The average person gets through their day, and that's great. I don't interact with them about that. It does not affect me one way or the other.
Their opinions about "abstract ideas and far-off events" do affect me. That's clearest every couple of years, when they vote (or fail to). In between, the results of their opinion are imposed upon me by literal force. The government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and those elections determine what is "legitimate". Just the threat of violence is sufficient to drastically affect my life.
I don't expect people to be experts. Democracy rests on the proposition that reality puts a thumb on the scale. If ignorance is randomly distributed, and the experts mostly agree, then you'll get the right choice most of the time regardless.
That's a pretty nifty proposition. It means that nobody has to designate who the experts are, which is fraught. But that presumption of ignorance being randomly distributed is dubious. People can easily become convinced of very bad ideas, and there are no good options for dealing with that.
You nailed one of the biggest concerns I have in the face of that, which is that we all have an equal say in how our society is ruled, despite clearly not being equally equipped to make good decisions. Of course, all the alternatives to that method of governance seem to be worse, so...
Umm, OK? I still don't get why, in the author's view, they do the bad thing on purpose, and why that is not stupid. (Perhaps the author might make say that doing a stupid thing doesn't make someone a stupid person, or something to that effect -- but, even if so, I don't see any sign of that argument in TFA.)
People advocating for drug legalization do the same thing for example.
Seeing that your essay is about people’s presumptions about one another, and you say that you lose respect for people based on their chat bot opinions without a lick of self-awareness around the topic of the essay it can be concluded that your overall thesis is that people that don’t like chat bots like you do are inherently less worthy of respect.
Then there's the more subjective ones, such as: 1. Does it appear this person has fully thought through the short term and long term ramifications of their actions? 2. Would I have done that specific thing in that specific scenario? 3. Would a member of my peer group reasonably concluded the same thing?
The author seems fixated on subjective definition 1, claiming that people should be assumed to have made decisions rationally and thoughtfully and that people are too harsh on those who lack specific domain knowledge.
I'm not sure why he thinks that all the empirical evidence we have of what I will summarize as nutritional illiteracy in the US should ignored or that high school and college students (two groups with a well documented history of ignoring long term consequences of their actions) should be assumed to be rational, thoughtful agents, but my only guesses are that he has never interacted with any of these people or that he doesn't care because this is just a leaping off point for his defense of AI (my money is on the latter).
Subjective definition #2 seems to be what most people use, which I feel is unfair.
I added subjective definition #3 because it's one I've talked about with my friends a lot. Due to the removal of human interaction from most menial tasks (self checkouts at grocery stores, delivery of most goods via Amazon, etc.) and the fact that everyone I work with and nearly everyone I live near has at least one advanced degree and a high income, I literally can go weeks without interacting with a single person with an IQ of less than 115, which must skew my definition of stupid somehow, and I believe I am far from alone in this bifuraction of society.
IMO, contemplating that would be a much more interesting article than creating a very self-congratulatory method to chastise those who aren't all-in on AI as our future.
> What are these results actually telling us that the average person doesn’t already know?
Nothing. It's a trivial claim, but does this imply we should not research it?
An enormous amount of effort in the hard sciences is dedicated to proving/stating:
* Claims that on their face appear trivial - like 1+1=2, or the "two points determine a line" postulate
* Things that seem obvious and hardly worth stating - like the pigeonhole principle, or laws of associativity/commutativity/distributivity
* Seemingly redundant re-phrasings of the thesis (every theorem, once it clicks)
But these sorts of mathematical rules become increasingly non-obvious when combined with each other. There is a reason the hard sciences works like this: you want to arrange knowledge hierarchically. You need to have a foundation of knowledge in order to do anything more complex.
The social sciences don't work like this, but they should. Whenever someone proves obvious things, they get told, "why are you wasting time proving that? Everyone already knows that." But psychology, with its replication crises, has a long way to go before it becomes like a hard science. You need to accumulate a hierarchy of proven foundations.
I guess that isn’t so surprising as most of us deal with people constantly and so our intuitive understanding of human psychology is actually pretty good.
But it does prove the value of constructing the scientific theory painstakingly and carefully out of tiny claims rather than trying to do something bombastic.
The ratio of those two values shows, in my experience, that a lot of people are not very good at things they spend a lot of time doing, and are generally unaware of their own shortcomings
The average American spends 4.2 hours a week in the car. A typical 40 year old american has driven around 50,000 miles. For someone to continue to be bad at driving after that much experience, it must be a fundamental limitation on their capabilities for learning, thinking, or understanding. Drive to work any given day in Denver and you will see that a large number of people suffer from those fundamental limitations.
This article seems to present a world where most people the author interacts with can think critically about a complex topic, and are interested in learning or improving themselves. I wish I lived where the author lives, because I have had multiple jobs across multiple countries and never encountered an average population like the author describes.
People driving and making decisions are error prone.
A simple test is to watch how people turn. Do they turn early potentially hitting the curb or cutting it too close to pedestrians. Or do they increase their radius by turning late? The latter are better drivers.
Edit: here are more tests,
- do they signal
- do they cutoff others
- do they let those who signal in
- do they drive too slow or too fast for the given road and conditions
- do they have an awareness of all cars around them
- do they block the passing lane
- do they maintain a reasonable distance behind other cars
- do they let emergency vehicles pass
etc.
> it must be a fundamental limitation on their capabilities for learning, thinking, or understanding
You said it yourself. Assuming people are doing something without being mindful and purposefully trying to improve then 50k miles on mental autopilot it is not a surprise that someone wouldn't get better at driving. Without a desire to improve and/or being involved in a process that would give feedback then there will be no growth.
Making decisions that are better for the collective group?
Or making decisions that are better for them individually?
I think most of you assume the former when you should really expect the latter. Viewed through that lens both the set of problems and solutions should be obvious.
(For what it's worth, I'm making this argument as someone who _is_ a bad driver, and that's a large part of why I don't drive anymore!)
But are they a bad driver? Maybe. Or maybe they are driving according to another region's expectations. So any time you see a bad driver from another region, or you are the one in another region, stop and think is it really bad, or just unexpected?
For this reason I ignore all claims of "People from X are terrible drivers." No, they just drive differently.
I've always assumed the reason people don't get better at driving with that much experience is the reason people don't get much better at most of the things they do: they've never pushed themselves to the limit of their capabilities. While this can be dangerous in a car, it can be even more dangerous when you're put in an unexpected circumstance with no ability to respond calmly and correctly.
4.2 hours a week in a car doesn't imply that any of that time is spent doing things that may make one a better driver (by whatever standard we're measuring this), it's just repetion of the minimal amount of driving skill that's enough to get you by.
If it's not possible to increase one's skill in anything without practicing things that are just on the edge of capability then no amount of regular, unsupervisied driving without any critique targeted towards improvement is going to help.
Something like 50% of college graduates in the US are considered functionally illiterate, despite an enormous number of opportunities for intentional practice; and despite presumably knowing, at least somewhat, of the benefit of attaining more advanced literacy. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10928755
When I think of poor drivers, I think their incentives to become a good driver are much higher. After all, their own lives and the lives of their loved ones are at risk.
Unless you are striving to continuously improve, experience per se does not guarantee improvement
You don't see your own here? Are you honestly sitting on the side of the road and intentionally evaluating drivers according to some criteria? Or are you just allowing yourself to notice that which inconveniences you?
Do you ever take time to notice how _convenienced_ you are? How cooperative other drivers can be? How often the rules get followed even though there is no one around to enforce them?
> the author interacts with can think critically about a complex topic
People can. They let their emotions get in the way and they simply choose not to. Frustratingly they never seem to notice when this happens. They remember that they _can_ make rational decisions so they assume _all_ their decisions are rational.
> I wish I lived where the author lives
Your experiences would likely not change.