[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You proposed a topic last night. I could make the same thing tonight which is ‘the possible epidemic of stupidity.’ I want to pivot really hard or lean in hard on two points. What do you mean by possible here and what do you mean by epidemic here?
Rick Rosner: A couple days ago I saw on Twitter, a tweet from I think a medical professional asking I think other medical professionals if they’d noticed like a number of instances of brain damage in their patients and with the implication being could be related to Covid, could be related to a three-year lockdown because of Covid. We’ve touched on this idiocracy before. For a long time I thought our devices would make us smarter by being extensions of our minds, that nobody would ever get lost again because we have ways or Google Maps. That might be true that people get lost a lot less than they used to because of apps but there’s an alternative point of view that when wolves were domesticated into dogs, dogs became stupider than wolves because thinking got outsourced to humans. Dogs let humans do the thinking because we’re good at that and then supposedly humans let dogs take care of the sniffing because they’re good at that.
So there’s an alternate argument that the more we depend on our apps the stupider we get because we just let them do our thinking. Certainly people’s information absorption strategies have changed since Google where you have to go hunting through books or old newspapers or track down an expert to get your answers to get your questions answered and now most answers are available within a minute just by typing them into a search engine. So I mean there are cultural reasons for our thinking changing but we should first look at Covid and the Covid is said to be a clotting disease that among the other things it does, it makes you form a lot of little clots which can include the little clots associated with TIAs, transient ischemic attacks which are like mini strokes. It’s kind of like pump brain where you have heart surgery and they put you on a heart lung machine. Heart lung machine can beat up your blood cells and make them clumpier and it’s not an uncommon thing that somebody who undergoes five hour surgery, within a few weeks after the surgery kind of loses themselves. They kind of get that wrapped in gauze feeling. They don’t feel as inhabited, as conscious, as aware as they did before the surgery as their beat up cells cause a bunch of slow to develop brain insults; little TIAs all over their brain from beat up blood cells getting hung up and causing little mini strokes which take a while to recover from or take a while to get used to.
So it could be with Covid and officially about a third of Americans have been tested and positive for Covid at some point but unofficially the number could be well over half of Americans with at least four million Americans having trouble working, that their health and concentration have been hampered by what is probably long Covid. And then another few million Americans at least still able to work but maybe having defects that they’re not entirely aware of or they’re working through. So you might have 60% of the US population having had Covid which would be roughly 200 million Americans. And up to a quarter of those people, 50 million Americans with appreciable long Covid. And if one of the characteristics of long Covid whether it’s detected or not could be compromised a brain function. 50 million Americans is more than enough to call it an epidemic.
So if there is an epidemic of stupidity, you could argue that it could be a nature and nurture thing, that there could be biological reasons and not just Covid but two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, including people can be diabetic; all this stuff can gum up your thinking. There have been studies, I don’t know if there have been epidemiological studies to figure out the percent of people who could have their thinking affected by diseases related to lifestyle and being overweight. What is it, metabolic syndrome? Anyway, there are plenty of physiological possibilities for people getting stupider.
And then there are cultural reasons where the Republicans figured out 50 years ago that dumber people are easier to manipulate politically and have been using strategies that are more effective with people who are euphemistically called low information voters with the euphemisms standing in for dumber people. Lots of right-wing media targets dumber people. Fox News is dumbed down. Also aging; another physiological reason as the average now with Covid, the average U.S lifespan is actually dropped over the past two or three years but before that happened life spans were going up. So people were living longer and so you have more people, I’d say well over 10 million older people who suffer from mild cognitive difficulties related to age and maybe some other stuff.
There are certainly Industries, scammers who prey on older people. My wife and I still have a landline and landlines are in the realm of old people and we get lots of scam-y calls that are intended to work on old people who still have agency, who are still in charge of their own affairs but who are losing it a little bit. And I’d say that there are at least 10 million Americans in that situation. Maybe their kids are talking about getting live in help or moving them to senior living or taking away their car keys but you’ve got a lot of people with various reasons for possibly being dumber physiologically. And then CBS excuse oldest among the broadcast networks and their shows look superficially like the shows a little bit of less subtlety and a little bit of added clarity. I feel and occasionally watching CBS shows that reflects the CBS’s knowledge that old people are watching the shows and they need a little bit more help with plot etc. They still like to feel like they’re part of the world but they need stuff that’s slightly dumb that looks like real regular adult grown-up TV but is slightly dumbed down so they can deal with it.
I wonder about myself. We’ve been talking for I think more than eight years now. So we have a long baseline, so I could ask you. Do you think I’ve become stupider over the past couple years as I get older, as I’ve been locked down? I was just on this stuff called Flomax for a kidney stone; it’s a muscle relaxant and it made me very lethargic and I feel like I’m coming back from it but am I coming back all the way from it? I was driving a couple days ago extra carefully because I feel like for whatever reason my focus might be lessened compared to me five years ago and even though I’m driving extra carefully, I still tap somebody’s back bumper with my front bumper. Fortunately didn’t cause any damage but that’s just not good.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: And I’m writing a book, I’ve always been writing a book.
Jacobsen: Correct.
Rosner: The book that I’m writing is set 10 to 15 years in the future and after reading this tweet I’ve decided that it’s been discovered in the 2030s that the average IQ in America is about 12 points lower than it was 10 or 20 years earlier. So there you go, people might be stupider. And there’s a huge wealth gap in America, the biggest in history; the gap between America’s richest and the rest of America. Covid and everything else served to further concentrate wealth. And I would say that in the 2030s and beyond, there will be an intelligence gap that the people who are best able to embrace technology including medical technology which might include brain implants, people who are tech savvy, who become more and more intimately linked with biological adjuncts, people who believe in the singularity or singularitarians and transhumanism.
Jacobsen: Come on man, you are getting old. You’re losing it.
Rosner: What? Not being able to pronounce singularitarians?
Jacobsen: Yeah I’ve noticed a couple things in doing some of the transcriptions for you where you mispronounce some words or have difficulty with particular words.
Rosner: What words?
Jacobsen: Singularitarians and transhumanism would be two of them. Like transcendentalists would be like a Unitarians or something.
Rosner: Okay, well somebody from the mid 19th century.
Jacobsen: I mean I am actually; I will let you know I’m a member of the Unitarian Church, the entire Universalist I think but I’m a very terrible member I don’t really do anything. I just pay the membership dues. I think they gave me a free membership actually.
Rosner: So you’re saying you’re a transcendentalist as a Unitarian.
Jacobsen: Something like that, yeah. I’m not Jewish but I’m part of the cultural and secular Jewish organization as well, the executive directors gave me a free membership because I’ve interviewed her and she’s like “Come on in,” and I’m like “Okay. I’m Dutch. I’ll be Spinoza. Why not?”
Rosner: So, I get the idea of all this stuff is that one can aspire to higher being without believing in a specific God.
Jacobsen: It’s more you have nodes and networks and nodes being individual premises hidden or explicit beliefs of a worldview or life stance. Then those nodes network together being that world viewer life stance formally and then how those can sort of overlap sufficiently and consistently with other ones without contradiction, so it’s in a way of looking at world views and philosophical systems as sets of matrices that overlap in a sort of a larger net. So all of those together, I think you can make an argument for sort of larger sort of Monic views of outlook whether secular Judaism or cultural Judaism or Unitary Universalism or secular humanism or even the non-theist Satanists, etc. I State this because I hold memberships in each of these including a bunch of other ones.
Rosner: So what you’re saying is that you can, I think what I was saying that you can aspire and you can find value in the world without adhering to some specific theology.
Jacobsen: Yeah, non-dogmatic cosmopolitanism. How about that?
Rosner: Okay, sounds good. Those specific theologies may have things to offer, you can take aspects of them as you will.
Jacobsen: Yes. I am Catmatic, I’m not dogmatic.
Rosner: Okay. So if I am losing it a little bit, part of it could be with pronunciation. I had serious dry mouth earlier this year that was just gumming up my mouth. You noticed it that my talking was getting super gummy.
Jacobsen: Yes, it was really annoying.
Rosner: Yeah, so that is related to dry mouth and having the wrong bacteria in my intestines for some reason I’m about two-thirds better from that. So I don’t know if that impacted the way I talked, well it did but I don’t know if it really impacted pronunciation. Anyway, if I am losing it a little bit I don’t think I’ve had Covid but as I said there are plenty other reasons.
Jacobsen: You’ve had snorvid; you’ve had a lot of sleeping and you spent a lot of time in your robe.
Rosner: Yeah, fortunately there is crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is acquired expertise; the shit you know and have learned.
Jacobsen: What do those really mean? What do those terms in fact mean structurally? They’re just placeholders in my mind. What you can intake and what you know.
Rosner: All right, your knowledge base; crystallized intelligence equals knowledge base.
Jacobsen: Yeah but even that we know from cognitive science, from memory studies, is not crystallized. It is in fact reconstructed. So you construct the knowledge with your fluid intelligence, fine. But when it’s in there, to get it again, you reconstruct with memories and such.
Rosner: Okay, but that kind of intelligence whatever you want to call it, is more durable.
Jacobsen: Ah! Okay, that makes more sense, durable intelligence.
Rosner: Then fluid intelligence, which is high powered, intuitive, able to figure any fucking thing out based on the thinnest little clumps of information, being able to be dazzling not because of your erudition but because of your pure mental power. So fortunately, even if I’m losing fluid intelligence which I may not be and it may be very difficult to separate fluid intelligence from crystallized intelligence anyhow but fortunately I’ve still got a decent knowledge base. That’s kind of how the academia works where the young amazing thinkers shoehorn their way in, bust their way in to the academy and earn professorships in tenure in systems that still work. That whole system, that tenure system is kind of breaking down but with early brilliant original work and then as they get older they become stodgy and continue to be of value because of the shit they know.
They can always teach intro classes or even you know graduate level seminars based on knowledge rather than brilliance. According to… is it Popper? What’s the book, the 1960s…?
Jacobsen: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Rosner: Right. So Kuhn says, sometimes you have to wait for all the old scientists to die for people to accept new science but not all science is new science and the old guys you’re waiting to die still know a lot of shit that’s useful. In 1920 the old guys maybe, or 1930 or even 1950, the old guys may have had trouble accepting relativity quantum mechanics but they still knew all this shit about classical mechanics and a bunch of other shit. Anyway, that’s the deal. People might be getting stupider, technology will make some of us smarter and technology will continue to make some of us stupider.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 