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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4488 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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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 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

As flawed as academia is, I still think we'd be stupider without it.

I think you're right. But:

  1. That's what anyone living in the Stupid Ages would think.
  2. We may be crossing - or already have crossed without knowing - a boundary where academia contributes greater stupidity than it alleviates, and so past performance isn't indicative of future performance.
  3. Stupidity isn't some single-dimension attribute that we can place on "humanity" and move up or down, but rather an aggregation of countless little individual things, so we could be less stupid thanks to academia and more stupid, with the possibility that the harms of the latter are so significant (though not necessarily greater than the benefits) as to mark our current time.

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