Sometimes when people talk about a problem in society, they strongly imply that most people are stupid.
This is wrong. Most people aren’t super knowledgeable about a lot of specific facts about the world (only half of Americans can name the 3 branches of government) but they’re intelligent when it comes to their own lives and the areas they work and spend time in. We should expect the average person to struggle with factual questions about abstract ideas and far-off events, but not so much about what’s right in front of them day to day.
If a claim about how society works implies that most people are incredibly stupid, much more stupid than anyone I encounter in my day to day life, I dismiss it. This simple test kills a lot of big claims about how the world works. I’ve been applying it in a lot of AI conversations recently. I’ve written about this a bit before but want to go into more detail.
Here’s a common claim that I think fails my test: “The reason Americans are so unhealthy is that doctors don’t tell people about healthy diets.”
I think most people know what’s considered healthy food. They maybe wouldn’t be able to perfectly break down ideal ratios of macronutrients, but they have a rough idea. The average person whose bad diet is making them unhealthy would probably be able to point to the bad diet as part of the problem. If I walked up to the average person and asked them to make an ideal meal plan for themselves to be maximally healthy, I think most people would do a decent job.
Stefan Schubert makes a similar observation about what he calls sleepwalk bias:
When we predict the future, we often seem to underestimate the degree to which people will act to avoid adverse outcomes. Examples include Marx's prediction that the ruling classes would fail to act to avert a bloody revolution, predictions of environmental disasters and resource constraints, y2K, etc. In most or all of these cases, there could have been a catastrophe, if people had not acted with determination and ingenuity to prevent it. But when pressed, people often do that, and it seems that we often fail to take that into account when making predictions. In other words: too often we postulate that people will sleepwalk into a disaster. Call this sleepwalk bias.
I often use the idea of sleepwalk bias in conversations. However, what I’m pointing at here is a much more extreme example of assuming everyone is stupid about even normal everyday experiences, so I think it needs its own name. I’m calling it my "Are you presuming most people are stupid?" test.
AI
There are a few claims about AI floating around that fail my test.
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