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“Yes We Are Living in the Age of Stupidity.”
I saw this heading above recently in the Wall Street Journal and it massively resonated with me. It seemed to encapsulate my personal experience of the last two years. During this time, putting aside the usual insanity of life, we have experienced the massively polarizing US presidential election with the subsequent January 6 uprising and the on-going insanity surrounding the Covid pandemic and the vaccine.
Other than mentioning them here I have no intention to dwell on it, neither to create more opinionated friction nor for those who are, like me, bone-weary with the endless insanity of it all. Instead, I prefer to focus on the science of stupidity, and its social twin, ignorance.
I really like this explanation of the difference between the two:
“The intrinsic difference is that ignorance simply implies lack of awareness about something, while stupidity denotes the inability of a person to understand something due to insufficient intelligence, thus leading to the misinterpretation of a fact.”*
Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man:
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
Following that thought, social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger came up with a theory that is known as The…
