April 3, 2021

The Five Universal Laws of Human Stupidity

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-five-universal-laws-of-human-stupidity?utm_source=pocket-newtab

In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.

Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren.

Let’s take a look at Cipolla’s five basic laws of human stupidity:

Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

No matter how many idiots you suspect yourself surrounded by, Cipolla wrote, you are invariably lowballing the total. This problem is compounded by biased assumptions that certain people are intelligent based on superficial factors like their job, education level, or other traits we believe to be exclusive of stupidity. They aren’t. Which takes us to:

snip...

April 1, 2021

The Right Curriculum? How PragerU Infiltrates Schools.

https://prospect.org/api/amp/education/right-curriculum-how-prageru-infiltrates-schools/

The right-wing nonprofit, known for viral videos like ‘The Left Ruins Everything,’ launched a program specifically designed for teachers last fall. But according to students, its content has been in public schools for years.

Robyn Ellis was a high school sophomore in a rural town in Kern County, California, when their government teacher started showing a string of videos from a media organization that Ellis had previously seen criticized online for being conservative propaganda. In one of the first weeks of school, Ellis’s teacher plugged in a Chromebook to the classroom’s TV and screened the first of what would become many videos created by Prager University.

Caroline Lannes, now 18, knew her economics teacher was right-leaning even before he started showing the class PragerU videos. In a Northern California high school, the teacher talked about Ronald Reagan with a particularly nostalgic cadence and had a poster of Margaret Thatcher pinned to the classroom wall. But for Lannes, showing PragerU content crossed a line.

“I knew it was BS. It was clearly misinformation,” she said. “But the teacher never said anything like that. And it made me mad.” As a self-described liberal, Lannes knew that the content was only egging on her already right-leaning classmates. “It was totally fuel to the fire,” she added.

snip...