Chapter 1: What are the signs of modern brain rot?
When I'm talking, I feel dumb. We were never, and I mean never, ever meant to hear the thoughts of this many stupid people in one day. Like, we all know we're getting dumber, right? Like, you feel it, I feel it, we all feel it. As you scroll through your feeds, do you ever feel like all that brain rot is taking a toll? It's not just that.
We're investing less in schools, we distrust science, and we have AI doing a lot of our thinking for us. Some people are saying we're in a golden age of stupidity.
Chapter 2: How is willful ignorance affecting our intelligence?
I think we are at the dawn of the golden age of stupidity. It honestly feels like at times we solve the issue of not knowing things by deciding that we don't need to know those things. We are the most informed generation in history, yet somehow the dumbest. The words stupid and dumb are thrown around a lot, and definitely in ableist ways.
But what we're talking about here is willful ignorance, using our minds less and allowing them to get weaker. I'm Jonquan Hill, and this week on Explain It to Me from Vox, how do we get our brains back? A lot of people have a lot of opinions on what it means to be stupid.
The easy way is to say that if you get less than 100 in an IQ test, the further you are away from 100 with your score, the more stupid you are. I really want to push back against that definition. I think it's a really stupid definition because it doesn't really capture at all what we mean when we talk about stupidity. And also IQ tests themselves are pretty clumsy ways of defining stupidity.
How do you define it?
Chapter 3: What is the historical perspective on stupidity?
Damn you. That's a really good question. This is Stuart Jeffries. He's a journalist and he wrote a book called A Short History of Stupidity. I like this idea of it being somehow a moral thing rather than data, you know, because I think we're so wedded to data and it doesn't really capture what we really value.
And what we value, I think, is stopping being ignorant, having a will to stop being ignorant. And if you don't have that will, that to me is stupidity. Why are we talking about this now? Why have we returned to this discussion about it? There seemed to be a lot of it around.
Chapter 4: How does AI contribute to our cognitive decline?
And when COVID hit, there seemed to be a lot of people behaving in rather stupid ways. A lot of people weren't. But it seemed to be a good time because of that and because of the rise of a kind of populist demagoguery, which still appalls me, still shocks me. You know, it's like people have abandoned the very critical thinking that we need.
Right now, there are a lot of things that make us feel, I don't know, like kind of numb. You know, our feet are full of slop. The Pantone colors of the year have been so bland. I'd like to announce Pantone's color of the year 2025 is... Shit brown. Good news, everybody.
Chapter 5: What role does social interaction play in intelligence?
Pantone just announced its 2026 color of the year and they're going with white. Plus, we have AI summaries for everything now. Choose watch video and the AI agent will watch the entire video in seconds and summarize it. The truth is nobody has time, but AI does. It all just feels flat. Is that making us less smart? I don't know. I'm going to push back.
I'm always going to push back a little bit against the idea that AI is screwing us over. But I really take your point.
Chapter 6: How can we train our brains to be smarter?
There is a sort of blandification of life. It's like we feel that we're more stupid. But, you know, looking at history, maybe we aren't. We're actually just dealing, as we always have done, with new kinds of technology which threaten us, you know, really upset us.
the luddites destroyed the machines because they were terrified of them now we're terrified of ai because you know maybe an existentially different threat but it is a sort of it seems similar to me we're just threatened by the the unknown and we think we're on the chasm of something you know of our own extinction or something like that i kind of think it's too soon to call it but yeah i know what you mean the sense of brain rot we're feeling is out there
Do you know more about modern brain rot or OG brain rot? Let's find out. Ballerina cappuccino. Yes. Chimpanzini bananini.
Chapter 7: What is the relationship between critical thinking and knowledge development?
Perfect. Tung tung tung sahur. Yes. And there are ways our brains are working less for things. You know, for instance, I don't necessarily need to know directions. I have Google Maps on my phone. There's not really as much friction in the world for payoff. Does that impact the way we interpret and understand the rest of the world? I think, yeah, I really take that point.
That sort of cognitive outsourcing where we've just made our technology do the work for us.
Chapter 8: Can we reclaim our intelligence in the modern age?
That's worrying if that's what's really happening. There's also another thing, which is that we are made to feel stupid by the bureaucracies we live in. If you ever get mired, as I always seem to, you know, two-factor recognition, authentication and all that kind of stuff, you just feel dumb all the time, even though you aren't.
Even though, you know, if you're a college graduate or if you're a professor, you're going to feel dumb. So there is a sense in which you will feel dumb no matter how clever you are. I think living lives in, you know, technologically advanced society has got really complicated, perhaps too complicated. Yeah.
You know, people say because of all of these different factors that now we're in this golden age of stupidity. Yeah. Is that true? Do you think that is true? No, not really. What a father I would be, apart from everything else, suggesting that we're on average getting more stupid when my daughter's, I think, cleverer than me.
You know, she's got better opportunities, she's better read, and she's, yeah, you know, more empathetic and... Kind of sweeter person than I'll ever be, you know. Yeah, so I'm not going to say that, and I don't really believe it at all. You know, and I look back at some of the things I was doing when I started my career.
You know, they weren't great, and I wasn't doing things that were particularly clever. I think I'm cleverer and better now, partly because of the technology I use that helps me to connect with people in ways that I wouldn't have been able to do when I was, say, you know, her age, when I was 20. Yeah.
When we talk about stupidity, are we maybe thinking of a different kind of stupidity when we think of the era we're in now? You know, it's the lack of critical thinking, a lack of curiosity. Is that sort of where we are? Yeah, there's a fear. And you can see it in the way that people talk about how politics isn't working. People don't know the names of their representatives.
They don't really get involved in politics. And that leaves the way open to demagogues of the kinds who are dominating the world at the moment. You know, yeah, you're right. There is a lack of critical thinking. But it was ever thus. You know, it's not like there was a golden age where everybody was really, you know, on top of democracy and really keen to sort of, Hitler was elected.
I've said the H word already, but it's always worth bearing that point in mind. He was elected, and by sophisticated people as well. So the suggestion that we are worse than our elders, cognitively, seems to me to be dubious. Humans have been fretting over how smart we are and aren't for a really long time. That's next. Support for this show comes from Rocket Money.
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