28
votes
The rise of elevated stupidity - America’s hot-take economy has created a kind of smart that is indistinguishable from stupid
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- Title
- The Rise of Elevated Stupidity
- Authors
- Dave Holmes
- Published
- Jun 11 2021
- Word count
- 1801 words
Every time I am recommended a podcast, I visualize this article. It is so goddamned exhausting to be alive and to know that half the things I know are not even entirely true.
There's a really good quote in this article that summarizes this feeling, actually:
"We fall prey to Elevated Stupidity because we’re tired. Our best selves tell us to challenge our existing biases, to read the works of people whose experiences do not match our own, to engage with fresh perspectives. But you’ve met us, and you know we’re not going to do that. We’re overwhelmed and inundated with content, and as human beings, we’re desperate to do the minimum amount of research that allows us to keep on believing what already makes us feel good about ourselves. So we subcontract the reading and the thought."
I just want to play video games and fall asleep at 7pm, but after chores, I have a duty to figure out why it is that a copy of a copy can never be anything like the original. I can see why people give up.
I’m certainly much better at selecting what I read than before. But I wish I could have an objective way to tell who’s full of shit.
It’s so depressing to hear someone you’ve read or heard a lot from talk about something you know about and realize their confidence has been dishonest all along. I guess the best metric for bullshit is confidence. Listen to a particle physicist talk about a nearly confirmed theory. You’d get the impression that the Higgs Boson was a crackpot idea 10 years ago. In reality you could have been more certain of its existence than you are of most things you commit to every day.
is the absence of verifiable references and citations.
See also : bibliography.
Unfortunately - and I think this is the point of the article - people can be very adept at copying trusted ways of presenting information while still being disingenuous. It is possible to copy the style (including bibliographic references) without actually improving the quality of the material.
There are many ways of doing this: reference another work but inaccurately portray what the document you are referencing says. Cherry-pick examples from literature that paint a picture contrary to the general trend. Cite widely discredited information but don't mention that it is discredited. Reference other false news / misleading material from one of the many other people in your bubble - perhaps even from your own network. Start a new think tank or 'peer reviewed' scientific journal where reviewers are pre-screened to be people who support your viewpoint, with policies that reject any opposing views (see: Journal of Creation), and everyone can start citing that.
So I'd say the presence of a bibliography is not a reliable metric - and verifying the citations would require recursively verifying the graph of referenced documents, which eventually becomes an impossible task.
I don't know if you've ever talked to a Conspiracy Theory person before, but they are chock full of references and citations. They barely have any thoughts of their own, just an insistence that you read 12 meandering articles and watch several hours worth of YouTube videos before you can even understand WTF they're talking about.
Often genuine experts don't bother citing things for random comments online because whatever they're explaining to us non-experts is so basic level for them that they probably can't remember when or how they learned it.
Funny and insightful commentary on the hot take economy.
Try viewing it on incognito, I was able to access it no problem. If that doesn't work, there's always outline.
Firefox reader view worked for me