The Very Smart People Are Dumb

Everybody does stupid stuff. Not just you or your family or your friends. People — including big, important, credentialed people with lots of money and power — do stupid things. Presidents, CEOs, prime ministers, real-estate moguls, senators, clergymen, and all the rest, do extremely dumb things. Even if they’re Very Smart People.

See, growing up, we’re taught to respect authority. We’re especially taught to revere institutional authority, which supposedly makes its decisions based on expertise and The Science. When I was little, I loved reading statistics about things, and I swallowed them unquestioningly. Certain questions never occurred to me. Questions like “Does this study replicate?” and “What agenda does this serve?” and “Was this done by social scientists? Whose only exposure to math was a single undergraduate statistics class? Which they barely passed?”. As a result, I assumed that every decision made by people in power was well-informed and wise. I didn’t assume it would always turn out well, of course. I knew that people in power could make mistakes, of course, but I thought that such mistakes were the result of certain variables being unknowable. Certainly, big, important institutions, like universities and governments and think tanks, could never make a mistake out of simple, howling stupidity! These are the Very Smart People!

Yeah. I was naïve.

As I grew, I learned, by experience, how dumb people can be. Not just silly people like me, but important people with lots of responsibility. I saw:

1. The German government shutting down its nuclear plants, relying on Russian natural gas and a tiny amount of wind and solar, and then being plunged into an energy crisis after losing access to Russian fossil fuels. This was the German government, supposedly one of the most effective states in the world. This decision was made by Very Smart People.

2. The United States invading Afghanistan for exactly zero good reasons, becoming stuck there for two decades, and then pulling out on what amounts to a whim. The most powerful country on Earth decided to spend twenty years bombing Pashtuns hiding in caves for reasons that are difficult to understand. This decision was made by Very Smart People.

3. Minneapolis (partially) defunding its police department to show its solidarity with radical leftist elements, and then experiencing an unprecedented spike in violent crime. The reasoning was, “We need to signal that we’re good people, so let’s cut our police department in half.” Then violent crime skyrocketed, and the municipal government was flummoxed as to why that was. All this from the municipal government of a major city. This decision was made by Very Smart People.

4. A group of billionaires going to see the Titanic in a submersible, literally made from used, bargain parts, which would supposedly withstand the pressures at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean. I didn’t hear about them until their budget-component submersible imploded from pressure and killed them all instantly. And this was a submersible designed by people who knew The Science and could supposedly be trusted. This decision was made by Very Smart People.

And those are just the first four I could think of off the top of my head. I have repeatedly watched Very Smart People do incredibly dumb shit my entire life. It hasn’t gotten any better with time. In fact, it has gotten worse. See, there was a time when screwups by government and media and corporations and NGOs would be forgotten. In the 1990s, if some big-swinging-dick NGO made a mistake, we’d all forget about it in a year, and most of us would never hear about it to begin with. These days, as soon as such a thing happens, everyone hears about it right away. And it’s on the internet forever. No wonder governments and corporations are scrambling to implement censorship. Not that it’ll work…