Is it possible to be stupid

The list of manufacturing and low-level service jobs that have been taken over, or nearly so, by robots, online services, apps, kiosks, and other forms of automation grows longer daily.

Among the many types of workers for whom the bell may soon toll: anyone who drives people or things around for a living, thanks to the driverless cars in the works at for example Google and the delivery drones undergoing testing at for example Amazon, as well as driverless trucks now being tested on the roads; and most people who work in restaurants, thanks to increasingly affordable and people-friendly robots made by companies like Momentum Machines, and to a growing number of apps that let you arrange for a table, place an order, and pay—all without help from a human being.

These two examples together comprise jobs held by an estimated 15 million Americans. Meanwhile, our fetishization of IQ now extends far beyond the workplace. Intelligence and academic achievement have steadily been moving up on rankings of traits desired in a mate; researchers at the University of Iowa report that intelligence now rates above domestic skills, financial success, looks, sociability, and health.

The most popular comedy on television is The Big Bang Theory , which follows a small gang of young scientists. What do we mean by intelligence?

A few numbers help clarify the nature and scope of the problem. By comparison, at Ohio State University, a considerably better-than-average school ranked 52nd among U.

How many high-school students are capable of meeting the College Board benchmark? This is not easy to answer, because in most states, large numbers of students never take a college-entrance exam in California, for example, at most 43 percent of high-school students sit for the SAT or the ACT.

In these states in , the percentage of students averaging at least on the reading section ranged from 33 percent in D. The strength of the link between poverty and struggling in school is as close to ironclad as social science gets.

That leaves us with early education, which, when done right—and for poor children, it rarely is—seems to largely overcome whatever cognitive and emotional deficits poverty and other environmental circumstances impart in the first years of life. As instantiated most famously by the Perry Preschool Project in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in the s; more recently by the Educare program in Chicago; and by dozens of experimental programs in between, early education done right means beginning at the age of 3 or earlier, with teachers who are well trained in the particular demands of early education.

These high-quality programs have been closely studied, some for decades. Unfortunately, Head Start and other public early-education programs rarely come close to this level of quality, and are nowhere near universal.

In lieu of excellent early education, we have embraced a more familiar strategy for closing the intelligence gap. Participants who were least able to judge what was funny at least according to the professional comics were also least able to accurately assess their own ability. This finding was not a quirk of trying to measure subjective sense of humour. The researchers repeated the experiment, only this time with tests of logical reasoning and grammar.

These disciplines have defined answers, and in each case they found the same pattern: those people who performed the worst were also the worst in estimating their own aptitude. In all three studies, those whose performance put them in the lowest quarter massively overestimated their own abilities by rating themselves as above average. In a later study, the most incompetent participants still failed to realise they were bottom of the pack even when given feedback on the performance of others.

Kruger and Dunning's interpretation is that accurately assessing skill level relies on some of the same core abilities as actually performing that skill, so the least competent suffer a double deficit. Not only are they incompetent, but they lack the mental tools to judge their own incompetence. In a key final test, Kruger and Dunning trained a group of poor performers in logical reasoning tasks.

Other research has shown that this "unskilled and unaware of it" effect holds in real-life situations, not just in abstract laboratory tests. For example, hunters who know the least about firearms also have the most inaccurate view of their firearm knowledge, and doctors with the worst patient-interviewing skills are the least likely to recognise their inadequacies. What has become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect is an example of what psychologists call metacognition — thinking about thinking.

The effect might just explain the apparently baffling self belief of some of your friends and colleagues. We feel good, but we overlook crucial facts. As a result the smartest people ignore the intelligence of others so they make themselves feel smarter. Being smart can come at a cost. Asking tricky questions, doing the research and carefully thinking things through takes time. Most of us would rather do anything than think.

A recent study found that when left alone in a room, people preferred to give themselves electric shocks than quietly sit and think. Being smart can also upset people. Asking tough questions can quickly make you unpopular. Intelligent people quickly learn these lessons. Instead of using their intelligence, they just stay quiet and follow the crowd — even if it is off the side of a cliff. In the short term this pays off. But in the long term it can create poor decisions and lay the foundations for disaster.

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