My "Are you presuming most people are stupid?" test

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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

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.

Consuming junk food and using LLMs to do homework are examples.

When it happens at scale one could call this stupidity.

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.

"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.

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.)

Is that enough, though?

Sure, lab rats are intelligent in navigating their mazes to get to the reward.

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

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.

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

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.)

> 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.

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.