That more and more people are willing to vote against scientific findings. Or the influx of right-wing populists: You can know that right-wing populist economic policies will not increase prosperity, including your own. And choose her anyway.
We were always limited and always made mistakes - and at the same time we were always great. People build a lot of crap, but also pyramids. Nevertheless, I am completely with you that we notice a qualitative difference in our time. This consists in the fact that we experience a strong egocentric way of thinking. Not in the sense that people are only interested in their own advantage. Rather, they are cognitively egocentric: they think very much from their own perspective and are only guided by their own values. A real clash of perspectives on the world.
Is this a process of dumbing down?
That's a thesis you can have. But I rather believe that we live in a culture with an extremely high level of knowledge. This creates the impression that one can know everything better everywhere. This overwhelms the individual, it creates pressure - and it leads to a frontline position. If someone says that I ignore the facts of medicine and that I no longer vaccinate, then that is a stand against established wisdom. I call this excessive stupidity in the book. And it is strategic. These people don't say of themselves: "I'm going to do something really stupid." On the contrary, they say: “I don’t want your wisdom anymore, I want room for mine.”
Please explain this in more detail.
There is a telling moment with J.D. Vance in his "Hillbilly Elegy": He says, I used to think I was an idiot - but back then I didn't yet understand that there was a difference between intelligence and knowledge. These people pit their intelligence against the knowledge of a society that, in their view, no longer meets their desires in life. That's why I ask myself: Is our problem really a dumbing down? Or is it a twist? The absolute will to want to know better. Significantly, no one says to themselves: Maybe I'm stupid, I've made a mistake. Everyone wants to be on the side of the smart people. My impression is: we would rather not understand each other than admit that we don't understand something.
The excess of wisdom produces the countermovement.
This is the dialectic of stupidity and cleverness. Johann Eduard Erdmann, a contemporary of Hegel, put it succinctly: People who want to be clever tend to stick to their perspective. But every perspective is limited. This is how they limit themselves. Conversely, people who we consider to be open-minded are quickly ready to say: That's just my perspective, I'll remain flexible. An intelligence that believes it is only smart becomes stupid. And intelligent stupidity, which knows that it is always limited, becomes wise because it opens itself up - to other people and to reality.
But there are decisions that are objectively wrong because they have consequences that the person who made them did not want. Anyone who does not vaccinate during a measles epidemic is very likely to get measles.
These people would never associate the consequences with their own thinking. I don't think we should stop talking about stupidity. But the actual form of what you describe is idiocy: being truly unteachable. Smart people also make stupid mistakes - but they know it and they own up to it. What we should rightly resist is not stupidity. It's unteachability. If we one-sidedly distance ourselves from stupidity, we lose sight of two important things: that stupidity unites us because we are all stupid from time to time. And secondly, the creative aspects of stupidity: every mistake, every stupid question can also open up a new perspective and initiate change.
Now, with artificial intelligence, we are advancing a technology that technically cannot achieve balance. It doesn't weight, it calculates the most likely answer and presents it as absolute.
AI is the pinnacle of the movement toward oversmartness. A machine that knows everything, in quotation marks, and always answers confidently. The prompt is not a question. It is the starting point of my thinking that the AI autocompletes - a bit like the old Nokia phone that completed my words very poorly. A conversation is what we both do here. I have no idea what you'll say next. In this ping pong we are both constantly changing. I can't do that with an AI because it always assimilates, statistically, and reacts to my prompt.
That’s why you suggest reading AI as “no intelligence.”
To make it clear that we have no interlocutor in her. I would never say that AI is the work of the devil. As a mathematical technology that recognizes patterns, it can be very useful, for example in tumor detection. And for a complex rail system, an AI can probably create a timetable much better than any human planning authority. On the other hand, I don't think autonomous action in reality is easily possible. This requires intelligence, and intelligence means being able to allow yourself to be unsettled. A machine never learns anything about itself because it has no relationship with itself and others.
So it is suitable for what AI was originally intended for. Of all things, the chatbot that is currently spreading rapidly is not suitable for this?
When it comes to chatbots, we have to realize that this is a commercialized, gamified industry. If you recognize the speech patterns, you can see: The great conversation partner is simulated, the buddy, the understanding friend. Behind this lies the interest in retaining users. All the talk about artificial intelligence is marketing jargon and hype.
At the same time, AI serves a real need. We all find ourselves in situations every day in which we have to prove ourselves.
It's a feedback loop. We live in a culture that fuels this constant need to know, and AI is making it even faster. I have to have the AI prepare me for every meeting. In the end, I can only send the AI into the meeting, the other person sends theirs, and the two do it mutually. What falls by the wayside is human conversation – and an existential dimension. If you ask people if they feel at home in this world, it quickly collapses into a simulation of "I know" and despair that you don't always. I am sure: one hundred percent of all people are insecure.
In the heyday of Silicon Valley there was a real cult of failure. My impression is that we have moved on from that - that today the most important thing is to cover up uncertainty. Why the setback?
Sure, the fuck-up nights. But I can't help but get the impression that we always incorporate this into an optimization narrative: I was weak then, but this weakness made me stronger. An open error culture means first of all: I actually make mistakes, sometimes really stupid ones. But that's not exactly a bad thing, it's part of us.
Try to get through everyday working life in most companies.
You can see this immediately in work cultures. Some mistakes are talked about, but there is a limit to the truly embarrassing ones that are never talked about. This has exactly the opposite effect of what error culture promises. The result is not a real safe space, but a simulated one - and it is much worse. I'm a big fan of the idea of a Safe Space for Stupidity, as pursued by the Center for the Less Good Idea in South Africa. They say: People really need to feel like they can be stupid. Only then does a terrain emerge in which we learn to appreciate the diversity of our intelligences.
This difference can sometimes be quite stressful.
Our achievement as Homo sapiens has nothing to do with individual achievement, but rather with the ability to make a difference together, always doing something wrong and still moving forward. Failure is part of life. From the perspective of a super-smart guy like Elon Musk, the worst thing is dying; for him it is absolute stupidity.
This may be what makes him so desperately aggressive.
He basically tries everything. And that is almost a metaphor for what I mean by stupidity: that in the middle of our lives there is a massive point of incomprehensibility that we suppress. It means that things are limited, not least our own lives. We would do well if we showed more how many times we fail and are supported by others. We depend on others in every way. That's the only reason we can talk, that's the only reason we can cross the street.
But in human history, little has worked as reliably to unite masses as an idea that declares all other ideas to be wrong. Socialism, fascism, today MAGA. Your concept is probably less emotionally connectable.
On the contrary, my impression is that there is a huge longing there. Let's call it brain positivity: an appreciative relationship to your own thinking in all its imperfection. Everyone suffers from the pressure to be perfect. We are always afraid of failing somewhere. Like me in this interview for example. So I think: Let's realize that by courageously trying things out, we can be humble at the same time. Our greatest strength lies in imperfection. It leads to collaboration and creativity - while the performance paradigm leads to a decline in performance because everyone fights against everyone else and becomes rigid in their own position.
At this point I could say: The other side is undemocratic, so my willingness to talk ends here.
The tolerance paradox – you cannot tolerate the absolute form of intolerance. There must be a discursive limit, and that has to do with violence, in a comprehensive sense. When people are shouted down, insulted, humiliated or physically threatened. I still believe that we just need to listen to each other better. We also have to be able to be offensive when listening and say: I think this is completely wrong. But also: I may not understand it. Because therein lies an opportunity: to be able to understand something differently at some point. And to develop ourselves further.
