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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/19/how-to-act-less-stupid-according-to-psychologists/>
"What they found is that people tend to agree about what deserves to be
called stupid and what doesn't — remarkably, there was a roughly 90
percent rate of agreement. They also learned that there are, it seems,
three situations, that we tend to use the word stupid for. Three
scenarios, characterized by specific types of behavior, that make people
cringe or laugh or put their hands to their forehead."
Via rare avis and Yonatan Zunger, who added:
When you do fieldwork in artificial intelligence, search, or other fields
that require understanding how humans form judgments about things, one of the
first things you learn is that it's insanely hard because humans tend to form
surprisingly different judgments. "One man's meat is another man's poison" –
or to use a somewhat more apt metaphor, "one man's porn is another man's
street photography."
(Seriously. Potter Stewart's famous "I know it when I see it" line?
Completely, utterly, wrong.)
So the thing that caught my attention the most about this study is that
people do, to a large extent, agree when someone did something stupid.
The researchers were curious about how people judge stupidity, and so
assembled a collection of 180 stories from news, blogs, etc., which described
events which might be characterized as stupid, and showed them to 150 people,
finding over 90% agreement. This seems like a very strong signal that we do,
in fact, have a meaningful built-in "stupid detector:" i.e., whatever it is
that we characterize as stupidity, there seems to be broad agreement over it,
and we really do know it when we see it.
Going further, they discovered that there seemed to be a real pattern in
things marked as stupid: they fell into three distinct categories. First and
foremost, "confident ignorance" – not only the most agreed-upon, but the one
rated as stupidest. Second, behavior showing a lack of control, especially
due to obsession or addiction. Third, and much weaker than the others,
absentmindedness.
If I had to describe the common factor here, it would be cases where people
failed to perform a baseline level of cognitive self-monitoring: to realize
that they aren't as good at something as they think, to bring their impulses
under control, or to pay attention when they needed to.
That is, stupidity isn't an attribute we give to a lack of cognitive skills,
but to a lack of meta-cognitive skills: it's the way we describe the behavior
of someone who isn't "thinking about thinking."
Combined with the robustness of the human stupidity detector, this suggests
that we have a very sophisticated built-in cognitive self-monitoring system,
and that we can recognize failures of others' self-monitoring very
effectively. (Really, more people can spot stupid than can spot unhappy or
most other affective states, so our detector for this is really robust) That
suggests that this is something our brains consider either very important or
(for some reason) anomalously easy. One possibility – and this is just bare
conjecture on my part – is that better ability to detect stupidity in others
helps us avoid stupidity ourselves.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
