It's great to make people more aware of bad mental habits and encourage better ones, as many people have done on LessWrong. The way we deal with weak thinking is, however, like how people dealt with depression before the development of effective anti-depressants:
- Clinical depression was only marginally treatable.
- It was seen as a crippling character flaw, weakness, or sin.
- Admitting you had it could result in losing your job and/or friends.
- Treatment was not covered by insurance.
- Therapy was usually analytic or behavioral and not very effective.
- People thus went to great mental effort not to admit, even to themselves, having depression or any other mental illness.
The only "anti-stupidity drugs" we have are nootropics. But the nootropics we have weren't developed as nootropics. Piracetam was, I think, developed to treat seizures. L-DOPA was developed to treat Parkinson's. No one knows who started using ginkgo biloba or what they used it for; it was used to treat asthma 5000 years ago. Adderall derives from drugs used to keep soldiers awake in World War 2.
And none of them are very good against stupidity. AFAIK, to date, not one drug has been developed by understanding and targeting the causes of different types of stupidity. We have the tools to do this--we could, for instance, sequence a lot of peoples' DNA, give them all IQ tests, and do a genome-wide association study, as a start.
We don't research these things because society doesn't want to research them. People don't conceive of stupidity as a disease that can be cured. We need, somehow, to promote thinking of stupidity as a mental illness. As something drug companies could make billions of dollars off of.
We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity. The government could, for example, provide incentives to companies that resist automation, thereby preserving jobs for the less brainy. It could also discourage hiring practices that arbitrarily and counterproductively weed out the less-well-IQ’ed. ...
When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire. At the time, the world he imagined, in which intelligence fully determined who thrived and who languished, was understood to be predatory, pathological, far-fetched. Today, however, we’ve almost finished installing such a system, and we have embraced the idea of a meritocracy with few reservations, even treating it as virtuous.
-- David Freedman [no, not David Friedman], "The War on Stupid People," The Atlantic, July/Aug 2016
Let's define "stupidity" as "low IQ" where IQ is measured by some standard tests.
IQ is largely hereditary (~70%, IIRC) and polygenic. This mean that attempting to "cure" it by anything short of major genetic engineering will have quite limited upside.
There are cases where IQ is depressed from its "natural" level (e.g. by exposure to lead) and these are fixable or preventable. However if you're genetically stupid, drugs or behavioral changes won't help.
We could and people do that. If you're interested in IQ research, look at Greg Cochran or James Thompson or Razib Khan, etc. etc.
That, ahem, is exactly what's happening already :-/
It is worth pointing out that the heritability estimates are determined from current variation, and thus are only weakly predictive of what interventions are possible but unknown. (I do expect that if there were an easy way to make improvements here, we would know about it already, but it's very possible that there are hard ways to do this.)
Love the idea...
I think the key disconnect here is that (AFAICT) you mean that we should treat stupidity as a mental illness in the idealized way we're trying to get everyone to treat the mentally ill (see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B5nfkaeplc)
We don't think of mental illness in such an accepting way yet. Maybe when we do, saying that stupidity is like mental illness is like physical illness is like something that deserves sympathy and help will make sense, but right now it sounds more like prejudice.
I see what you're saying and appreciate the insight, and will try to treat stupid people with sympathy instead of frustration, but think that this comparison doesn't quite work yet.
http://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection
Our way to measure IQ is build on the core assumption that IQ doesn't really change. Our way to measure depression is on the other hand build on the assumption that depression changes over our lifetime.
We likely need a new way to measure intelligence or stupidity to say well that a treatment increases it within a span of a year.
So, on one hand, I agree that it would be better if people were smarter on average.
On the other hand, you're using a lot of scary labels. ... Actually, after reflecting a bit, "Stupidity is a mental illness" is the only scary label. But it is a REALLY SCARY label. As in, my overton window is probably shifted, I dunno, 2 or 3 or 4 standard deviations in your direction, compared to the average person. I know about nootropics (at the very least, that they exist). And I'm sort of familiar with this community. And I still got scared reading this.
One o... (read more)
Disclaimer: I have autism. I sometimes worry that despite functioning pretty well in society, some day, people will say "hey, these people have problems integrating with society sometimes! We should cure all the autisms!" and I'll be forcibly "cured" and have my personality (autism is a way of thinking, sometimes, so I think that this counts as part of someone's personality) altered against my will.
Compare with the deaf people, which is BOTH a culture and a disability. Same thing goes on here. I believe that a way should be found to prevent people from being born deaf/with autism (preferrably via curing in the womb, not via abortion, but if people want to abort because their unborn child is deaf/has autism I think they should be allowed to do that because it places a higher burden on the parents). I don't believe you should forcibly (or via social pressure) intervene in people who, for their entire lives, have been deaf/have autism in order to cure them. You should make the means available to them, but it's their decision.
If the analogy here is with depression, that doesn't seem a likely outcome. Depressed people don't normally have anything forced onto them, unless they make it clear that there's a substantial imminent risk that they'll actually kill themselves.
I think the things that will get a mental illness forcibly treated are (1) that it genuinely makes the person who has it unable to function independently, or (2) that it puts other people at substantial risk. Stupidity has to be really severe before it causes #1; I suppose the question is whether (in a hypothetical world where stupidity is medicalized and treatable) it would often be seen as causing #2.
I do, though, very much agree that the combination of giving "stupidity" a broad enough definition that it applies to a substantial fraction of the population and treating it as a disease seems really dangerous and open to abuse.
Wow.
Seems a bit harsh, though after you've debated a few creationists, it doesn't seem so unsupportable.
No one is going to impose mandatory treatments for stupidity.
A much more likely version is that at some point in the future, parents will be offered an "IQ enhancement package" for their potential kids. Do you accept? This is a much more interesting question.
The simple inroad would be intellectual disability.
Right now you're disabled if your IQ is below 70 and you have trouble functioning in your everyday life. These are 2 to 3 % of the population and there's a societal framework already in place for them.
If you could gradually raise that IQ threshold, you'd achieve much of what you want to achieve here.
I don't know who determines that threshold, but whoever it is is probably more approachable, and more likely to listen to reason, than the public at large.
Let's say I describe a person as 'fighty'. There are two different things I could mean by that:
The first of these I think is...pretty much morally neutral?
The second of these I think is fairly clearly morally bad.
These things are definite... (read more)
The contents of this post seem unnecessary ableist to me. We're building a society for all people and thus statements like these carry a rather bad taste:
This statement shames people which the article previously stamped as "stupid". People with disabilities have the same right to prosper just live everyone else. It seems to me that your post carries with it the assumption that "having less 'stupid' people" some... (read more)
“Stupidity is the result of corrupt decisions, caused by relative intellectual deficit, ignorance, cognitive biases and others. These prevent or distort the collection and storage of information and its intellectual processing, producing decisions without thinking, biased, false, irrational, stupid. "
Kuke Lito, 2019.
I thing it would be very difficult to make a disease out of stupidity, much less to treat it as one.
Stupidity is more dangerous than malice. Evil can only persist so long in its destructive nature sowing wreckage before people identify its obvious ills and rise up against it forcing it away or even destroying it by sheer force. It's only a matter of time until people unite and rise up against something malicious.
Stupidity on the other hand is a total loose cannon. The stupid person can not only not be relied upon to accomplish anything of substance but is liable, without their own knowledge or consent, sabotage just about anything they come across w... (read more)
I know a highly educated and well spoken person who is a expert at noticing and making snide remarks about other cars on the road, but he does all the same things; text, not stay in his lane, constantly tail-gates, swerves accross traffic to make his exit, doesnt pull forward so the person behind him can make their order, doesnt pull up to the car ahead of him in the left turn lane (causing traffic jams behind him). But somehow will say "i wish people used their brains more" when somebody tailgates him.
The truth is, people who flaunt their IQ around rarely critisize themselves and only see things from their perspective.
A diminished IQ, would nor could, be indicative of a mental illness, and I say this because there are plenty of daily examples, you can tell just by observation, that postulate "stupid" people are actually quite healthy. I could actually argue that people conceived as "stupid" present themselves as more charismatic and agreeable then their intelligent counterparts, furthermore, having an easier time acquiring acquaintance with other people.
I urge you to read the first book of the Evans Third Reich trilogy, in which one of the interesting topics mentioned revolved around eugenics. I fear that the way you've framed your point will prime people towards this direction.
To approach "stupidity", an already vague concept, from a diagnostic point of view would be a disaster. One reason being the history I linked to earlier, eugenics was a popular -enough sentiment then to be a problematic primer, and I fear that while having stupid people around is an existential risk, I think another exist... (read more)
We're not very good at destigmatizing and treating depression. why would we want to carry that model onto anything else?
Saturday night live needs to apologize for a skit they did on mental illness by calling people stupid. It was very offensive and I am a mental health professional who feels like suing them.
Rather than forcing people to undergo an alteration of, for example, their genes, you can simply make it a requirement to receiving funding. For example in welfare states (or in a libertarian society, private charities). Other enhancements can be done in a similar fashion, or voluntarily obviously.
If you heap scorn on 'stupid' people or by attribute whatsoever, it's great to note the cause, many times it is probably psychological projection with an underlying anxiety of not being up to part to one's standards.
"We have the tools to do this--we could, for instance, sequence a lot of peoples' DNA, give them all IQ tests, and do a genome-wide association study, as a start."
I remember a few years ago the Chinese offering free genomic scans for the sufficiently intelligent. Did anyone sign up for that? Anyone know of how that story turned out? I assume they weren't going to share that info.
If you think these are equivalent, I can only hope nobody depends on you for mental health advice.
Depression responds to placebo better than pneumonia does. That's what I mean when I say it responds well to placebo. But depression still responds to modern psychiatric care better than to placebo. That's the linked analysis' main takeaway from the study ChristianKl mentioned.
SSRIs alone do somewhat better than placebo. Modern psychiatric care is way more than SSRIs, these are only one of many tools. There are also anxiolytics and iodine and MAO inhibitors and relaxation exercises and CBT and a whole bunch of other things that all work better than placebo for some patients. And all of them only became available a few years or decades ago.
No I don't. Enlighten me.
That's a bit different and goes back at least to "how can anyone be so stupid as to risk the fires of the eternal damnation". Treatments tended to be... rather drastic.
A necessary condition for anything to be a illness in people not too old to have children should be that it reduces reproductive fitness. Having a sufficiently low IQ does, but having a moderately low IQ, from what I've read, might be correlated with greater reproductive fitness.
There is no reason why our values need to be evolution's values.
You are literally talking about eugenics.