Tag Archives: stupidity

Wrong with conviction

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I was going to share a social media post that basically called science a religion and argued that people who ‘believe in science’ are in a cult and so it doesn’t feel like worship, it feels like sanity. I only just decided that I don’t want to bring attention to this post, because when I went back to the post, my comment was gone.

I found it in my activity stream, but on the post itself, it wasn’t there. My comment didn’t fit the narrative so it was deleted. I don’t want to participate in sharing this drivel when it was shared only to promote a biased and grossly misleading narrative, with no intent to stand on its own merit against a disagreeing comment.

Meanwhile the post has over 150,000 views and 10.4K likes. I’m tired of seeing people spew convincing sounding nonsense with conviction, and spreading bad ideas that gain traction. And this is getting worse, not better.

We have access to almost unlimited information, and yet so many people just ride out their biases and beliefs, standing their ground on topics they only have a tiny understanding of… Sharing half truths, misleading ideas, and exaggerated lies that sound as if facts are factored in, but they are not.

We’ve entered an era where being wrong with conviction will gain traction simple because it fits a narrative that is appealing. We are living in a post truth era and I’m struggling to see how we escape this? And there’s no way to say this next part without sounding condescending but I’m going to say it anyway.

I think we’ve reached a point in our civilization where you have to have a certain level of intelligence or you are doomed to get dumber. Either you pass a threshold of intelligence or you succumb to stupidity shared online that simply traps you in the stupidity zone. I used to have faith in humanity but if I use what’s shared on social media as a litmus test then a very, very large number of people are doomed to stay stupid.

Mental gymnastics

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I know it’s a very small percentage of people in the world that think the world is flat, but this group fascinates me. You’ve got to be a special kind of stupid to live in 2026 and think that every scientist and millions of others are all conspiring to fool you. The mental gymnastics needed to ignore blatant evidence and then double down on thinly veiled lies and poorly contrived talking points has to far exceed the effort to actually look at the obvious evidence. How much must it hurt to admit you are wrong to continually have to fight logic, facts, and data that contradict your beliefs?

Meanwhile, the rest of the world can marvel at Artemis II, travelling to the moon and back , and sharing incredible photos of this pale blue marble that we all live on. There is so much we still don’t know about the universe we live in, mysteries still to be solved… and here is a group of people who not only fight science with oblivious imagination, they hide from the enjoyment of seeing our globe from angles we have not enjoyed in decades, at resolutions we could not have previously imagined.

Maybe Artemis II will be the thing that has flat eathers ‘come around’ to the global reality… but stupidity defies logic, and I’m afraid the mental gymnastics will continue to work against people dedicated to sharing their ignorance in a loud, proud, uninformed, and uneducated way.


Dire consequences

The inability to process the consequences of your thoughts, words and action is a good definition for stupidity. The thing about stupidity is that even intelligent people can perform acts of stupidity. But repeatedly doing stupid things suggests a lack of intelligence.

I watched a video yesterday of people doing stupid things and getting hurt. One example was a guy standing on someone’s shoulders on a diving board and trying to dive, but slipping while pushing off and landing face first on the diving board. I don’t know if alcohol was part of the decision making, and I don’t know how smart that person might be, but this is a good display of stupidity with dire consequences.

If I said that there’s currently a display of stupidity on a global scale by a political administration, you would automatically know exactly which administration I’m talking about. The difference between the stupidity of the guy on the diving board versus this administration I mention is the scope of the consequences. The diving board guy was the sole sufferer of his stupidity.

I honestly feel like when I am listening to the words and watching the actions of this administration, I am watching a blooper reel of accidents. I’m watching a repeated display of stupidity with dire consequences, and yet the bloopers keep coming: Insulting and even threatening allies, slashing support programs, dissolving institutions, and making economic blunders, all of which are alienating not only global friends, but dividing their nation, and harming their citizens.

This blooper reel isn’t going to be fixed with stitches on a forehead, needed because of an impact with a diving board. The suffering for this stupidity won’t be felt by a single person. This is going to hurt a lot of people, and it’s going to take a long time to recover. The question is, when will the stupidity stop?

I don’t think the guy on the diving board is going to try to repeat that stunt. The question is if he’ll do something equally stupid again… it’s the repeated behaviour that truly moves someone from making a stupid choice to actually just being stupid.

Not even wrong

“Not even wrong” is a phrase often used to describe pseudoscience or bad science. It describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but uses faulty reasoning or speculative premises, which can be neither affirmed nor denied and thus cannot be discussed rigorously and scientifically… The phrase is generally attributed to the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was known for his colorful objections to incorrect or careless thinking. (Wikipedia)

I love this term. A great example of where this applies is to flat earthers.

Another is deniers of the moon landing.

These ‘believers’ have to deny volumes of evidence. They have to believe that so many people are conspiring to lie, across political party lines, and across international borders… with the sole purpose of keeping a massive secret that doesn’t benefit anyone to keep.

What surprises me is the willingness of bright people to engage in debate with these pseudoscientists and crackpots. The reality is that these are such bad ideas that they do not deserve to be put on equal footing with good ideas.

Why argue with someone who is so intellectually dishonest that they aren’t even wrong?

Flat earth and flight times

I’ve already shared this clip where you,

“just need to go to 5:46 of this video, and watch until 12:48.

https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44?t=346

This 7 minutes is all you need to debunk Flat Earthers.”

But forget about the science for a moment, forget about the videos from space, and forget about what the shadow of the earth looks like on the moon.

What gets me is how flat earthers think time zones and plane travel work? We have decades of flight traffic data, and every day flights take off and land in predictable times between set locations. If the world were flat there would be some split in between 2 locations that would be impossible. Let’s say the split is somewhere between Hawaii and Japan. Take the globe and flatten it out with Hawaii on the Far West and Japan on the Far East. Then how can the flight between these two places be only 8.5 hours? Meanwhile, going the other way, it takes over 11 hours from Hawaii to Newfoundland… how could a plane go from one side of the flat earth to the other side so quickly?

No matter where you decide to draw the lines for a flat earth, we have flights travelling daily that would have to beat all airspeed records to accomplish landing on time, if they couldn’t go around the earth and instead had to fly the opposite way to avoid the edge. Put a flat earther on one of those flights, and that should defy any proof they think they might have. That should be the only evidence needed. Yet I guess it’s not enough.

That’s the weird thing about conspiracy theories like this… They don’t stand up to any evidence and yet people stick to them. To anyone who seriously and vehemently stands by the idea that the world is flat, do me a favour: draw the lines in the sand. Tell me where the edge is that separates east from west, then tell me how the flights between a city on the east and a city on the west can be achieved so quickly?