On Human Stupidity
Social media has given us a glimpse into the brains of our random acquaintances, with horrifying results
"Dunce-cap - Delapouite - game-icons" by Delapouite is licensed under CC BY 3.0.
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Let’s go back to 2007. Like many people at the time, my inbox was often full of invitations to join this new thing called Facebook. Many friends, colleagues, family members and random acquaintances were signing up and giving the site access to their whole address book, generating invitations.
When I finally joined, I already had plenty of “friends” on the site. For the first time in human history, I could see the innermost thoughts of a bloke who once sold me a kettlebell or a woman who sat behind me in history class when I was a teenager. The results were truly horrifying!
Evidence-free conspiracy theories were everywhere, as were strange worldviews; and most social users - including me - were very prickly when faced with any contradiction at all (something I later found out was due to cognitive dissonance). This reluctance to accept feedback meant that people became entrenched in odd positions. Over the years, I have had unsatisfactory conversations with three Facebook contacts, who had joined a bleach-drinking cult. None of them wanted to hear any criticism at all. One sadly died young. May he rest in peace!
In 2012, I joined Twitter (now X) and eventually stopped being an active user of Facebook (although I love WhatsApp, which was founded in 2009 and was bought by Facebook in 2014). The results on Twitter were simultaneously better and worse. On the one hand, I had some interesting conversations and made friends with some cool people who I might not have met otherwise. On the other hand, I got monstered by an army of Russian bots every time I criticised the movement for Catalan independence; and cybernats who supported the movement were almost as annoying, particularly when they started spreading conspiracy theories. I am pleased I survived various social media mobs, but it is not an experience I would recommend to anyone ever!
Around the middle of the 2010s, there was a lot of talk about the extent that social media was encouraging conspiratorial thinking. Many people assumed this to be the case, but I had my doubts. While doing the deep literature review that formed the basis of the Sharpen Your Axe project, I came across an interesting passage in Suspicious Minds by Rob Brotherton. In discussing the Great Fire of Ancient Rome, it had this to say:
Even before the embers had cooled, conspiracy theories began to spread. Suspicion immediately settled on the emperor, Nero… [who] had been thirty-six miles away in his hometown of Antium, when the fire broke out. When he got back to the city, he quickly organized shelter and food for the homeless masses. Yet his relief efforts earned him little gratitude from the public. Rumors were already spreading that while the city was burning, the young immature, self-involved emperor had been in Antium giving a singing recital…
Whether the fire was an inside job or not, and whether Nero really serenaded it with his lyre, we do know this: He was not happy to be the subject of conspiracy theories. In an effort to scotch the rumors, he came up with a conspiracy theory of his own. According to [historian] Tacitus, “Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the population.” False confessions were forced out of a few Christians, on the basis of which many more were rounded up. They were convicted, Tacitus reports, “not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.” Nero’s treatment of the scapegoats was ruthless. “Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths,” Tacitus reports. “Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”
In other words, the dawn of the social media age shone a light on an aspect of human nature that had always been there. Human stupidity acts as a constant background hum through the history of our species. If we want to be a little more polite, we could discuss how the conspiratorial mindset comes easy to us and is grounded in intentionality bias.
Let’s fast-forward to the present day. Ted Gioia is one of the smartest commentators on Substack. A music critic, he also has interesting thoughts on the cultural industries, as well as Big Tech in general and artificial intelligence in particular. In May 2024, he provided an excellent reading list on human stupidity. We have mentioned it before on the essay on Cleon (an ancient demagogue).
In today’s essay, I would like to discuss three books on the universality of stupidity from Gioia’s list. One is is Extraordinary Popular Delusions (first published in 1841) by Charles Mackay. A sweeping survey of delusional thinking, many of the most interesting chapters deal with subjects from speculative bubbles to alchemy, which cover wishful thinking and the way it can be exploited by con artists.
Another book on the list is The March of Folly (first published in 1984) by Barbara W. Tuchman. She suggests that stupidity is often due to “wooden headedness” or - in more modern terms - being resistant to feedback and/or particularly susceptible to cognitive dissonance (an uncomfortable feeling we all experience when faced with contradiction).
An unholy alliance between wishful thinking and resistance to feedback was on full display during the Catalan coup attempt. Supporters of independence fully believed that society would magically improve after separating from Spain by illegal means; and had to resort to conspiracy theories to explain away capital flight as multinationals and banks moved their headquarters outside Barcelona as matters came to a crux. Any feedback at all was seen as an excuse for a social media mob, as mentioned at the beginning of this essay.
It would be easy to sit back and feel smug at this point. However, a third point from Gioia’s reading list, In Praise of Folly (first published in 1511) by humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus, makes a deeper point. He says that folly (an old word for stupidity) keeps us sane in a dark world, particularly what he calls Self-love (or regarding ourselves as above average, against all the evidence). He quotes Scripture: “The number of fools is infinite.”
The collapse of Spanish liberal party Citizens (Ciudadanos in Spanish and Ciutadans in Catalan, often abbreviated to Cs) is a case in point. It was founded in 2005/6 to provide a voice to people in Barcelona and surrounding areas who were unconvinced by Catalan nationalism. After a slow and uneventful start, the party started to gain traction as the regional government moved towards secessionism around 2012.
The party defended sane positions like the ideas that nationalism isn’t progressive; while backing the position that constitutions and the rule of law are meant to keep citizens safe from leaders. Its high point came in 2017, when it came first in Catalan regional elections triggered by the central government to stop the regional government’s coup attempt, although C’s Catalan leader Inés Arrimadas wasn’t able to form a government afterwards.
However, as Erasmus had warned more than 500 years previously, stupidity is inescapable. The liberal party’s leaders also took a number of tactical positions that led to its collapse and eventual disappearance. Here are four examples:
In 2014, the party decided to contest elections throughout Spain rather than focusing on its core mission of defending constitutional democracy in Catalonia against populists;
in 2018, national leader Albert Rivera declined to back a vote-of-no confidence promoted by Socialist leader Pedro Sánchez (a decision that was poorly explained at the time and was misunderstood by many of his voters and potential voters);
also in 2018, the party pivoted from defending multiple overlapping identities to defending civic nationalism, complete with waving giant Spanish flags (something that enabled hard-right Spanish nationalists while turning off more thoughtful critics of nationalism who were the party’s base);
and around the time, Cs unsuccessfully tried to replace the Popular Party (PP) as the main choice of the centre-right rather than holding the centre ground and attracted liberal-minded voters from left and right.
What went wrong? Cs was perfectly correct in its criticism of the wishful thinking and feedbackphobia at the heart of the independence movement. However, stupidity is everywhere, and poor tactical decisions (along with a lack of commitment to the party’s core mission) meant that it ended up ruining its chances with the electorate, which in turn never gave it a chance to govern competently. The party has effectively disappeared as a result.
Imagine an alternative universe where Cs’ leaders avoided these stupid decisions. In this world, they kept their eye on the ball and decided to stay in Catalonia; kept criticising Spanish nationalism as well as Catalan nationalism; and worked hard on overcoming the structural bias that gives a greater weighting to voters in the countryside (where support for independence is strong) than those in Barcelona (where it is weak). Sooner or later, the party would have found a way to a majority or a coalition (one of the two major games of politics) and been able to implement a reformist programme in power to improve the lives of voters (the second major game).
Even so, what Erasmus called Self-love would be inescapable. The party’s leaders would no doubt have ended up congratulating themselves of being so marvelous. They would have found it increasingly hard to accept unwelcome feedback; and slowly but surely lost touch with the population. Power corrupts, as we all know. Stupidity would have won in the end even if the party had been able to stay in power for a decade or so, while implementing generally sensible policies much of the time.
If stupidity is inescapable in life, what are we to do? To conclude this essay, I would like to talk once again about scepticism, a view of life with its roots in Ancient Greece, which emphasises uncertainty and doubt (with an emphasis on self-doubt). As regular readers know, I fell in love with scepticism in the late 1980s as a young philosophy student at the University of Leeds. The philosophy deserves to be discussed much more often in a complex world awash with data, where much of the information we see is generated by algorithms.
I last discussed scepticism in depth back in February 2021 on my blog and in my book (published in October 2022). My subscriber base has grown by nearly 8x since the last blog post on the subject, so - with apologies to long-standing readers - I will repeat myself a little. Here’s a quote from my book on critical thinking:
Socrates was a stonemason [from Athens], who was both doggedly unopinionated and extremely argumentative. Around the age of 30, his friend Chaerephon visited the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. He asked the Oracle – the high priestess of Delphi who prophesized in the name of Apollo while in a sacred trance – if there was anyone wiser than Socrates. The Oracle replied that there wasn’t.
Socrates was puzzled by the answer as he didn’t consider himself a wise man at all. He began questioning fellow citizens of Athens with reputations for wisdom about their views. His probing questions uncovered mistakes, contradictions and strange assumptions in their worldviews. He gradually came to realize that he was wiser than others because he was aware of his own ignorance. He was quoted as saying that “the life which is unexamined is not worth living.” He also compared himself to a midwife, saying that under his questioning he could help other people deliver babies (or valid ideas), although more often than not these were stillborn.
Many of you will know what happened next. Socrates’ dogged questioning brought the stupidity, inconsistency and Self-love of his contemporaries into the sunlight, triggering massive cognitive dissonance in his peers. He was publicly accused of corrupting the youth and failing to acknowledge the gods of Athens. After being found guilty and refusing to plead for mercy, he cheerfully drank poison and ended his own life. His younger friend Plato later made him the star of his dialogues, which became the cornerstone of Western philosophy, along with the works of Plato’s own student Aristotle. Plato founded the Academy, the ancestor of modern universities, which eventually became home to academic scepticism.
The first formal school of scepticism had been founded by Pyrrho before the development of academic scepticism. He was a thinker from Elis in the Ionian Sea. Again, let me quote my book:
Pyrrho is said to have travelled East with the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great, who himself had been been a student of Plato’s student Aristotle. Some scholars have speculated that Pyrrho developed his views after coming across an early form of Buddhism in the East, although there is too little evidence to give a solid answer either way. When he returned, he developed his own school of Pyrrhonism. It is based on suspending judgement about abstract issues, while more or less conforming to the customs of society. Suspending judgement is actually a very good way of managing our sense of cognitive dissonance when faced by contradiction, even though the ancient skeptics wouldn’t have put it in exactly those terms.
Academic scepticism and Pyrrhonism influenced each other in complex ways; while members of the two schools also at times disagreed on fundamental principles on how to apply doubt and uncertainty. By Roman times, Cicero reports that academic sceptics were thinking about the world in probabilistic terms - one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of thought.
The power of scepticism is due to the way that it acknowledges the reality of human stupidity, while providing us with a provisional way out. Admit ignorance! Suspend judgement! Examine your views! Examine the views of your friends! Work out which view is more likely! Realise that many exciting ideas will be stillborn! Be aware of your own potential for stupidity!
This approach is much more powerful than it might seem at a glance. French thinker René Descartes grappled with scepticism during the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th Century, laying the foundations for modern philosophy. On the other side of the English Channel, John Wilkins and Joseph Glanvill developed the idea of “limited certitude” out of probabilistic scepticism. Wilkins later wrote the charter for the Royal Society, which first met in 1662, helping lay the foundations for modern science. Socrates’ observation many centuries previously that many ideas would be stillborn would become a central part of the scientific method.
Even modern probabilistic thinking grew out of the problems raised by scepticism. The Reverend Thomas Bayes was so troubled by the work of Scottish Enlightenment sceptic David Hume that he developed an approach based on a first guess with revisions based on feedback. Bayesianism is hugely popular among people who care about ideas nowadays, particularly in Silicon Valley, where philosophy is surprisingly popular. Being trained in doubt and uncertainty is powerful in a world governed by massive amounts of data and algorithms. Having said that, Elon Musk in particular should dig deeper into the literature about scepticism rather than just treating stillborn ideas as gospel!
It is worth repeating an idea we have discussed before. The word “scepticism” is often misused nowadays by people who describe themselves as “vaccine sceptics” or “climate-change sceptics.” The people who do this tend to have a very one-dimensional approach to scepticism. True scepticism not only encompasses doubt about vaccines or climate change, it also encourages doubt about anti-vaccine narratives and climate-change denialism, along with a healthy dose of self awareness about why contrarian views with weak evidence can be emotionally appealing to us.
Finally, scepticism can help us understand the power of liberal democratic institutions, which are based on the rule of law and the peaceful transition of power. We should expect a certain amount of stupidity from our elected officials, who are highly unlikely to attain a complete understanding of reality. Why not apply brakes to some of their wilder ideas? And get rid of incumbents once in a while?
At the same time, a sceptical attitude also helps us understand why markets work in a stupid world. You can test your ideas about new or improved products and services in the marketplace. A large percentage will be stillborn, to borrow Socrates’ phrase (which also applies to science, as mentioned earlier). Meanwhile, freely moving prices can embed and transmit information that isn’t available to any individual.
Please note that a stance that generally supports markets is not an endorsement of completely free markets or market fundamentalism. A market-based economy came late to our species; and it will always have its ups and downs, as well as limitations, with plenty of individual failure to boot. Some kind of welfare state will probably always be necessary alongside lightly regulated markets, just as it is sensible to have a few insurance policies to keep you safe even if you are healthy and plan on living for a long time.
The comments are closed, as usual when I discuss Catalan independence. If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Russian bots, cybernats and online mobs
Human nature, the conspiratorial mindset and intentionality bias
Con artists (part one, part two and part three)
Capital flight in Catalonia (part one and part two)
Nationalism is not progressive (part one and part two)
Nationalism and critics of nationalism
Massive amounts of data and algorithms
The rule of law and the peaceful transition of power
Why markets work and the welfare state
Further Reading (books)
Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories by Rob Brotherton
In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay
Ancient Scepticism by Harald Thorsrud
The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara W. Tuchman
Further Reading (blogs)
The Honest Broker from Ted Gioia
Krugman wonks out from Paul Krugman (the Nobel Prize-winning economist is very alert to stupidity in the public domain, particularly in Donald Trump’s incoming administration)
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