Dietrich Bonhoeffer on stupidity (1943)
platoscave.org
platoscave.org
> You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people, you have to do things that are arbitrary, and believe things that are false.
"Stupidity" seems so strongly associated with a motivation to identify with a particular group, in almost exactly the sense that I understand the old Sinclair quote about what a man will and won't understand when his salary is involved, that I wonder now if "stupidity" as a phenomenon is JUST social signalling to demonstrate group association. Or does it has aspects beyond social conformity?
I considered myself stupid when I came to this realization years ago. I recall thinking "why didn't my parents teach me how to be stupid to fit in?" Well, better late than never? The realization had some pretty significant effects on my life. It has enabled me to sympathize with people on a whole new level. It has brought me much closer to my family and made me better in all of my personal relationships, but at the same time it has made me feel so much more alone than I ever felt before.
That said, I’d recommend not lying to your children to the best of your ability. For us that means certain American traditions aren’t celebrated in our house (Santa, tooth fairy, etc.). That also means sometimes having tricky conversations regarding propaganda from “trustworthy” sources as they learn to understand more about the world.
Having age-appropriate conversations about subjects isn’t hard and doesn’t require lying. It does require having some idea of a child’s developmental level and reference to the subject at hand. You wouldn’t tell a 3-year old that smoking causes emphysema, but telling them that it could make you sick is true.
I also think this is especially true for religious families. Ultimately that is a decision for individuals to make. Parents can teach their kids to the best of their abilities, but kids will have to take that and choose their own way. (Comments about how religions are lies are unnecessary and unwelcome.)
Obviously, no one person can have a completely accurate view of the world and all subject areas, and that’s important to teach kids as well. “I don’t know” or “let’s learn more about that” or even “here’s what I think annd here’s what some other people think, what do you think?” are perfectly acceptable answers at any age. We’re all going to be biased in certain areas. As kids get older, I think letting them know the foundation of that bias (cultural, socio-economical, educational, etc.) may help reasoning from different perspectives.
And they know when you’re lying, eventually. Especially when you tell them something that isn’t something you believe.
But you often don’t have to lie to explain something that’s too complicated or not necessary for them to know, as a simple explanation is not a lie, even if it’s not completely true.
(That said, if you are good at switching demeanour to make it obvious to them that you're not serious, kids do often enjoy the absurd and ridiculous, so it can be fun to 'lie' to kids in that way by offering increasingly absurd explanations. But care must be taken to ensure they know you're not actually trying to mislead them!)
Interestingly enough, when a classmate's dad told my 1st grade daughter about the (Christian) god, she got home and asked me why people believe in false things like that. But, she still continued to believe in Santa and the tooth fairy as well as her imaginary friends, etc. I think that maybe she knows they also don't exist, but she's enjoying the fantasy and experience.
For example, it’s hard to find papers on heterodox hypothesis for climate change where a few good papers showing null results would help convince a lot of skeptics (although of course there will always be skeptics who distrust all academic data and are immune to changing their mind).
I’m probably past the point of jaded, but if there isn’t money behind it (and even more to be made), even if the results are valid, it will just be crushed by those with incentives to bury it (until, like tobacco for example, it can’t be ignored anymore).
I also think - and suspect TFA agrees here - that taking lunatics (or, more likely, the intentionally dense) seriously emboldens them, and lends their ideas the unearned merit of your efforts. Sartre had something to say about that, too.
Treating people like children leads to them acting like children. I am yet to see any evidence that discussion ‘emboldens’ them; rather suppression makes them angry and angry.
Also, I think this view aligns with TFA. Don’t try to convince stupid people because they will just be reactionary. All you can do is give them the evidence, but to do that you need to take their hypothesis seriously.
If you don’t have these experiments or debates, you have 0% chance of changing people’s minds. At least give them a chance.
It is a band-aid solution to the demarcation problem that simply doesn’t work. I wish more people would read Lakatos and do reviews using his research programme paradigm. It’s the most reasonable solution we have. Alternatives like peer review are just window dressing.
Yes? When I did science at school we repeated various experiments to prove various Newtonian principles. I'm pretty sure those are settled matters but still useful to demonstrate for educational purposes.
Treating people like children is exactly what many political leaders do to shepherd their own partisans into continuing to support them and it often works. Fearmongering, lies, emotions. Telling them they need you to protect them.
And are we pretending that the anti-vax movement is now perfectly transparent with information and acts like it's an adult debate where they simply make reasonable points? That this cause wasn't driven people who came into it already convinced, who never took the hypothesis of "this could be an effective way to vaccines" seriously at all?
Not every vaccine skeptic is spouting "it's going to rewrite your dna" or "they're tracking you with microchips" and "it's the mark of the beast" but the nutjobs are a quite significant fraction and none of them ended up there because they went looking for data on clinical trials and didn't find as much as they wanted to.
Some things that I often wonder:
- why are the fundamentals of philosophy not taught as part of standard curriculum?
- why do the fundamentals of philosophy not play a bigger role in journalism and mainstream/official discourse?
- why do few people wonder about this and other obvious(?) things? Might that be related to the preceding points?
- will this ever change, enough to carry the day considering our load of problems (known, unknown, mistaken, etc)?
It may(!) not help her, but it could help you realize that "the future" you are describing is not what you think it is, and if you can realize that maybe you would be better equipped to help your friend.
Rationality and optimism are very useful skills to have in one's kit.
Giving these very stupid views access to the same platform as any rational actor, placing them in the same context as - or even right next to - real actual science or history, is such a poor choice.
The best solution is long form debates where the whole thing is available, so each party cannot be taken out of context. If you don’t have these kind of debates people looking for heterodox views will find them anyway and an ‘entertainment’ industry spouting bullshit is created.
You don’t need to put all heterodox views in textbooks, but they shouldn’t be generally shunned because it is counterproductive.
You, like many "smart" people, have an air of confidence about you...but if you really think about it, you think there aren't people out there that couldn't absolutely ragdoll you on the intellectual equivalent of a Jiu Jitsu mat, if the above is the type of game you bring?
Conspiracists demand the lies.
Look how Fox News lost control of the Big Lie narrative. They (sort of) tried to tell the truth. Their audience rejected them.
Vaccine skeptics mostly fall into this category. I mention it because the author of this blog appears to be one of them.
I agree that more effort should be put into the "fringe" research to disprove these things, but I'm concerned that no amount of proof could ever help, which ironically is the point of this quote.
Painting this broad brush is not useful or based on evidence, it is simply the mainstream narrative.
But that doesn't sound like something that would be changed one bit by doing serious research into lunatic conspiracy theories like microchips for tracking in covid vacines...
Are there any actual examples of "serious research" into "lunatic conspiracy theories" (lunatic here being your word) changing the minds of people buying into those theories?
I’m just as worried about anyone with complete confidence as I am someone who immediately assumes evil ulterior motives. Over time, the probability of one having a medical procedure with overpromised outcomes or under-disclosed side effects approaches 100%.
Personally, I happen to believe there is, and I bet it might even be way easier to do than it may seem.
what you present is an anecdote of a few skeptics that are educated but it's by and large not the majority of these people that can't be swayed with evidence to the contrary. painting with this broad brush is based on evidence.
Additionally, mainstream scientific community is not something that shouldn't be challenged - quite the opposite. Just like any other community it is prone to corruption in every possible sense.
This corruption has long term consequences for society.
The philosophical attitude should be trying to understand. The way I think about it, if someone has been around for 1,000 years and yet is indulgently stupid then maybe I have some right to be angry with them, otherwise I should consider that they haven't been around that long and are understandably susceptible to the double ignorance of thinking they know what they don't.
"Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it."
This statement reflects a general observation present in Socratic (or Platonic and Xenophonic) philosophy that those with the most power and authority are basically by definition most responsible for changing things for the better. Without organization and attention people act on an individual level, and their apparent unreasonableness may be a concession to their limited circumstances.
"The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity."
"God" could be replaced with "Nature" for those of a modern, skeptical bent, but nevertheless can combine a humility resulting from an awareness of the limits of human knowledge with a confidence in greater meaning in virtue of the existence of humanity and the ordered cosmos itself.
Alternative interpretation: If someone has managed to be around for 1,000 years and you think they are stupid, then maybe your definition of "stupidity" is the wrong one.
I'd be surprised if they were.
It's better for one or two to think, and the rest to just do what they do once they've got it figured out. How many use microwave ovens, but have no clue about what principles they operate from?
And so evolution has gifted most people with a positively abysmal level of stupidity. They just don't need it, as long as some outlier pops up once in awhile. This isn't some personality flaw. No one raised them wrong, the education system didn't betray them, and nothing you do can fix it. Ever. Because they're all just horrifically imbecilic. And every time you see them do something that appears at first glance as clever, it really is just them imitating really well. They do it so well it manifests as the Flynn Effect on IQ tests.
What we still haven't come to grips with is that the internet and the information age have made propaganda and the ability to sway large swaths of the "stupid" (which I would more accurately call the uninformed credulous) exceedingly easy. Network effects cause this mob behavior to accelerate much more rapidly than before.
In Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World [2], he starts his book with an account of what Dietrich here would call the "stupid", a taxi driver that begins to question Carl in earnest about all sorts of conspiracies.
Carl shows through this exchange that it's not that people are stupid. Often many of the credulous are very intelligent, and curious. But what has happened is that our society has failed to teach critical thinking across the board, and has also failed in its ability to democratize education in a way the reaches everyone equally.
Public schools have been a failure in teaching critical thinking. Teachers are not versed or required to have standards in critical thinking skills. Our society also lacks a focus on childhood mental health, so children the most at risk often can't even begin to benefit from school, and will continue down the same paths as their parents. And so we are left with a perpetual problem that continues generation to generation.
If we fix our education and mental health systems, I believe a lot of the worlds problems will follow.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/06/20/1183289840/election-workers-a...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Da...
Chuds are chuds and will never change unless whatever it is suddenly confronts them personally and engages their emotions.
We just have to deal with the fact that our chud brethren are not to be excited or riled up and its best to simply change the subject when they say something ignorant.
Bless their little cotton socks.
Why ask of others what you yourself will not do (here I am referring to the hallucinations in the remainder of your message. Why you hallucinate reality, Homie? Why do you not "simply" stop doing that? Did you even realize you were doing it in the first place?).
I await my cultural scolding/education ("bad faith!", "HN is for "curious conversation" [only] - one account throttling for you!"[1], etc) with anticipation.
[1] Gee, might this sort of thing play any causal role in the grand scheme of why humanity is not as smart as it could be?
It's fun to think about anyways!
Is it likely the current tone of American political discourse is a result of so many taking this attitude and assuming their political opponents must all be stupid?
I think Carl Satan had a quote about folk valuing their ignorance at the same mark as others knowledge.
More than 50% of my extended family believes that humans and Brontosaurus lived together on earth within the last 10,000 years.
I'm pretty sure that a few of them also believe that the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust is much less than 6 million.
None of them are cruel or bigoted either. Many of them are ridiculously kind.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Name calling as a mean to dehumanize fellow humain beings (deceased or living), especially in the name of _objective-truth_ vs _stupid_ and/or _willfully ignorant_ appears to me as especially wicked. Unless one claims the typo excuse.
Point in case, coming to believe contrarian partie(s) to be less than human is a very well documented war propaganda tactic that only become socially acceptable as said contrarian and opposing parties settle for the idea that an upcoming battle has become inevitable.
This is where we're at now, at this point in time, when almost all voices who witnessed WWII horrors have passed. Brace yourself.
>The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
(my emphasis)
B was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi dissident, who was sent to a concentration camp in 43 and was hanged 2 years later as one of the last dissidents, by personal directive from Hitler.
For all other German speakers, here's the original: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Von_der_Dummheit
Just so -- it's as if you're debating with the ideology itself, really.
Curiously, this also matches my observation. I was and still am quite puzzled as to why that is
Socrates:... So if you have come across anyone worth mentioning, I should be glad to hear.
Theodorus: Well Socrates, I think you ought to be told... about a remarkable boy I have met here... Along with a quickness beyond the capacity of most people, he has an unusually gentle temper...I never thought a combination could exist; I don't see it arising elsewhere. People as acute and keen and retentive as he is are apt to be very unbalanced. They get swept up in a rush, like ships without ballast; what stands for courage in their makeup is a kind of mad excitement; while, on the other hand, the steadier sort of people are apt to come to their studies with minds that are sluggish, somehow - freighted with a bad memory. But this boy approaches his studies in a smooth, sure, effective way, and with great good temper; it reminds one of the quiet flow of a stream of oil.(...)
But personally I think that stupidity can be acquired in other way too - by anti-social acts like stealing or killing - some pathways in brain shoots down and some thinks start to be considered absurd and joke, literally logical deduction starts to giving other results... For example "justice" is common victim. Maybe it is psychological reaction but for sure it is life changing if you suddenly can't understand "bigger picture"...
Another common stupidity system is concentrating on what you feel and only on that, making it compass of your life... It's complicated because "feelings" are part of biological instructional and self-preservation mechanism.
Please don't make assumptions. Thanks.