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.

"Stupidity," like "depression," is a sloppy "common-sense" word that we apply to different conditions, which may be caused by genetics (for instance, mutations in the M1 or M3 pathways, or two copies of Thr92Ala), deep subconscious conditioning (e.g., religion), general health issues (like not getting enough sleep), environment (ignorance, lack of reward for intelligent behavior), or bad habits of thought.

Like depression, it may not be possible to develop effective behavioral therapy for stupidity until its causes are understood, the most severe cases may have physiological causes, and pharmaceutical interventions will probably be much more effective than behavioral interventions for such cases.

Like depression, as long as it's seen as shameful and incurable, people won't admit to having it and won't seek help for it, regardless of the type they have.

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 resea...

Liz Ellis

Liz Ellis

Liz Ellis

Liz Ellis