Destigmatize being dumb

Intelligence is good — the stigma around lacking it makes us dumber

I’ve gotten much smarter over the past year because I no longer feel bad about being dumb. I think everyone should do this. I think it will improve your life AND society.

Understanding in what ways I am dumb helps me improve. Example: I’m not very good at abstract thinking. A lot of my engineer peers seem to grasp things much quicker than me without concrete examples. Accepting that meant I no longer feel bad for “being slow”, instead I ask, “can we look at an example?” This allows me to make valuable contributions: I can find bugs or design flaws that they can’t see.

https://x.com/way_opener/status/1841314483785859314

I claim that this is a root cause of a lot of problems in society. If we destigmatize “being dumb” (1) a lot of people will get smarter (2) leaders will admit it more often and ask for help.

How to admire “smart” without stigmatizing “dumb”

I think we currently don’t admire & reward intelligence ENOUGH, and I think this will help with that. Any system that rewards finding flaws will improve. Apple, Google, etc will pay you a lot of money if you can find a security flaw in any of their systems. The military does this with matters of life & death (if admitting failure is punished, people hide failure). If you find an inefficiency in the economy, you can make a lot of money fixing it (through betting on the stock market, or starting a business).

How do we reward “finding out if you’re dumb” without making things worse? I talked about doing this for myself in “how I learned to think for myself”. I made it a game where I win by finding instances where I fail to predict the world, & updating my world model.

A failure mode of this is celebrating being dumb in itself, like “haha I’m so dumb at math”. This does NOT help, it keeps us stuck, and it doesn’t feel good. Instead it’s more like the spirit of this XKCD, we reward the process of fixing a flaw. Make it fun.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

“Being smarter” != “a better person”

A major cultural roadblock to fixing this problem is separating the notion of “a good person” from “a smart person”. We need to acknowledge that you can be very smart and also be the cause of evil in the world.

https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1846541984070090835

I don’t know the answer here, best I got so far is: trust that calibration always helps. There are people who think they are very smart, but they are not, and they will be much more effective if they recognize this. And there are people who have internalized “I’m dumb” when they were young and have stopped trying. Calibration helps everyone. It helps you in your own work, as well as those you interact with.

https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1802528377602990561

Bootstrapping cultural shifts

Changing culture en-masse is hard, and also dangerous. But there is a way to change culture that is safe & easy:

1. Just start doing the thing. Even if no one else ever adopts it, your life improves.

2. Convince 1-3 friends, or co-workers.

We don’t have control over the global culture, but we absolutely have control over the micro-culture around us. This is what Dan Luu is doing when he writes about “Willingness to look stupid”. It helps spread the idea AND make him visible to employers that understand this concept. It helps his career. It’s win-win.

Can we make a shirt?

I really love nohello.net, it’s a website that spreads one specific idea: it’s bad practice to DM your coworker and say “hi can I ask a question?” It’s better to just..ask the question. I’ve sent this to a lot of people over my career & it’s been very useful.

I want something like that for this idea. I want to wear a shirt with a cute design that says “DESTIGMATIZE BEING DUMB” so I can go to a party and my IRL friends can be like, “haha, what’s up with your shirt?” and we can talk about this.

I made a destigmatize-being-dumb GitHub repo where I’m collecting links to articles that do a good job explaining this. I don’t know how to design a shirt, or how much it costs to print & sell one, or if someone has a better catchy name than this phrase, but if you understand this idea & think it’s important: I’d appreciate your contribution!