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No matter how stupid people are today, I'm sure they were dumber pre-1900, especially before we normalized hand-washing. Although if you want to call the entire history of humanity "the stupid ages" I'd agree to that.
I'd be surprised if these didn't have subtle errors that will be corrected later, but they (even the slightly incorrect old models) have already been replicated and extrapolated into new discoveries, unlike much of psychology, so I wouldn't call them "stupid" and certainly not useless.
Pre scientific people were often dumb in believing incorrect things, but they believed these things largely due to the limitations of their methods and observational equipment. Modern beliefs which are incorrect are intentionally so, lots of these beliefs are literally supported by changing the definitions of things when statements about them have been falsified.
Aristotle believed that women naturally had fewer teeth than men because he was unable to check the chemistry of nutrient flows in pregnancy that led to tooth loss. He believed that objects in motion gradually come to a stop because he had no way of measuring air resistance. He believed women’s mental illnesses were caused by their wombs moving out of place because he had no way to check hormone levels. People believing falsified things about gender and sex being meaningfully different can check those things, they know they’re wrong, because they have checked this. They changed the relevant definitions instead of updating their beliefs.
Pre scientific people were intentionally mislead by smarter ones too: mystics, false religions, etc. And science is sometimes like mystic religion, with incorrect beliefs perpetuated by dogma, but I think it’s more accurate than those of the past: exposed papers do get retracted, my albeit basic understanding of mysticism is that there isn’t really an analogue “oh our beliefs are wrong now that outsiders have actually questioned them”.
We have mystics and false religions even today. Woo is still a thing.
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The difference in my view is that mystics, false religions, etc. didn't provide some structured, well-established method at arriving at facts and the truth the same way science does. Generally, mystics, to whatever extent they believe that their mysticism gives them access to the truth, doesn't purposefully corrupt their mysticism in an effort to "discover" that what is true is everything they wanted to be true all along (arguably the mysticism itself accomplishes that, which is one part of what makes it different from science). Right now, the people purporting to do science are doing exactly that, despite having all the tools and knowledge and information required to understand that they are indeed corrupting science and also how not to corrupt science. That's what makes their stupidity extra stupid.
Like how someone with training in arithmetic and calculators who declares the calculator as a tool of White Supremacy and therefore 12 x 12 = 1212, not 144 like what the calculator said, has a sort of stupidity that goes beyond the stupidity of someone who just never had access to mathematical education and declares 12 x 12 = 1221. 1212 is slightly more accurate because it's even like 144, not odd, and also closer to 144 than 1221 is, but the process by which the person arrived at that was arguably more stupid.
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I think it could make sense to call the ages the Stupid Ages if the cause of us being stupid was the very thing that was for the purpose of addressing/avoiding/escaping stupidity, which is sort of what's happening with academia, which are ostensibly for the purpose of something like addressing stupidity, even if, overall, we're less stupid than any other age. There's something to hubris that is extra stupid than just being plain old stupid. Especially since hubris is, itself, a concept that is taught in academia as something bad and to avoid.
As flawed as academia is, I still think we'd be stupider without it. For example, imagine if we didn't have the psychological fallacies (although even today people fall for them way too frequently, imagine if you couldn't even point them out because they weren't established, and AFAIK these haven't been debunked).
I have seen exactly 0 people convinced anytime anywhere by an argument via someone else saying they are committing a psychological fallacy. It's nice to have them labeled but I'd put the real world impact as pretty de minimis
Even that might be overly charitable. If you start with someone who is arrogant and partisan and teach that person various fallacies, quite possibly he will become more arrogant, more confident in his partisan opinions, and less willing to consider contradictory information (because he is better at spotting arguable weaknesses in his opponents' arguments).
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I think you're right. But:
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