The medium is the mob

Lane Brown has published a long essay on what he calls his “theory of dumb,” which is an attempt to explain why everybody is apparently getting stupider. This is — sort of — hyperbole, but he does point to a number of intriguing studies from the last few years suggesting that the Flynn effect — that is, the roughly three-point per decade average rise in performance on IQ tests observed from the 1930s through the 1990s in countries across the world — has possibly stopped or even reversed.

Because these leaps appeared over just a few generations, Flynn ruled out genetics as their cause. Evolutionary change takes hundreds of thousands of years, and the humans of 1900 and 2000 were running on the same basic mental hardware. Instead, he posited that there had been a kind of software update, uploaded to the

collective mind by modern life itself. Better education trained students to reason with hypotheticals instead of just memorizing facts. Office and industrial jobs required workers to grapple with ideas rather than physical objects. Mass media exposed audiences to unfamiliar places and perspectives. People got better at classifying, generalizing, and thinking beyond their own daily experience, which are some of the basic skills IQ tests are designed to measure. Flynn liked to illustrate this shift from literalism toward abstraction with the example that, a century ago, if you asked someone what dogs and rabbits have in common, they might answer “Dogs hunt rabbits,” not “They’re both mammals.

Maybe, then, all the noise and novelty wasn’t rotting our minds but upgrading them. (Studies suggest that better nutrition and reduced exposure to lead may have also helped.) In any case, the Flynn effect held steady for so long and through so many apparent threats that there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t last forever, even if, someday, somebody invented a chatbot that could do homework or Theo Von started podcasting.

Or so thought Elizabeth Dworak, now an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, when she chose the topic of her 2023 master’s thesis. She decided to analyze the results of 394,378 IQ tests taken in the U.S. between 2006 and 2018 to see if they exhibited the same climb. “I had all this cognitive data and thought, Hey, there’s probably a Flynn effect in there,” she says. But when she ran the numbers, “I felt like I was in Don’t Look Up,” the movie in which an astronomy grad student played by Jennifer Lawrence discovers a comet speeding toward Earth. “I spent weeks going back through all the code. I thought I’d messed something up and would have to delay submitting. But then I showed my adviser, and he said, ‘Nope, your math is right.’”

The math showed declines in three important testing categories, including matrix reasoning (abstract visual puzzles), letter and number series (pattern recognition), and verbal reasoning (language-based problem-solving). The first two, in which losses were deepest, measure what psychologists call fluid intelligence, or the power to adapt to new situations and think on the fly. The drops showed up across age, gender, and education level but were most dramatic among 18-to-22-year-olds and those with the least amount of schooling.

Brown considers the popular thesis that the internet in general and smart phones in particular are dumbing us down — I would like to dub this the Kardashian effect — but claims to reject it, in favor of an alternative theory that I’m apparently not quite smart enough to understand actually constitutes an alternative theory, as opposed to a rephrasing of the former:

Not so long ago, the dolts among us were free to think their thoughts quietly to themselves with no easy way to share them. At worst, a person would usually just embarrass himself in front of his own family or bowling team. Bad ideas had a harder time scaling and reproducing, so lots of stupidity stayed local, and everyone else could happily overestimate the average person’s intelligence because they saw less of it. But then we connected everyone on the planet and gave them each the equivalent of their own printing press, radio station, and TV network. Now, even those with nothing useful to say can tell the whole world exactly, or more often vaguely, what they think.

To be clear, this isn’t nostalgia for a time when fewer voices were heard. The widening of the conversation has been, in some ways, a good thing: more perspectives, more accountability, the Rizzler’s TikToks. But the downside is that we can see the full distribution of human thought in one infinite scroll, and it turns out the median is lower than we ever could’ve imagined. In theory, this is the democratization of expression. In practice, it feels like a crowdsourced lobotomy.

The problem isn’t any one device or platform or influencer, and you can’t escape it just by quitting Instagram or unsubscribing from all your paid newsletters. The unavoidable reality is that a massive decentralized swarm of people is now talking, arguing, and opining all at once, everywhere, all the time. And if you want to say anything, or simply understand what’s going on, you have to pass through them. The medium is still the message, but the medium, today, is the mob.

This account on how stupidity has gone viral, metaphorically and perhaps even literally, could be combined with a related point I touch on in The Triumph of Stupidity. Here I quote a friend whose career is deeply embedded in the cyberworld:

We are hardwired to consider the world in terms of us vs other. We have made progress (against racism, etc.) because we live in increasingly diverse communities. We don’t overcome “us vs them”, we just come to accept more people as “us”.

But because of advances in technology, our community is no longer the people we live amongst. It used to be that our community was our family (of course) but also our neighbors that we chatted with, or the colleagues we encountered at the office, the people we met when we went into town to shop.

But now we don’t do that. Family, yes, still. But so many of us don’t encounter colleagues at work, we work from home. We don’t encounter people at the stores, we shop online. Our interaction with restaurants is saying our name and having them hand us a takeout bag of food we ordered on our phone. We barely even know our neighbors.

So that forced interaction with a diverse community is dying. Instead, we’ve replaced it with online interactions. Our community is family plus Facebook friends plus Facebook groups plus Instagram feeds plus YouTube videos.

In the past, if we went into town and shared strong political beliefs based on bullshit lies, the people we ran into would say something. Challenge us. Roll their eyes, something. But now, we can choose to only interact with people who won’t make us feel bad that way. And the algorithms they use make sure that they only feed us the things we agree with.

That basic thing that made our world better, forcing us to confront diversity and different opinions, has been killed by allowing us to choose our community, and reinforcing it via algorithms.

Superficially, this sounds like the opposite of the claim Brown is making, but perhaps we can move toward a Hegelian or even Zizekian synthesis, in which stupid people create epistemological bubbles, and epistemological bubbles create stupid people, in a sort of grand enstupidization of the circle of life.

Brown has an interesting discussion of how AI is likely making all this worse in various ways, which is all too plausible. And his conclusion is a grim one for those of us who are brain toilers:

It feels a little quaint to worry about this stuff right now, just as all of society seems to be downgrading its view of intelligence. “My friends and I were joking about how being smart isn’t as sexy as it used to be,” Dworak tells me. “Now people just care more about things like how many subscribers you have on Twitch.”

If the Flynn effect was partly a story about society encouraging and rewarding certain cognitive habits — abstraction, analysis, sustained attention — those rewards are now disappearing. AI is encroaching on high-paying knowledge work: It is already stealing jobs from entry-level coders with doctors, lawyers, and bankers likely next. Tenured posts in academia are disappearing as schools adjunctify and research funding dries up. Anti-elitism has turned wonkishness and expertise into a political liability, which is bad news for the Democrats’ crowded bench of professorial Obama impersonators. If you’d invested a few hundred dollars into Dogecoin instead of the S&P; ten years ago, you could have retired by now.