If you are smart, big internet companies don't want you; they want the dumb ones!

If you are smart, big internet companies don't want you; they want the dumb ones!


Facebook, Google, Twitter, Linkedin, Amazon and big internet exploitation companies use their technology to trigger "the zombie effect" in people in order to control their trends, votes, media and news intake.

If you are smart, you will be harder to trigger "the zombie effect" in. In this group article we will; examine the science behind the big web companies.

There are more dumb people around today than ever before in history. The dumb ones used to be too dumb to survive and they died out. Modern society has created institutions like the NFL, Walmart, corner bars, NASCAR and other aggregation resources, which gather the dumb ones together and support them.

Mass groups of dumb people, who will click on what is put in front of them, and buy when they are told to buy, and vote for who they are told to vote fo,r and not notice that they are being manipulated, are the bread and butter of Google. Let's take a look at why this is and how billionaires become billionaires by feeding off of, and exploiting, the dumb:


The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Martin A. Schwartz, Department of Microbiology, UVA Health System, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22908, USA


I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.

I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way. Let me explain.

For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can't be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.

A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did.

That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn't really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

I'd like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don't think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.

Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
© The Company of Biologists Limited

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In this paper we question the one-sided thesis that contemporary organizations rely on the mobilization of cognitive capacities. We suggest that severe restrictions on these capacities in the form of what we call functional stupidity are an equally important if under-recognized part of organizational life. Functional stupidity refers to an absence of reflexivity, a refusal to use intellectual capacities in other than myopic ways, and avoidance of justifications. We argue that functional stupidity is prevalent in contexts dominated by economy in persuasion which emphasizes image and symbolic manipulation. This gives rise to forms of stupidity management that repress or marginalize doubt and block communicative action. In turn, this structures individuals' internal conversations in ways that emphasize positive and coherent narratives and marginalize more negative or ambiguous ones. This can have productive outcomes such as providing a degree of certainty for individuals and organizations. But it can have corrosive consequences such as creating a sense of dissonance among individuals and the organization as a whole. The positive consequences can give rise to self-reinforcing stupidity. The negative consequences can spark dialogue, which may undermine functional stupidity.

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We have smart genes–the rest is up to us

A lot of people study intelligence, or at least take it for granted. We speak, listen (sometimes—more on that in a bit), form social groups that other animals don’t. Pretty smart, eh? But humans also do some colossally dumb things—engage in unnecessary stereotyping, stick our tongues to a frozen pole, or trigger a worldwide financial crisis.

So, while it’s valuable to study human intelligence, it might be just as valuable to study human stupidity. There may be more value than meets the eye.

Gerald Crabtree, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, states that intelligent human behavior requires between 2,000 and 5,000 genes to work together. A mutation or other fault in any of these genes, and some kind of intellectual deficiency results. Before the creation of complex societies, humans suffering from these mutations would have died. But modern societies may have allowed the more intelligent to care for the less intelligent. While anyone who had participated in a group project understands this phenomena, it doesn’t explain why IQ and other tests have consistently risen, and why people with high scores on those tests still do stupid things.

The answer might not lie with what genes are in our brains, but how we choose to use them (both genes and brains). Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton University scientist and Nobel Laureate for his work on economic and human behavior, discovered that the human brain works one of two ways (and never both): deliberatively and analytically, or irrationally, using intuition. Christof Koch of CalTech calls this irrational behavior our “zombie” response. Whatever name you use, it refers to reacting quickly to a situation without truly thinking about it. This is a useful reaction when a saber-tooth tiger (or an enemy soldier) is attacking you. It is not as useful when creating a retirement plan.

Our intuition, and all the problems that come with it—stereotyping, bias, abhorrence of ambiguity—prods us to make snap judgements, which can look pretty dumb.

But surely, complex societies are intelligently run. They’re large, operate with a great deal of human care and feeding, and overall seem successful. That’s what Andre Spicer of the Cass Business School in London and Mats Alvesson of the University of Lund, Sweden, thought. They began their studies looking at how highly prestigious businesses hire and manage their “best and brightest.”

The problem with Spicer’s and Alvesson’s hypothesis was; these organizations behave stupidly, in fact, more stupidly than less prestigious organizations. Hence the 2007 financial crisis, in which thousands of highly educated, financially astute experts in investment banks, ministries of finance, central banks, and commercial lending organizations apparently were completely blindsided by a financial bubble and subsequent meltdown that really appeared pretty obvious. In fact, Spicer and Alvesson found that the organizations that acted the most stupidly were investment banks, public relations agencies, and consultancies.

At these firms, the researcher found patterns: after hiring very intelligent people, they incorporated them into organizations that valued intuition over analysis, and trained them to avoid any risks. There resulted a distinct disconnect between an individual’s actions and the consequences of those actions.

So what’s the answer to stupidity? Stupidity, suggests Martin Schwartz, a microbiologist at the University of Virginia, but of a different sort. Echoing Desiderius Erasmus’ classic The Praise of Folly, Schwartz says that approaching a problem with the assumption that you know nothing, and need to build up a knowledge base, would sweep aside the intuitions that apparently, dumb down us all.


Sources: New Scientist

Crabtree, G. (2013). Our fragile intellect. Part I Trends in Genetics, 29 (1), 1-3 DOI: 10.1016/j.tig.2012.10.002

Alvesson, M., & Spicer, A. (2012). A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organizations Journal of Management Studies, 49 (7), 1194-1220 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6486.2012.01072.x

Schwartz, M. (2008). The importance of stupidity in scientific research Journal of Cell Science, 121 (11), 1771-1771 DOI: 10.1242/jcs.033340



KEYWORDS: bounded rationality, identity, ignorance, knowledge, power, Google, Facebook, intelligence, economics, Stanford University, University of Lund, zombies, zombie effect