"... 'Art': 'Leads to poorhouse. What use is it, since machines can do things better and quicker?' ... 'Bird': 'Wish you were one, saying with a sigh: "Oh, for a pair of wings!" This shows you have a poetic soul.'... By mocking these thoughts, we push ourselves past them. From this perspective, our sense that we’re getting stupider may simply reflect our determination to be smart."
Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Are We Getting Stupider? Stupidity is eternal—and more complex than we think" (The New Yorker).
"Dictionary of Received Ideas' — link goes to full text — is one of the few books that has its own tag on this blog: here. It's long been one of my favorite books, and you may have noticed my various proposals for entries in a new Dictionary of Received Ideas. If you get Flaubert's idea, maybe you can help me write this volume for my shelf of Unwritten Books.
Actually I don't think Rothman conveys Flaubert's idea accurately. Here's a new New Yorker piece from 2013 (by Teju Cole), which explains the "Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues" like this: "What galls Flaubert most is the inevitability, given an action, of a certain standard reaction. We could learn from his impatience: there are too many standard formulations in our language. They stand in place of thought, but we proclaim them each time—due to laziness, prejudice, or hypocrisy—as though they were fresh insight."
Anyway, what's Rothman's point about our possibly becoming stupider? He writes:
[O]ne of the problems with the discourse of stupidity is that it can feel reductive, aggressive, even abusive. Self-humiliation is still humiliating; when we call one another stupid, we spread humiliation around, whether our accusation is just or unjust. In a recent post on Substack, the philosopher Joseph Heath suggested that populism might be best understood as a revolt against “the cognitive elite”—that is, against the people who demand that we check our intuitions and think more deliberately about pretty much everything. According to this theory, the world constructed by the cognitive élite is one in which you have to listen to experts, and keep up with technology, and click through six pages of online forms to buy a movie ticket; it sometimes “requires the typical person, while speaking, to actively suppress the familiar word that is primed (e.g. ‘homeless’), and to substitute through explicit cognition the recently-minted word that is now favoured (e.g. ‘unhoused’).”...
He's describing a political power struggle, and it's one that the "experts" have been losing lately. People are not so easily conned by getting called "stupid" anymore. It may have once inspired silence and deference, but those days are over.
पोस्ट्स
६८ टिप्पण्या:
Well you write for the new yawker 'theres your sign'
Sorry, I had "People are so easily conned" for a few minutes. There needs to be a "not": "People are NOT so easily conned." Fixed.
If you believec th kavanaugh rape libel and the russia hoax brought by the same writer
Flaubert was writing at a time when it was the intellectuals who would shock the common folk with their lack of regard for the conventional pieties. Now it's the other way around.
"there are too many standard formulations in our language. They stand in place of thought, but we proclaim them each time"
If I had a nickel.
Stereotype and cliche name the same printing machine part.
Children learn language through learning to disassemble and reassemble cliches.
The mistake was almost inevitable: “People are so easily conned” is a cliché’d expression of one of the most widely believed of today’s received ideas.
Received ideas are big on right wing comment sections.
Derrida is the way out. Keep the idea but work with it enough to see that it has problems. Things that are slightly wrong. Not that there is a better alternative, but a property of language is at work.
Reworking is an ongoing process.
Derrida is the destruction of reason
Stupidity is eternal—and more complex than we think"
Well that's just stupid. Stupidity is no more real than poverty--that is, it is completely relative; it is whatever we say it is.
Like poverty, you can have as much or as little as you like simply by defining it with your preferred results in mind. It will never be eradicated if you don't want it to be. It can be eradicated today if that's what you want.
"Derrida is the destruction of reason"
There's a received idea. Or you could ask somebody who's read through several shelf feet of Derrida for pleasure.
Guys, read Derrida's _Spurs_ (skip the preface by somebody else), very short. Women would prefer "The Post Card." Good introductions that suggest there's something worth working for in harder texts.
„Mit Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens“ - Friedrich Schiller.
Althouse quotes...
Actually I don't think Rothman conveys Flaubert's idea accurately. Here's a new New Yorker piece from 2013 (by Teju Cole), which explains the "Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues" like this: "What galls Flaubert most is the inevitability, given an action, of a certain standard reaction. We could learn from his impatience: there are too many standard formulations in our language. They stand in place of thought, but we proclaim them each time—due to laziness, prejudice, or hypocrisy—as though they were fresh insight."
George Orwell says it (more evocatively)...
As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
- Politics and the English Language
The inability of stupid people to recognize their own limitations leads them to overestimate their own competence. Same as mentally ill are unaware of their mental health disease or that their behavior shows the symptoms of mental illness. Mentally ill people don't acknowledge their illness that's why they refuse to take meds that would help them. If one is stupid and mean, they are mentally ill.
'’Art': 'Leads to poorhouse. What use is it, since machines can do things better and quicker
…as an asset class the rates of return on fine art have beaten returns on all traditional asset classes including equities and even private equity by a substantial margin. Wanna know the asset class surpassing returns of all others? Chinese porcelain…
There is an intellectual gamesmanship where insane ideas like cashless bail have purchase
Unilateral disarmament pushed by jonathan schell in the 80s
Economics prefers the term rational. People are not always rational…and as such so economics doesn’t always prefer the term rational….
Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics, Explained
The current model of the mainstream media is to use "fake news" to create "received opinions" that favor their political allies. Also called creating a narrative.
For example:
"...Donald Trump going over the heads of his scientific advisers to suggest that injections of disinfectants might treat COVID."
That's from Rothman's column on stupidity.
Also, "I felt stupid, obviously—so stupid that, afterward, I could barely concentrate on the heavy weights I was lifting."
Josh, the internet has your picture. You aren't lifting "heavy weights."
How big is the sign also it was chris cuomo who had the quack who injected a bleach solution
[Uncle Hamilton] was always lost in the shuffle conversationally, so that in any group discussion all you heard from him were the beginnings of statements, the rest being trampled or drowned out by more definite types, such as we all were here. So that in memory now I can hear him saying "If you ask my opinion," but not the opinion; "what the whole thing boils down to," but not what it boiled down to; "experience has taught me," but not what it did - and so on. ... "The trouble with Hollywood," Uncle Hamilton said...."you'll find in the long run"
Peter DeVries, Vale of Laughter
You can watch this play out in real time as they turn Brian Cole into a Trump supporter. A white one!
Well that involved serious brain damage
I'll run this by y'all. I use a specific definition for stupidity when I'm at work to get a point across.
"Stupidity is the refusal to learn from experience. It's a conscious choice."
"Stupid" isn't an IQ deficit. People with low IQs may make poor decisions when confronted with a new situation, or may take longer to learn from experience. For people with normal or high IQs, what's the excuse? There ain't none. You stupid.
I've seen Forest Gump.
Lockdowns were also another 'received idea' pushed by the 'right people'
Regarding the "received idea", IMO we're all standing on the shoulders of giants, and not speaking strictly of philosophy either. Simply adding to the corpus - of anything - is a rare and spectacular privilege. Conservatives like Twain and Chesterton stood on the shoulders of Voltaire and Pascal as much as Voltaire and Pascal stood on Cicero and Zeno.
Common sense disguised as earthiness is still common sense, and I'm not even an old country lawyer.
Ann Althouse said...
Sorry, I had "People are so easily conned" for a few minutes. There needs to be a "not": "People are NOT so easily conned."
Meh, either was captures a significant chunk of present-day humanity.
either way, that is.
Megan Basham on X: "I asked @Worldrelief about their condemnation of President Trump’s order to further vet immigrants coming in to the U.S. from terrorist states. They say they stand behind their statement. Again, one day before an Afghan national that World Relief settled opened fire on two https://t.co/GskpTx3Gju" / X https://share.google/zQgC6Bxr3XwMTC6aw
There are some good 'received ideas' and stupid ones
Rabel said, "You can watch this play out in real time as they turn Brian Cole into a Trump supporter. A white one!"
Literally front row seats to the death of a worldview. Narrative collapse explains almost everything we see now. They're dying...albeit slowly.
It isn't that people are getting "stupider" as a species. It is that we no longer teach or encourage people to think on their own. To be aware of surroundings. Use our survival instincts. Failure to use critical thinking, logic and learn from experiences.
Instead we "google" the answer or use AI Bots, Grok to think for us. Accept as real every statement made, every photograph, video seen. Regurgitate the pablum and propaganda fed to the public. Useful idiots abound.
Sometimes the average person's reaction is the correct one. The desire to show you're smarter than everyone else. To always be contrary to the masses, is neither smart nor clever.
Being your own person means agreeing with popular taste and attitudes when they are correct.
You see this a lot with leftwing critics over the years. If average white people liked X, then they didn't. And vice-versa.
And some of them project that back in time. Honest to god, I was reading some critic who was snarking about the Beverly Hillbillies and I love Lucy, and how much better The Dick van Dyke show was. Like DvD was Picasso of TV sitcoms.
Thems fighting words (lucy is timeless)
Sometimes received ideas stay that way for a reason. Check out Kipling’s "The Gods of the Copybook Headings".
Useful idiots abound.
Also the useful idiots tend to group together...live in a bubble...and wallow in "group think". Refusing to accept or even consider that their might be more to the world than what is in their narrow scope. Reinforcing the idiocy through mutual feedback.
Ann Althouse said...
"Sorry, I had "People are so easily conned" for a few minutes. There needs to be a "not": "People are NOT so easily conned." Fixed."
Now, a sucker is born every minute and a half.
I often need to explain how heuristics in thinking and speaking work. Being shortcuts, heuristics save mental energy but for the lazy or cognitively challenged, they become unchecked habits of thinking and speech. Understanding this inborn habit and questioning them is creative and freeing. Many others will think your words are daft though because they only understand heuristics thoughts. Creative thought is puzzling. Just reading a biography of Flaubert at the moment.
To translate Frederic Schiller in an 1801 play "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."
Or the Jewish proverb that when the Messiah comes the sick will be made well but the fools will still be fools."
The American "cognitive elite" has got out over their skis due to the weight of their swelled heads.
“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
the people who demand that we check our intuitions and think more deliberately about pretty much everything
The "élite" (I like that it has the accent in one instance and not in the other - that's some deep thinking there) would certainly like to think that's what they're doing. But isn't one present theory of cognition that everything we think that we think is really an ex post facto justification for what amounts to a brain reflex?
I'm not of that extreme a school - I do think that we possess free will. But it's obvious to me that we don't exercise it nearly as much as we think we do; we run on algorithms a lot of the time -"élites" as much as anyone else. They (or perhaps, given the general degree of higher education in this commentariat, "we") might be better at believing that free will is at play - a belief that could be eupemistically termed "greater self-awareness" even though it's pretty much the opposite.
"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."
Or...You can't fix stupid.
John Wayne. Life is hard...its harder if you are stupid.
As others have said...sometimes stupid is a choice.
That might have been dean in animal houses line
https://x.com/Rightanglenews/status/1997015447770693785
We stand on the shoulders of giants, and shit all over their heads.
While we are on the subject, I could recommend The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce.
https://www.thedevilsdictionary.com
tcrosse just beat me to the punch on Bierce. I had just gone to the online version of it. One advantage of The Devil's Dictionary is that it was written in English, rather than translated, which means that it is our own cliches rather than translated French ones.
We could learn from his impatience: there are too many standard formulations in our language. They stand in place of thought, but we proclaim them each time—due to laziness, prejudice, or hypocrisy—as though they were fresh insight.
God I can think of dozens of these that are constantly spouted by lefties, without scarcely even trying.
"If it saves even one life, it's worth it!"
"Make the rich pay their fair share!"
"We have to save Our Democracy!"
I am sure my side has some of our own, but I guess it is in the nature of these things that they are hard to recognize within ourselves.
George Orwell says it (more evocatively)...
Nice catch, Wince. You are an educated man.
We have an unspoken agreement with the giants, Narr. We get out of the way of their semantic fallacies, and they overlook us shitbirds and our philosophical feces.
I was reading some critic who was snarking about the Beverly Hillbillies and I love Lucy, and how much better The Dick van Dyke show was. Like DvD was Picasso of TV sitcoms.
Isn't it obvious?
Van Dyke is a flaming leftist and outspoken Bernie Bro, while Buddy Ebsen was a Republican who supported Barry Goldwater, and Desi Arnaz was of course a refugee from Castro, a lifelong Republican, a stout-hearted enemy of Communism, and an American patriot of the sort only a grateful immigrant can be.
No other factors are considered by the media jackals when evaluating an entertainer's ouevre these days. The opinions of these worthless lice are of interest to me only as an endorsement of those they damn.
For the record, I think Beverly Hillbillies far outclassed both of the others, perceptively poking fun at poor country bumpkins and rich city slickers alike.
some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.
Attributed to Orwell
Desi may have been a Republican but Lucy's family were serious communists.
In a recent post on Substack, the philosopher Joseph Heath suggested that populism might be best understood as a revolt against “the cognitive elite”—that is, against the people who demand that we check our intuitions and think more deliberately about pretty much everything.
I think Heath has it right. I think Rothman has misconstrued it. I find that my intuition is to assume that whatever the "elite" is peddling is bullshit, and to think deliberately about whether there is any merit to it. Generally there is not.
I believe that R. Emmett Tyrell used to do a monthly column in The American Spectator called "The Conventional Wisdom" and subtitled "Among the Intellectualoids." It was just a collection of quotes from the "elites." No comments. It was hilarious.
I think the beverly hillbillies (at least for the first 2 years - about 70 episodes), was damn funny. Irene Ryan was incredible. The problem is it went on, and on, and on, and on. Just like Betwitched it was a static comedy that just went on too long.
BTW, I just looked it up. The ratings for the two years were about 35. which means 35 percent of the USA was watching it.
I love lucy is still funny. But even it was wearing thin after about 150 episodes. Desi was the brains behind the whole thing.
Lucy was no red, just a redhead. And a fake one at that.
BTW, I just saw her in a serious movie "5 came back" from 1939. She was good as a serious actress, but you can watch her perform, and see how just a different vocal inflection or look on her face could make a serious line a funny one.
The problem with that line of argument is the embedded assumption that the people who are running things right now are cognitively "elite." They are not. Not even close.
And there are good reasons for that. People with elite-level IQs are generally terrible leaders--even when they're not socially maladjusted--because they're usually bad communicators and terrible at motivating others. They tend to confuse their own prejudices with logical conclusions, and they are extremely prone to believe that high intelligence and expertise in one domain confers expertise in other domains.
The cultural world we're living in right now has been constructed by midwits for the benefit of midwits.
Imposing elaborate procedures on otherwise simple actions is midwitism, as is lawyering actions that don't need to be lawyers (buying movie tickets). Insisting that people replace simple language ("the familiar word that is primed") with euphemisms ("the newly minted term") is midwitism. Indeed, changing the names of things is the absolute ESSENCE of midwitism.
And midwitism is ok. Midwitism is probably the best we can hope for, as there are a LOT of midwits and exceedingly few cognitive elite. Midwitism is generally kept under control by the combination of the stubbornness of the bottom 40% of the IQ distribution, who can often prevent destructive ideas simply by not being able (or refusing) to implement them, and the judgment of the real elite, who can use tools of persuasion to steer midwits away from disaster.
Unfortunately, information technology has upset the balance in multiple ways, giving some actual cognitive elites WAY too much power (from giving them so much money), and making midwits think they are much smarter than they actually are.
Unfortunately, the kind of rebalancing that we need tends to only come when there's an existential threat--almost always war--to the particular society.
Look IQ only gets you so far. Just because you can understand high level math/physics or dazzle everyone with high verbal IQ doesn't mean you are wise. Or have good opinions or beliefs on a whole range of things.
First, intelligence unsupported by learning or experience is worthless.
Second, your smarts are irrelevant if they are clouded by your emotions.
Third, a smart person can use his intelligence for good or evil.
Fourth, crazy smart people can do a lot of damage to society.
Fifth, lots of areas of life only require an above average IQ. I doubt Einstein even if he wanted to, could have fixed his car, or coached the Princeton Football team better than the people who did it.
It's long been one of my favorite books, and you may have noticed my various proposals for entries in a new Dictionary of Received Ideas. If you get Flaubert's idea, maybe you can help me write this volume for my shelf of Unwritten Books. "
Maybe there could be an Althouse feature where you present some words and we fight for our own version of the received stereotype. I'd be in.
Speaking of stupid. The stars of the usual suspects haven't chimed in.
Bierce and Mencken saved me from Idealism.
Reading Marx and Lenin saved me from Communism.
Reading Mark Twain saved me from progressive moralism.
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