‘Stupidity is an Existential Threat to America’
Cognitive neuroscientist and author, Bobby Azarian is concerned about what he calls a "stupidity crisis" due to the 'celebration' of a bias, ignorance, overconfidence and numbed out sense of curiosity
Bobby Azarian, writing at Raw Story, pulls no punches about the dumbing down of our society. “What we are dealing with here is an epidemic of stupidity that will only get worse as (cultural, political) divisions continue to increase,” he says.
It’s pointed, rude, offensive analysis yet Azarian wants to explain.
“It may sound like an insensitive statement but the cold hard truth is that there are a lot of stupid people in the world and their stupidity presents a constant danger to others,” he says.
“Some of these people are in positions of power and some of them have been elected to run our country. A far greater number of them do not have positions of power, but they still have the power to vote and the power to spread their ideas,” Azarian adds.
The high-risk result is painfully clear to him.
“We may have heard of ‘collective intelligence,’ but there is also ‘collective stupidity,’ and it is a force with equal influence on the world,” Azarian contends. “It would not be a stretch to say that at this point in time, stupidity presents an existential threat to America because, in some circles, it is being celebrated.”
There is a reason for it and also, a smarter reaction, Azarian claims:
“When we can clearly see the social factors that are causing people to become increasingly stupid, our anger and hatred toward them should dissipate,” he asserts. “We do not have much control over our level of intelligence or ignorance — or our ignorance of our ignorance.”
Azarian doesn’t just complain. He recommends boundaries and limits and offers up potential solutions.
“… this does not mean that we should accept stupidity as the result of deterministic forces that are beyond our control. After gaining a deeper awareness of our own cognitive limitations and limited knowledge base, we should do what we can to instill this higher awareness in others.
“We must not just educate the public and our youth; we must teach them to become aware of their own ignorance, and give them the skills they need to search for more knowledge, and to detect when they or others are overestimating their knowledge or competency,” he proposes.
There is a reason that for all that he finds distasteful, dangerous and concerning there is still room for hope.
“We have good reason to be optimistic,” he writes. “A 2009 study showed that incompetent students increased their ability to estimate their class rank after being tutored in the skills they lacked. This suggests that we can learn a type of “meta-awareness” that gives us the power to more accurately assess ourselves and our own limitations.”
That is encouraging to him.
“Once we can do that, then we can know when we need to do more research on a given topic or to defer to experts,” Azarian suggests. “We can also get better at distinguishing between true experts and those who only claim to be experts but are really just demonstrating the Dunning-Kruger effect.”
That shortcoming is not something to feel bad about if we are willing to do something positive and responsible about it.
“An inability to accurately assess our own competency and wisdom is something we see in both liberals and conservatives,” Azarian writes. “While being more educated typically decreases our Dunning-Kruger tendencies, it does not eliminate them entirely.”
Risk remains, even if we feel our thinking, conclusions, statements, confidence in them and decision making is beyond question and logical and moral.
What Azarian proposes isn’t easy yet there is progress to be made through the process, with consistency and determination.
“That takes constant cognitive effort in the form of self-awareness, continual curiosity and a healthy amount of skepticism,” he says. “By cultivating this type of awareness in ourselves and making an effort to spread it to others, we can fight back against the stupidity crisis that threatens our nation.”
What is your viewpoint? Is his assessment and points made accurate, more likely than unlikely or false and why so?
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I wonder if what Mr. Azarian calls "stupidity" can be more accurately understood as lazy thinking. Becoming aware of our own ignorance is a vital aspect of creating a more knowledgeable society, but an even more vital aspect is that we need to become aware of our own laziness, our own lack of willingness to delve deeper, think more broadly, and question what we are told. I also wonder if the much talked about Dunning-Kruger effect is not as much an underestimate of our understanding but a laziness of people to accept easy answers. That would seem to better describe the reality that social factors are influencing people's decision making.