Stupidity as a Tribal Identifer
Kapoor has been thinking about stupidity-specifically, why people choose to believe stupid things-and has come to the conclusion that a great deal of stupidity is voluntary. Voluntary is different from native stupidity or simple ignorance in which one's honestly not bright enough to make a given decision, or makes a bad decision based on a lack of information. Voluntary stupidity is when one has good information and the intellectual capacity to process it, but chooses instead to come to a faulty conclusion and act accordingly.
People are already adept at embracing information that reinforces an existing belief system and rejecting information that challenges it; it’s called “confirmation bias” and everyone is prone to it. Intelligent people are particularly vulnerable because they can rationalize their faulty conclusions. Nobody likes to be wrong.
There’s more to voluntary stupidity than a fear of being wrong, however. Our tribal ancestry is still with us in the form of the shared speech, shared actions, and shared beliefs of the various social circles through which we move. Sufficient deviation in thought, action, or word can get one excluded from the tribe. As social creatures, part of our identity derives from our tribal identification. Excommunication from any of our tribes can be quite painful.
Stupidity is therefore a tribal identifer, a defense mechanism people adopt for social advantage. If you’re an OT III, you can’t go to Flag and point out that since Hawaii didn’t exist 75 million years ago, Source must have been wrong when he said Xenu planted frozen bodies around the island before nuking the volcanoes. You’d get declared and lose all your Scientologist friends! If you’re an American liberal, you’re liable to lose a few liberal friends if you point out that the modern deregulation trend & defense buildup began with Carter rather than Reagan; they’d rather believe Reagan was the Devil and Carter was some kind of liberal hero. If you’re a church-going Christian, you risk your social position if you say you accept the evidence for evolution or that having an abortion is a medical decision best left to physicians and their patients.
A recent example of really concentrated voluntary stupidity in politics was the fight over health insurance regulation. The President backed a series of regulatory reforms that consisted largely of recycled Republican ideas from 15 years ago-nothing revolutionary, just a few tweaks. It was an opportunity for a serious discussion. Instead, both conservatives and liberals locked themselves into narratives that were, frankly, stupid. Republicans were screaming about a government takeover of the health care industry (hoping that no one would notice that single-payer is good enough for our seniors, and socialized medicine is good enough for our soldiers). Liberals were screaming about back-room deals with Big Insurance (hoping that no one would notice that all political deals are struck in back rooms). And GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney hunkered down and hoped no one would notice that he had already backed a similar plan when he’d been a governor.
No rational discussion ever took place. After months of thud and blunder, the nation got mild reforms to be phased in over 4 years. It even included a six-month window in which health insurance companies could run rampant (Aetna ate Kapoor's raise, for example), but after that time the more onerous practices would be curbed. It wasn’t worth all the excitement or the stupidity.
It did, however, show that stupidity is contagious. People identify with people who exhibit similar interests. If you have religious objections to pre-marital sex, you may be persuaded to vote for candidates who promise to fund abstinence-only sex education. You may talk to others who feel the way you do, and convince them to vote for the same candidates. And when you are shown data that indicate higher rates of teen pregnancy in areas that adopt abstinence-only sex education, you will ignore it and continue to persuade people to support your preferred candidates.
There’s that confirmation bias again. Confirmation bias means that voluntary stupidity is self-reinforcing, so that it’s easier to become even more stupid. For example, if you reject the evidence for evolution, which has been settled science for a century, it’s easy to reject the evidence for global warming, which has been settled science for only a decade.
To maintain one’s beliefs in the face of contrary evidence, it becomes necessary to create explanations for why so many people would push such “lies”. One popular solution is conspiracy theory, which itself makes it easier to believe stupid things. If you believe that a government conspiracy killed JFK, it’s easy to believe that a government conspiracy committed 9/11. Once you’ve embraced the idea of all-powerful conspiracies, it becomes easier to reject any evidence that would force you to re-evaluate your beliefs because the sources of that evidence are part of the conspiracy. Before long you end up believing that Communists are fluoridating the water to contaminate your precious bodily fluids.
In short, voluntary stupidity leads to madness, and as mentioned before it is confirmation bias that leads to stupidity.
Confirmation bias means that the easiest person to fool is...yourself. Scientists know this, and combat it with rigorous implementation of the scientific method. Hypotheses are constantly checked against new data, and work is subjected to critical examination by other scientists. When experts with completely different points of view can look at the data and agree on a conclusion, then that conclusion is probably correct (for varying values of “correct”).
The scientific method can be used to combat voluntary stupidity. However, it requires embracing a certain degree of uncertainty: “I think X about Y, but I may be wrong.” In general, people aren’t comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. It takes time and patience to embrace it. You may end up feeling more vulnerable, feeling lost in an unfamiliar world.
But you’ll be able to handle it, because you’ll be smarter.
People are already adept at embracing information that reinforces an existing belief system and rejecting information that challenges it; it’s called “confirmation bias” and everyone is prone to it. Intelligent people are particularly vulnerable because they can rationalize their faulty conclusions. Nobody likes to be wrong.
There’s more to voluntary stupidity than a fear of being wrong, however. Our tribal ancestry is still with us in the form of the shared speech, shared actions, and shared beliefs of the various social circles through which we move. Sufficient deviation in thought, action, or word can get one excluded from the tribe. As social creatures, part of our identity derives from our tribal identification. Excommunication from any of our tribes can be quite painful.
Stupidity is therefore a tribal identifer, a defense mechanism people adopt for social advantage. If you’re an OT III, you can’t go to Flag and point out that since Hawaii didn’t exist 75 million years ago, Source must have been wrong when he said Xenu planted frozen bodies around the island before nuking the volcanoes. You’d get declared and lose all your Scientologist friends! If you’re an American liberal, you’re liable to lose a few liberal friends if you point out that the modern deregulation trend & defense buildup began with Carter rather than Reagan; they’d rather believe Reagan was the Devil and Carter was some kind of liberal hero. If you’re a church-going Christian, you risk your social position if you say you accept the evidence for evolution or that having an abortion is a medical decision best left to physicians and their patients.
A recent example of really concentrated voluntary stupidity in politics was the fight over health insurance regulation. The President backed a series of regulatory reforms that consisted largely of recycled Republican ideas from 15 years ago-nothing revolutionary, just a few tweaks. It was an opportunity for a serious discussion. Instead, both conservatives and liberals locked themselves into narratives that were, frankly, stupid. Republicans were screaming about a government takeover of the health care industry (hoping that no one would notice that single-payer is good enough for our seniors, and socialized medicine is good enough for our soldiers). Liberals were screaming about back-room deals with Big Insurance (hoping that no one would notice that all political deals are struck in back rooms). And GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney hunkered down and hoped no one would notice that he had already backed a similar plan when he’d been a governor.
No rational discussion ever took place. After months of thud and blunder, the nation got mild reforms to be phased in over 4 years. It even included a six-month window in which health insurance companies could run rampant (Aetna ate Kapoor's raise, for example), but after that time the more onerous practices would be curbed. It wasn’t worth all the excitement or the stupidity.
It did, however, show that stupidity is contagious. People identify with people who exhibit similar interests. If you have religious objections to pre-marital sex, you may be persuaded to vote for candidates who promise to fund abstinence-only sex education. You may talk to others who feel the way you do, and convince them to vote for the same candidates. And when you are shown data that indicate higher rates of teen pregnancy in areas that adopt abstinence-only sex education, you will ignore it and continue to persuade people to support your preferred candidates.
There’s that confirmation bias again. Confirmation bias means that voluntary stupidity is self-reinforcing, so that it’s easier to become even more stupid. For example, if you reject the evidence for evolution, which has been settled science for a century, it’s easy to reject the evidence for global warming, which has been settled science for only a decade.
To maintain one’s beliefs in the face of contrary evidence, it becomes necessary to create explanations for why so many people would push such “lies”. One popular solution is conspiracy theory, which itself makes it easier to believe stupid things. If you believe that a government conspiracy killed JFK, it’s easy to believe that a government conspiracy committed 9/11. Once you’ve embraced the idea of all-powerful conspiracies, it becomes easier to reject any evidence that would force you to re-evaluate your beliefs because the sources of that evidence are part of the conspiracy. Before long you end up believing that Communists are fluoridating the water to contaminate your precious bodily fluids.
In short, voluntary stupidity leads to madness, and as mentioned before it is confirmation bias that leads to stupidity.
Confirmation bias means that the easiest person to fool is...yourself. Scientists know this, and combat it with rigorous implementation of the scientific method. Hypotheses are constantly checked against new data, and work is subjected to critical examination by other scientists. When experts with completely different points of view can look at the data and agree on a conclusion, then that conclusion is probably correct (for varying values of “correct”).
The scientific method can be used to combat voluntary stupidity. However, it requires embracing a certain degree of uncertainty: “I think X about Y, but I may be wrong.” In general, people aren’t comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. It takes time and patience to embrace it. You may end up feeling more vulnerable, feeling lost in an unfamiliar world.
But you’ll be able to handle it, because you’ll be smarter.