To avoid saying anything as simple as "most people are stupid" is worth it.
It is meaningless. Another one of those phrases where people will nod their heads in agreement, and those phrases piss me off.
Actually, it is pretty sad that so many people are willing to utter those words. It's a common thing most people say of everyone else. Why is this sad? From my experience, it stems from people's inability to communicate. So, not only do people misidentify the problem, but it seems like they are putting effort into not trying to fix it. Especially these days since everyone is a special snowflake.
Anyway, my fist post here. I admire the people here and on Overcoming Bias, and hopefully I'll learn to communicate at your level soon. See you guys around.
I'm reasonably sure that I have several beliefs that are crazy. The only problem is that I don't know which ones they are.
i don't know if this is a joke or not :-) perhaps i was projecting? in any case, sure, the people you mention (e.g., von neuman) were wrong about a lot of things. so was isaac newton. definitely not stupid. i agree.
in any case, let me elaborate. i recall the higher your IQ, the less likely you are to fall into the traps of cognitive biases and heuristics which lead you to the wrong conclusion (i think bryan caplan reports this data). of course, smart people still tend to fall into these traps (especially when they have ideological blinkers), but my experie...
I don't mean to offend or sound confrontational. Assuming a large audience, the extra effort required of a writer to punctuate and capitalize is much less than the total extra effort spent by people reading unpunctuated or uncapitalized text.
In addition to extra effort it takes to read uncapitalized text, it has another effect on me:
It makes the writer sound unintelligent and low in Conscientiousness. Perhaps this is because people with less of those things are less likely to use correct capitalization, leading to an association in my mind.
Since I know Razib is both intelligent and conscientious from being a long-time reader of GNXP, every time I read his stuff I have to fight my implicit association of his capitalization with that of 14 year-old LiveJournal users. I'd rather not.
Intelligent writers might often use colloquialisms that are more typically used by less intelligent people, yet they do so deliberately to achieve a particular effect, such as making their writing sound more conversational or accessible. In contrast, ignoring capitalization makes writing sound both less intelligent and less accessible. Is the shift key really so bad that avoiding it is worth hurting one's perceived intelligence and writing accessibility?
Hm... well, the lack of capitalization didn't much bother me because I know you. But I do think sentences are easier to read when capitalized, and that it is generally economical for one author to save a thousand readers the effort. Maybe don't capitalize on your own blog, but capitalize on blog comments on blogs where there's a high standard of commenting?
Though I actually am pretty sympathetic to your basic plea here, because the whole reason I started blogging was in an effort to write faster, and critical to that effort is learning to hold your writing to lower standards. As the saying goes, there's no such thing as writer's block - you can always write a sentence - there is only holding yourself to too high a standard. If lack of capitalization is your key trigger for lowering your standards enough to write, I won't complain. Back when I started blogging, just the fact that it was a blog post was enough; but it wore off over time and since then it's been a constant struggle for me to lower my standards. (Do not try this with anything other than writing!)
Perhaps a BHTV episode in the future?
I'd be honored to do a BHTV.
Exactly - craziness is far more soluble than stupidity at our present state of technology. What does it accomplish to complain that someone is stupid? Are you going to teach them to be smart?
As for which is worse, it depends on how crazy you are, doesn't it? "Intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of," said Phil Goetz.
Even with intelligence enhancement tech, by the time someone had been brought up to modern-equiv IQ 180 it would probably be more of a favor to them to teach them a little basic rationality than to bring them up further to IQ 190.
Stupidity - like tallness - is a relative concept.
Whether humans are stupid depends on what they are being compared against.
To clarify the difference between crazy and stupid:
What is stupidity other than a relative inability to solve problems? How is crazy not just a particular kind of stupid?
Stupidity is the lack of mental horsepower. A stupid person has a weak or inefficient "cognitive CPU".
Craziness is when the output of the "program" doesn't correlate reliably with reality due to bugs in the "source code". A crazy person has a flawed "cognitive algorithm".
It seems that in humans, source code can be revised to a certain degree, but processing power is difficult (though not impossible) to upgrade.
So calling someone crazy (for the time being) is certainly different from calling someone stupid.
Of course it can be considered a bug, if I do the considering and I don't give two cupcakes for reproductive fitness.
What leads you to suggest Aumann isn't thinking that?
That I've met smart religious people who don't think that way, and I expect that Aumann is at least as smart as they are.
There are intellectual religious people who believe that they've updated on all the evidence, taken it all into account, ignored none of it, and concluded that, say, Young Earth Creationism is the best account of the evidence.
You and I can see that they are ignoring evidence, or failing to weigh it properly, and that their ideology is blinding them. But that is not their own account of what's going on in their heads. They are not aware of any conscious decision on their part to ignore evidence. So it's subtle and tricky to unpack what it means for them to be "capable but unwilling" to update.
ETA: Your unpacking of "capable but unwilling" uses the word "ability", which does not illuminate the meaning of "capable". And you've used the phrase "convincing evidence" in a sense that clearly does not mean that the evidence did in fact convince them. So, additionally tabooing "ability" and "convincing", what does "capable but unwilling" mean?
I'm pretty sure this interpretation is obvious to the folks here.
ETA: Okay, proven wrong again.
It surprises me that people here, of all places, don't recognize this point immediately. People aren't stupid. People are irrational.
If you aren't saying that most people are systematically stupid, then what are you saying? That most people are smart, but they have just a few little issues which if fixed would turn them into Eliezers?
EDIT: saying "I'm saying they're crazy" really doesn't help much. Can you give an example of someone smart, but 'crazy' in a way which doesn't involve 'just a few little issues'? not reaching the right answers = stupid to me, regardless of whether it's because someone has a brain tumor, has too few myelinated neurons, is on drugs, or was brought up to believe the Flying Spaghetti Monster decreed the right answer to be something else.
I stopped reading Razib years ago when one of his readers accused him of "sexing up" a headline and deliberately misrepresenting what a paper was about in order to attract more readers and he flat out admitted it and didn't think there was anything wrong with it.
Misrepresenting your talk as "most people are stupid" is not surprising at all.
http://www.searchlores.org/realicra/basiclawsofhumanstupidity.htm
and comments on it here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=817703
Among other things the essay has a wonderful definition of stupidity, and related conditions.
Intelligent - benefits others as well as himself
Bandit - benefits himself at the expense of others
Helpless - failure who nevertheless at least benefits others
Stupid - harms others while also harming himself
He places these as quadrants in a plane, with Bandit and Helpless being transitional between Intelligent and Stupid. That is, Band...
If most people are indeed crazy rather than stupid, then craziness, in this case, is far more insulting than stupidity.
Razib summarized my entire cognitive biases talk at the Singularity Summit 2009 as saying: "Most people are stupid."
Hey! That's a bit unfair. I never said during my talk that most people are stupid. In fact, I was very careful not to say, at any point, that people are stupid, because that's explicitly not what I believe.
I don't think that people who believe in single-world quantum mechanics are stupid. John von Neumann believed in a collapse postulate.
I don't think that philosophers who believe in the "possibility" of zombies are stupid. David Chalmers believes in zombies.
I don't even think that theists are stupid. Robert Aumann believes in Orthodox Judaism.
And in the closing sentence of my talk on cognitive biases and existential risk, I did not say that humanity was devoting more resources to football than existential risk prevention because we were stupid.
There's an old joke that runs as follows:
A motorist is driving past a mental hospital when he gets a flat tire.
He goes out to change the tire, and sees that one of the patients is watching him through the fence.
Nervous, trying to work quickly, he jacks up the car, takes off the wheel, puts the lugnuts into the hubcap -
And steps on the hubcap, sending the lugnuts clattering into a storm drain.
The mental patient is still watching him through the fence.
The motorist desperately looks into the storm drain, but the lugnuts are gone.
The patient is still watching.
The motorist paces back and forth, trying to think of what to do -
And the patient says,
"Take one lugnut off each of the other tires, and you'll have three lugnuts on each."
"That's brilliant!" says the motorist. "What's someone like you doing in an asylum?"
"I'm here because I'm crazy," says the patient, "not because I'm stupid."