Why do smart people believe stupid things?

These are typically smart people they've learned they have a lot of training and things like academia.

But I don't think intelligence evolved for problem solving. it evolved for socializing. All of the most intelligent animals are social living social groups form social groups. Things like dolphins and orcas and chimpanzees. These groups have hierarchy and a lot of structure. Even for animals quite as sophisticated system of hierarchy.

I think it's evolutionary.

But what does this have to do about smart people thinking stupid things. I will admit that that was just language to get attention. It's more like smart people believe irrational things. Bike at morbidly obese person can be healthy, was that a boy you can become a girl just by saying he's a girl.

These are referred to as fashionable irrational beliefs. It is way too appear more sophisticated and two degree it does signal more sophisticated intelligence because you have to be quite intelligent that bend and move around this irrational structure in order to make the mental gymnastics work.

So why do smart people believe in irrational things for signaling to signal how sophisticated they are and how advanced they are because only an educated mind can come up with and rationalize something so ridiculous.

For example during slavery there was a very educated man that came up with an mental illness to describe why slaves were fleeing captivity. He called this draptomania. There's something very similar to this in modern society but the races have changed they call it white fragility. You also have a transphobia fat phobia islamophobia anytime someone's trying to connect something to phobia they're trying to create a mental illness that makes you think the way you do.

Thoughts?

 

What is irrational is to continue to call Caitlyn Jenner a man and refer to her as Bruce.

 

Hope you're a fashionable and sophisticated of you to believe a man can transition into a woman. There's not a damn thing rational about it but since when was being rational sophisticated?

 

As far as I know he legally changed his name to Caitlyn, but as a public figure he was known as Bruce for decades. So I don't think when a celebrity changes their name in their sixties the rest of the world necessarily needs to catch up.

As far as it being "irrational" to call him a man, well in what sense isn't he a man?

Caitlyn Jenner Says She Didn't 'Cut It Off'

 

This was what I was talking about. I'm not sure about that poster but he/she dose seem intelligent

Fashionable irrational beliefs. Thinking a man in drag has changed his sex. It's not about Objectivity it's not even about rights or acceptance it's about signaling.

 

Probably because reality is so complicated, and when it comes to abstract ideas (like in religion, philosophy, politics and ideology) very few people are intelligent enough to be able to develop their own opinions completely independently. Nor do they often have the time to personally collect all the information and think about it.

The fact that different groups of very intelligent people can completely disagree about certain things shows the limits of ordinary human intelligence, when it comes to trying to understand reality. Apparently belief is not an entirely objective and logical process, despite what people tend to assume.

Another issue is that modern education at academic institutions does not support independent critical thinking. Certain beliefs are taboo, can result in academic careers being derailed, rejection of papers and studies from mainstream publications. Social politics has come to dominate intellectualism.

 

Well maybe the poster will provide a rational, logical, scientifically based explanation to her opinion.

Or perhaps it won't be.

 

They can't. There's no national scientific explanation to support the belief that a human can change their sex. Other animals certainly can. So it isn't like this is a foreign concept to us.

 

LoL case in point.

That is still a man.

A man in womanface, but still a man.

 

And you can tell they don't really believe it when pressed.

They just have to say they believe it because it's required of them to do so.

 

Exactly.

Critical Theory has replaced Critical Thought in academia.

 

I don't think it's because they're not intelligent enough. In fact some of these ideas that are created are so absurd that only an academic can come up with them. Takes intelligence to do that.

I think a lot of it is essentially the story of The emperor's New clothes. The pretenders sophisticated and only they can understand these things when they're not really that complicated. Only the sophisticated people can see the inverse clothes just like only the sophisticated people can see the beauty of morbidly obese people.

I'm not talking about things people can disagree on. Disagreement is part of discourse.
I'm talking about things that are objectively false that are proven absolutely false that people still believe in. Like the idea that it's perfectly healthy morbidly obese. There is not disagreement here that's false. People saying it's not are factually incorrect. This isn't an opinion.

And even prescribe a mental health condition against people point out that they're wrong. Fat phobia.

So I'm not talking about things that you can disagree on or that are debatable. I'm talking about specific things intelligent people believe that are absolutely false.

It would be similar to believing that the Earth is flat, or the giraffes don't exist in the animals we call giraffes are holographic projections.

my problem is where does the impetus come from to do this. That's really at the heart of it.

There had to be something to drive people to do this. And I think it's the desire to appear sophisticated, high brow, more learned than the common Man.

It's the same thing that's behind conspiracy theories essentially that's what we're talking about, it's just a conspiracy theory of the academics. Except in this case the medical industry is the conspiracy or biology is the conspiracy.

It comes out of postmodernism. And postmodernism isn't really an educated thing it's just let the belief that tradition is useless. There are good parts to post modernism. Adidas question if certain people really are the same as other people. It made us question if religious beliefs should be allowed even if we disagree with them. It is one of the fundamental components from which constitutional Rights were created from.

So it's not all bad it's just when what once was postmodern is now just modern people adhere to the postmodernist if you point are going to attack the things that postmodernists stood for 300 years ago.

This is why art has turned into crap. And it's not like this hasn't happened before.

 

If course they don't they aren't stupid. They say it mostly so they don't get laughed at or called names.

Look at JK Rowling, all she said was something objectively factual. A visceral very real truth. And because she's an author, a vocation that people view is highly educated especially when they're popular, they have turned her into an essentially a klansman.

But not a soul can tell you why she's wrong because she isn't.

This is why people conform they don't want to be the next JK Rowling and if you're in this world it's different from you and me we live outside of this. My work is valued based on my skill level not whether or not I question the sophisticated canards people live by. And because of the time I'm seeing as unsophisticated. So the currency just doesn't have any value to me and I assume that's you too, as it's most people.

A lot of people most of us in fact will conform if there's group pressure. I remember reading about experiments where they would have a test subject in a room with multiple other people and little girl three lines on a whiteboard that were the same length and the test subject would agree if the entire group decided that line a was longer than b or c. Even though they knew it wasn't.

I think what's happening in the academic circle is essentially the same thing.

 

I disagree. Critical thinking has been replaced with a different things. Critical race theory, critical gender theory. Essentially instead of changing your mind which is what thinking is supposed to do. It's attempting to change reality so you don't have to change your mind.

The first step to learning anything the absolute necessary thing you have to bring to the table is the ability to be humble. To say I don't know and I'm willing to learn. This new version of postmodernism is throwing that away. That's what postmodernism does. Challenges standards.

Have you ever heard the phrase "never trust a man who is certain.". It's an expression that suggests hubris clouds judgment. This is where we see the death of knowledge the death of science in something called bias. Some people will in the earth thousands of times over rather than admit they are wrong. Admitting the wrong means you may be wrong about everything probably not but it's possible.

I think our education has become an ego thing. I've encountered people that studied various things got phds high levels of education. But absolutely will not work in anything other than a very very narrow very niche field. Because it's beneath them.

This is counterintuitive because the first step to learning is putting your ego aside. You cannot learn if you don't do that.

 

Critical theory is all of those things you mentioned.

 

Bruce Jenner is a man pretending to be a woman. That's the truth. John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer who pretended to be a clown named Pogo at children's events. Is it irrational to refer to Pogo the clown as a serial killer named John? sheesh. Sober up, would ya.

 

Some of the people believing irrational things might not be as smart as you imagine them to be (at least not in the field their beliefs are about). Of course, some of the things smart people believe might not be stupid (or irrational), you could just not smart enough to understand them properly.

 

I'm sorry I didn't mean to sound condescending a lot of people just don't understand what critical theory is and I do so I tried to explain it the way that everyone can understand I didn't mean to come off as condescending.

But I agree with you.

 

So you're going with the possibility that maybe the emperor really isn't naked maybe there are magical clothes that only sophisticated people can see?

Yeah not bloody likely.

I'm not talking about topics where there is a lot of nuance and debate about veracity I'm talking about fundamental truths that cannot to be denied. That were already objectively proven.

Like the fact that morbid obesity is unhealthy. Or the human beings can't change their sex there is no way you can know something some sort of magical thing that makes people healthy when they're morbidly obese.

It's not that it's stupid or irrational to me it's that it's objectively false.

It's not that I'm not smart enough to understand this magical situation that they're fabricating it's that they're sophisticated and so therefore they pretend they see the emperor is beautiful clothes.

 

The point I was trying to make with this thread is that this belief that Bruce Jenner changed his sex and therefore we must all play along with it is it irrational.

Arguing that humans can't change their sex to someone who supports to believe that they can isn't the way to stop this sort of thinking.

Leaving it as irrational or stupid and ridiculing people who believe that pointing at them and laughing at them kind of like the little child and The emperor's New clothes really exposes the irrational belief for its irrational qualities.

There's nobody that believes someone can change their sex any more than there's someone who believes someone can grow horns or in their adulthood grow 7 in height without severe horrendous medical intervention. So the point is to ridicule the belief not argue with it

 

I don't care if he thinks Halloween is every day he still has a big penis

 

Other way around really. People were convinced to act as if the Emperor had clothes on because they thought the people telling them so were smart.

That's just wrong. Very few topics are simple binary ones, especially the kind of examples you gave. You might not understand when other people talk about them being more nuanced but, well...

Smart people don't say morbid obesity is healthy, though some will point out that the concepts of both "obesity" and "health" are varied and nuanced, so a particular obese person could be healthier than a particular on-obese one.

Smart people also don't say humans can change their biological sex, but they might talk about social, medical or surgical changes to reflect a gender identity. The range of issues and topics surrounding that are extremely wide and varied.

 

Animals, at least the ones not permanently attached to rocks in the sea, move to find and capture food in order to live. Primitive animals can do so strictly on a stimulus-response basis, but higher animals lead a more complicated life. As animals become intelligent, the ability to imagine situations that do not exist becomes key. The raccoon has to imagine raiding the sweet corn patch versus eating frogs in the marsh. The fox has to imagine raiding farmer Jones' hen house versus catching field mice in the meadow. The ability to imagine futures that do not yet exist is key to intelligent planning of all sorts.

Humans are extremely intelligent. Therefore, they can imagine all sorts of things that do not exist. This leads to the ability to do abstract thinking of all sorts. For example, higher mathematics includes whole topics that have no particular correspondence to reality. Of the geometries of Euclid, Riemann and Lobachevsky, only one can correspond to reality.

So believing in "stupid thing" is a consequence of imagination being detached from reality, and it is a malfunction of our highly evolved intelligence.

 

I think you already nailed it- its fashionable.

I still have zero votes for 'if a trans woman were elected President, they would be considerded the first woman President.' Meaning none of the 890 people who viewed the poll really and truly believes a trans woman is actually a woman ...some of them will just say it in situations that they don't think matter.

The First Woman President? | PoliticalForum.com - Forum for US and Intl Politics

 

a plot that only an academic could come up with.

I didn't say it was binary. You're projecting something on to me that did not come for me that's strictly from you.

Also binary has recently become kind of a buzzword so I'm automatically suspicious of anybody who uses it outside of describing a star system or computer language.
,

feel free to present the nuance that makes a morbidly obese person as healthy as a fit person.

Some do. There are even fat studies as a subject in college. I'm not going to say these people aren't smart just because they have irrational beliefs.

you are engaging in the univsriant fallacy in that there isn't a single thing that is common among all healthy people and not a single thing common among all obese people.

I didn't speak in absolutes and pretending that I do to win a debate is dishonest.

This is a no true Scotsman fallacy or an appeal to purity. I don't recognize your gatekeeping as legitimate.

Gender identity as a concept is deeply flawed and dependent on strictly social roles attached to sex.

Essentially the concept of gender is not separable from sex so when you say someone changes their gender you're saying they change their sex and we can see this in the way it's expressed. A trans woman would fight to have her passport say f instead of M now if they believed that they aren't changing their sex they were just changing their gender F and M wouldn't matter.

So I think it's cognitive dissonance to say that these two things are separate they're not.

Gender identity is heavily dependent on sex there wouldn't be gender identity if it wasn't.

No doubt but that doesn't negate generalities.

If we weren't able to think in generalities all cognition would cease.