It's great to make people more aware of bad mental habits and encourage better ones, as many people have done on LessWrong. The way we deal with weak thinking is, however, like how people dealt with depression before the development of effective anti-depressants:
- Clinical depression was only marginally treatable.
- It was seen as a crippling character flaw, weakness, or sin.
- Admitting you had it could result in losing your job and/or friends.
- Treatment was not covered by insurance.
- Therapy was usually analytic or behavioral and not very effective.
- People thus went to great mental effort not to admit, even to themselves, having depression or any other mental illness.
The only "anti-stupidity drugs" we have are nootropics. But the nootropics we have weren't developed as nootropics. Piracetam was, I think, developed to treat seizures. L-DOPA was developed to treat Parkinson's. No one knows who started using ginkgo biloba or what they used it for; it was used to treat asthma 5000 years ago. Adderall derives from drugs used to keep soldiers awake in World War 2.
And none of them are very good against stupidity. AFAIK, to date, not one drug has been developed by understanding and targeting the causes of different types of stupidity. We have the tools to do this--we could, for instance, sequence a lot of peoples' DNA, give them all IQ tests, and do a genome-wide association study, as a start.
We don't research these things because society doesn't want to research them. People don't conceive of stupidity as a disease that can be cured. We need, somehow, to promote thinking of stupidity as a mental illness. As something drug companies could make billions of dollars off of.
We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity. The government could, for example, provide incentives to companies that resist automation, thereby preserving jobs for the less brainy. It could also discourage hiring practices that arbitrarily and counterproductively weed out the less-well-IQ’ed. ...
When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire. At the time, the world he imagined, in which intelligence fully determined who thrived and who languished, was understood to be predatory, pathological, far-fetched. Today, however, we’ve almost finished installing such a system, and we have embraced the idea of a meritocracy with few reservations, even treating it as virtuous.
-- David Freedman [no, not David Friedman], "The War on Stupid People," The Atlantic, July/Aug 2016
So, on one hand, I agree that it would be better if people were smarter on average.
On the other hand, you're using a lot of scary labels. ... Actually, after reflecting a bit, "Stupidity is a mental illness" is the only scary label. But it is a REALLY SCARY label. As in, my overton window is probably shifted, I dunno, 2 or 3 or 4 standard deviations in your direction, compared to the average person. I know about nootropics (at the very least, that they exist). And I'm sort of familiar with this community. And I still got scared reading this.
One of the issues is is that it takes something which has previously enjoyed somewhat protected status (intelligence), and puts it on a same level of importance as ... ... I don't have an example. Weird.
I know a lot of people who are stupid in one way or another. I would hate to see "treatment" forced onto them because they're not as smart as we'd like. I get the feeling that not speaking up now means being next on the list - "when they came for X I didn't speak up because I wasn't X, when they came for Y I didn't speak up because I wasn't Y, and when they came for me there was no-one else to speak up for me".
I don't know what constitutes "stupid" for you. Is it people with, say, an IQ of 70, where their intelligence impairs them on a daily basis? Or is it people who are capable of holding down a job, but live paycheck to paycheck and vote in elections based on very questionable grounds (I don't have proper examples for you)?
I think that because there is no definition of "stupid people" provided, this becomes scary. You're targeting a population group, which was previously okay, but now they're no longer okay, and this feels like you're trying to invoke "look at these people, they need to be fixed", and maybe I'm shaping some of that feeling myself, but I don't see the underlying tone of doing good. This isn't helping others, this is helping yourself. Maybe everyone benefits. But this essay reads as something that helps just you.
In short.
Promoting research into intelligence boosting drugs: Yay
Destigmatizing stupidity into favoring intelligence: Yay
Classifying stupidity as a mental illness, forcing things like the American health system onto people who are already missing one of the success factors in life: Nay.
...
And I don't think mental illness is seen as something positive either. People with mental illnesses are dangerous, not fit for society, scary, should be kept someplace safe... I think that's the sentiment you'll get if you ask the average person (maybe they're stupid too? I don't know). Now, I don't mean to say these traits apply to people who are stupid, I mean to say that people on average think these traits apply to people with a mental illness, and that as a result, you don't want to be mentally ill, and reclassifying people who are stupid as mentally ill won't go over well. Even only because people won't actually say they can't see the emperor's clothes, lest they lose their job.
Honestly, I think if you want to go this way, you'd be better off trying to develop things that people can use for their kids. They'll buy organic foods "because it's more healthy", so they might also buy intelligence boosters for their kids so they can go to a prestige university and do great in life.
And you don't want to classify stupidity as a mental illness. You want it to be seen as a physical injury. You go to the hospital, they fix you, you're better. No shrink visits, no endless talks, no getting locked up in an internment facility.
It's only offensive if you still think of mental illness as shameful.