{"id":87717,"date":"2019-02-13T17:02:25","date_gmt":"2019-02-14T01:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/02\/the-case-for-professors-of-stupidity"},"modified":"2019-02-13T17:02:25","modified_gmt":"2019-02-14T01:02:25","slug":"the-case-for-professors-of-stupidity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/02\/the-case-for-professors-of-stupidity","title":{"rendered":"The Case for Professors of Stupidity"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Where do I sign up!? \ud83e\udd2a.<\/p>\n

\n

On this past International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I reread a bit of Bertrand Russell. In 1933, dismayed at the Nazification of Germany, the philosopher wrote \u201cThe Triumph of Stupidity,\u201d attributing the rise of Adolf Hitler to the organized fervor of stupid and brutal people\u2014two qualities, he noted, that \u201cusually go together.\u201d He went on<\/a><\/a> to make one of his most famous observations, that the \u201cfundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russell\u2019s quip prefigured the scientific discovery of a cognitive bias\u2014the Dunning\u2013Kruger effect\u2014that has been so resonant that it has penetrated popular culture, inspiring, for example, an opera song<\/a> (from Harvard\u2019s annual Ig Nobel Award Ceremony): \u201cSome people\u2019s own incompetence somehow gives them a stupid sense that anything they do is first rate. They think it\u2019s great.\u201d No surprise, then, that psychologist Joyce Ehrlinger<\/a> prefaced a 2008 paper<\/a> she wrote with David Dunning and Justin Kruger, among others, with Russell\u2019s comment\u2014the one he later made in his 1951 book, New Hopes for a Changing World<\/i>: \u201cOne of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.\u201d \u201cBy now,\u201d Ehrlinger noted in that paper, \u201cthis phenomenon has been demonstrated even for everyday tasks, about which individuals have likely received substantial feedback regarding their level of knowledge and skill.\u201d Humans have shown a tendency, in other words, to be a bit thick about even the most mundane things, like how well they drive.<\/p>\n

Stupidity is not simply the opposite of intelligence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where do I sign up!? \ud83e\udd2a. On this past International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I reread a bit of Bertrand Russell. In 1933, dismayed at the Nazification of Germany, the philosopher wrote \u201cThe Triumph of Stupidity,\u201d attributing the rise of Adolf Hitler to the organized fervor of stupid and brutal people\u2014two qualities, he noted, that \u201cusually [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":501,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/501"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87717\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}