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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
Continuing on the theme of intellectual humility from last week’s cast. I warmly recommend this 20’ video about Bonhoeffer’s theory of functional stupidity, which is *not* the opposite of intelligence, but rather the surrender of intellectual independence under peer pressure, stress, or urgency. It’s a sociological (rather than individual) phenomenon by which even intelligent people end up suspending critical thinking and espousing group beliefs. Bonhoeffer observed functional stupidity taking hold around him in the 1930s when even the intelligent German elites surrendered to the superficially enticing, but deeply flawed tenets of nazism. The parallel with contemporary trends is unmistakable, and only exacerbated by the firehose of social media through which seductive falsehoods propagate faster than they can be critically examined. 1/2 https://youtu.be/Sfekgjfh1Rk https://farcaster.xyz/aviationdoctor.eth/0x67091196
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@aviationdoctor.eth
The author of the video recommends that we all pick one belief we hold dear and make the conscious effort to steelman its opposite. This not only takes intellectual courage, it also requires effort and time. Which led me to realize that I don’t do anywhere near enough of that myself, even as I preach it. The busy everyday life gets in the way of deep thinking. Reading might seem like a temporary reprieve from the daily firehose, but it is also a purveyor of new ideas, which then need to be reexamined critically (after all, Mein Kampf was also a book). We should probably spend as much time annotating and critically evaluating every book as we spend reading it, and that doesn’t sound like relaxation anymore. Hence, I realize that I tend to distance myself from any belief, as a form of temporary compromise, halfway between holding them uncritically (which is functionally stupid), and investing time and effort to examine them (which is potentially stressful). 2/2
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@aviationdoctor.eth
One more thought: a logical implication of this theory is that it’s important to avoid blaming any generation for lacking critical thinking, and instead recognize that the disciplined application of critical thinking against a constant firehose of factoids and dopamine-hijacking news is an unfair expectation to have of anyone. Conversely, instead of blaming LLMs for participating in the disaggregation of critical thinking among younger folks, we may think of AI as a saving grace here, by providing people with a simple, low-effort way to verify claims. The prerequisite, of course, is that LLMs are trained on a robust set of justified true beliefs.
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