#stupidity — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #stupidity, aggregated by home.social.
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@GeraldKutney #Trump thinks he's qualified to issue Executive Orders about #vaccines, too, & is shutting down #climate #research & other forms of #scientific, #biomedical & #scholarly research. He hates #science, he hates #knowledge - but thinks his abysmal #ignorance, not to mention #stupidity, makes him an "expert" on EVERYTHING!
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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
-- H. L. Mencken⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #HLMencken #Politics #Populism #Stupidity
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #ChacoCanyon #PuebloBonito #Ruins #360panorama #NewMexico
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America cannot read! We are a nation of illiterates.
#stupidity #readingIsEssential #illiterate #icecream #courts #rebel #USA
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Social media is truly dead because of #AI, and #Mastodon is no exception. Nothing but a big #bot gallery now. No great loss though, no. It was never great... never aimed to get us into a higher intellectual and spiritual level; never ambitioned to deliver and spread further some interesting conversations, making other people think a little bit more, and force us to do the same in the process. Far from it, it just made the few cultured or intelligent people in it lonelier, by dropping them into a sea of #endless #stupidity to drown by themselves below the waves.
Despite being a sort of "collective effort", by and for the #People, social networking was nothing like the first age of the #WWW: full of originality, diversity, and sincere personal interests. Instead, #socialmedia was just people reproducing subconsciously... spontaneously... the very worse traits of modern TV, of the #Idiocracy surrounding us, and the dumbest possible entertainment being scientifically tailored for the jelly brains. Perfectly shaped to drag the lowest common denominator into the traps of electronic formats and mass surveillance. It's legacy: tons and tons of human generated #slop that nobody should have ever cared about. #RIP.
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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
-- H. L. Mencken⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #HLMencken #Politics #Populism #Stupidity
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #BartolomeIsland #PinnacleRock #Galapagos
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Ah, sharks, nature's way of keeping down numbers of brain-dead "influencers" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yvrn7rpqpo
I sense a number of imminent Darwin Awards ... 🦈
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I suspect we will not be ordering a new .scot domain. Not only is the question crass, but they don’t even ask it on the form. They do not even have a correct list of Scottish constituencies to use. And there is no way to complete it. Incompetent fekkers
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“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”*…
David Krakauer (President of the Sante Fe Institute and Professor of Complex Systems there) argues that it takes intelligence to get things spectacularly wrong…
I have never heard a rock described as stupid. And the same would be true of a river, a hurricane, and even a thermostat. Stupidity seems to be a sophisticated form of behavior despite its ignominious associations.
Human beings can land autonomous rovers on Mars, sequence a genome in hours, and engineer nanometer circuits. And yet conspiracy theories, anti-scientific political movements, and institutional hatred proliferate on a scale that might embarrass the meager success record of a medieval alchemist.
One might say that stupidity implies a capacity for getting things right before it can get them spectacularly wrong. Stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence but its evil twin, the dissimulating Cain to a cerebral Abel. And perhaps surprisingly, the degree of stupidity available to any system scales directly with the intelligence that system possesses—more intelligence begets greater feats of stupidity. It would be a stretch to call a bacterium stupid, and we know that cats and dogs achieve modest feats of it. But human beings, equipped with language, abstraction, technology, institutions, and ideology, can be stupid on a truly civilizational scale. This is not a joke; it is close to a law of nature. A law that might very well be our undoing.
We have thousands of research programs on intelligence, and not all of them are intelligent, including studies of IQ, AI, animal cognition, and collective problem-solving. These take place in celebrated departments and are published in prestigious journals devoted to understanding how minds make hard problems easy. These days we cannot take a step without crashing into another article on intelligence and AI. Researchers from all fields without any knowledge of intelligence research and its history have become self-declared “thought leaders” in natural and artificial intelligence.
Yet stupidity gets almost no attention at all. It is treated as a mere absence, as if once we subtract intelligence what remains is stupidity. It is likened to a form of psychological darkness experienced after you have switched off the lights of deliberation. But this is a mistaken belief. Darkness does not do anything pernicious in the way that stupidity does. Stupidity takes an easy problem and, with great effort and misdirected ingenuity, makes it hard. That effort is the key to grasping stupidity, in that you need sophisticated machinery to be genuinely, consequentially stupid.
Here is how I like to think about this from a scientific perspective. If intelligence means making a problem of difficulty X easier, by deploying tools, using mathematics, and adopting strategies that reduce its cost, then stupidity means making a problem of difficulty X harder. And contrary to expectations, the most reliable way to make an easy problem hard is to bring to bear an impressive apparatus of complicated theories, elaborate beliefs, and sophisticated algorithms that sound tremendously convincing but perform worse than doing nothing. A person who does not know the answer to a question is merely ignorant. A person who constructs an ingenious hundred-page argument for the wrong answer is stupid. As great writers, artists, and philosophers throughout time have understood, such constructions require intelligence of a high order…
[Krakauer explores a variety of types of human stupidity, then turns to AI and draws his conclusion…]
… Artificial intelligence is by design the most powerful cognitive artifact ever created. It is engineered to minimize user effort by performing tasks that humans would otherwise find time consuming or impossible. The problem of course is that the better the tool gets the less the user needs to think for themselves. And in a vicious spiral, the less the user thinks the more dependent they become on their tools. That is until the tool disappears and the whole system collapses.
If intelligence is a necessary precondition for stupidity, and intelligence and stupidity scale together such that it takes real intelligence to be spectacularly stupid, then super-intelligence will be the opening act to an era of super-stupidity.
AI hallucination might be the first evidence of this dynamic. Large language models produce fluent, confident, detailed text that is, with some regularity, factually wrong. And this is not a simple bug but a structural feature of systems that optimize for appeal and plausibility rather than truth. And the danger is not that the AI will be wrong, after all, humans are wrong all the time, but knowing this, humans have invented means to detect and correct errors. We call this the scientific method.
The danger is that an AI will be wrong in ways humans can no longer detect because the very capacities that would catch the error have been outsourced to the machine or exceed the capacities of human minds. We face the prospect of a stupidity so sophisticated that it becomes indistinguishable, to its beneficiaries, from intelligence. This is the parable of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the answer to the ultimate question, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is 42.
I would like to make a modest proposal and suggest that we need a science of stupidity as rigorous as our emerging sciences of intelligence. This will not require billions of dollars of investment. It would involve inquiries into the mechanisms by which intelligent systems produce stupid outcomes. It would include studying the evolutionary dynamics that maintain stupidity despite its selective costs. It would promote the development of design principles that distinguish tools which enhance cognition from tools which replace it. And it would include surveying the institutional conditions under which collective intelligence degrades into collective stupidity.
Stupidity is not what remains when intelligence is subtracted, it is an active mechanism with its own logic, its own dynamics, and a capacity for unbounded growth parasitic on ingenuity. In a world obsessed with ever more powerful cognitive technologies, understanding stupidity is not merely an academic exercise, it might prove to be the most intelligent thing we do…
An essay on our undoing: “What Makes Humans Stupid,” from @sfiscience.bsky.social and @nautil.us.
Apposite: “How we meet the future” (“If we couldn’t make generalisations, we would be paralysed by the world’s complexity. Does that ever excuse stereotyping?”)
* Albert Einstein
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As we investigate imbecility, we might recall that it was on this date in 2008 that the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago “topped out“; construction was completed over the next few months. Donald Trump had announced in 2001 that the skyscraper would become the tallest building in the world, but after the September 11 attacks that same year, the architects scaled back the building’s plans, and its design underwent several revisions. When opened in 2009, it became the second-tallest building in the U.S. It surpassed the city’s John Hancock Center as the building with the highest residence (apartment or condo) in the world and briefly held that title until the completion of the Burj Khalifa several months later. The property has been beset by problems from its opening; they continue to this day.
#AI #artificialIntelligence #Chicago #culture #DavidKrakauer #history #intelligence #politics #Psychology #stupidity #TrumpTower #TrumpTowerChicago -
@taraprice
One thing I can (seriously) count on EVERY SINGLE DAY is a local TV news story of injury, death, road closures & traffic halted for hours due to Big Truck Accidents on our three major Sacramento freeways — and, especially in winter, over the Sierra summit on transcontinental U.S. 80.
Every.
Day.
I can’t wait to see the impact (yes, pun) with self-driving trucks. -
Virtue begins by shunning vice; wisdom
By shunning folly.
[Virtus est vitium fugere et sapientia prima
stultitia caruisse.]Horace (65–8 BC) Roman poet, satirist, soldier, politician [Quintus Horatius Flaccus]
Epistles [Epistularum, Letters], Book 1, ep. 1 “To Maecenas,” l. 41ff (1.1.41-42) (20 BC) [tr. Ferry (2001)]More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/horace/14188/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #horace #avoidance #folly #foolishness #immorality #negative #sin #stupidity #vice #virtue #wisdom
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Steam catapults?
I think there should be an EO to replace howitzers with trebuchets!
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So let me make sure I understand this Clacton. You had the chance to toss out a racist AND make commentary on the state of Parliament and instead, you re-elected the bigot? And I thought it was just us Americans who were fearful, stupid voters.
What am I missing here?
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"Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Thursday for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to be fired amid reports of difficult conditions (an understatement) faced by sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier":
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-senate-minority-leader-calls-for-defense-secretary-s-firing-over-conditions-aboard-uss-abraham-lincoln/4027003
#WorstCabinetEver #incompetence #IranWar #stupidity #mismanagement #military #politics -
My uniform of the day !!
#stupidity
#dumbasses
#darwinaward -
Doubtful that Trump or Hegseth care...
"Zelensky Says 5% of US Patriot Missiles Could Save Ukraine This Winter"
#Trump #Ukraine #News #Politics #Nato #War #ww3 #Military #Russia #USA #Escalation #Europe #EU #Iran #Israel #Pakistan #Alliance #Asia #Saudia #Oil #Houthi #RedSea #Iraq #UN #ukraine #China #Economics #Incompetence #Stupidity
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Thank god the president is saving us from the tubas. 📯
“This week, the Trump administration declared tubas, trombones, trumpets, and French horns a national security threat.
Yes, really.”
The catering-cart-in-chief is terrified of the sousaphone.
https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/donald-trump-tariffs-brass-instruments/
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"Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Republican chair of the Senate health committee, slammed the executive order in a social media post, saying vaccines are safe and do not cause autism.”
Vaccines are safe, effective, and do not cause autism. Neither Trump nor parents know better.
Vaccinate your children according to the AAP schedule. If you don't, at least have your children's' funeral plans ready. You'll need them.
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The presidential led enshitification of US health continues apace.
‘There have been multiple measles outbreaks in the United States this year driven by parental refusal, including hotspots such as South Carolina and Utah. Ninety-three per cent of those who contracted measles were unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status. It has been the worst year for measles in the US since 1991.’
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2/2
Dr. John Cleese (Monty Python) offers a one-minute lesson on "Stupidity
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From the "Don't know much about history...." / Dept. of #TrumpVirus / #MAGA #stupidity
Cartoon by Clay Jones / #Claytoonz
Related, see comment below for
a one-minute-flat note about just how stupid stupid can be... especially while claiming to be "smart... a stable genius... with all the best words" / #WordSalad -
“What helps: acquire as much #knowledge and #experience as possible and #reflect alone and with others, #analyze your own mistakes and the mistakes of others (error-friendliness) and allow a lot of #openmindedness.”
An epidemic of #stupidity and its danger to #society and #democracy
https://www.centreformalepsychology.com/male-psychology-magazine-listings/an-epidemic-of-stupidity-and-its-danger-to-society-and-democracy -
#amathia willful ignorance
#socrates
#natzi #evil #stupidity #logos
#usa #books #usa #trump #magaPhilosopher Jonny Thomson walks through Dietrich Bonhoeffer's 3 conditions for the kind of stupidity that destroys societies: Outsourcing your thinking to an authority, willful ignorance, and conformity.
Thomson shows how each one appears today, from AI answering our moral questions to political parties enforcing loyalty over conviction.
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"Man accidentally shoots himself while filming video on how to use gun he just bought"
That close to a Darwin award.
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Ukraine update from Dylan Combellick: Share the friend link to bypass the paywall and kick an oligarch in the nuts: https://medium.com/@dylan_combellick/ukraine-update-july-30-aa8616c8906c?sk=3a30882b2d7733009ea09e426e6d279f
#ukraine #journalism #war #russia #warcrimes #USA #evil #MAGA #greed #billionaires #stupidity #trump #shame #disappointment
