Stupidity as a mental illness

Let's define "stupidity" as "low IQ" where IQ is measured by some standard tests.

IQ is largely hereditary (~70%, IIRC) and polygenic. This mean that attempting to "cure" it by anything short of major genetic engineering will have quite limited upside.

There are cases where IQ is depressed from its "natural" level (e.g. by exposure to lead) and these are fixable or preventable. However if you're genetically stupid, drugs or behavioral changes won't help.

we could, for instance, sequence a lot of peoples' DNA, give them all IQ tests, and do a genome-wide association study, as a start.

We could and people do that. If you're interested in IQ research, look at Greg Cochran or James Thompson or Razib Khan, etc. etc.

We could see affirmative action for stupid people. Harvard would boast about how many stupid people it admitted.

That, ahem, is exactly what's happening already :-/

Love the idea...

I think the key disconnect here is that (AFAICT) you mean that we should treat stupidity as a mental illness in the idealized way we're trying to get everyone to treat the mentally ill (see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B5nfkaeplc)

We don't think of mental illness in such an accepting way yet. Maybe when we do, saying that stupidity is like mental illness is like physical illness is like something that deserves sympathy and help will make sense, but right now it sounds more like prejudice.

I see what you're saying and appreciate the insight, and will try to treat stupid people with sympathy instead of frustration, but think that this comparison doesn't quite work yet.

http://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection

Our way to measure IQ is build on the core assumption that IQ doesn't really change. Our way to measure depression is on the other hand build on the assumption that depression changes over our lifetime.

We likely need a new way to measure intelligence or stupidity to say well that a treatment increases it within a span of a year.

"Stupidity" is a...word that we apply to different conditions which may be caused by deep subconscious conditioning (e.g., religion).

Wow.

No one is going to impose mandatory treatments for stupidity.

A much more likely version is that at some point in the future, parents will be offered an "IQ enhancement package" for their potential kids. Do you accept? This is a much more interesting question.

The simple inroad would be intellectual disability.

Right now you're disabled if your IQ is below 70 and you have trouble functioning in your everyday life. These are 2 to 3 % of the population and there's a societal framework already in place for them.

If you could gradually raise that IQ threshold, you'd achieve much of what you want to achieve here.

I don't know who determines that threshold, but whoever it is is probably more approachable, and more likely to listen to reason, than the public at large.

Let's say I describe a person as 'fighty'.  There are two different things I could mean by that:

1. This person is good at fighting.  Perhaps they are large and strong...or skilled at martial arts...or carry weapons...or some combination thereof.
2. This person is prone to fighting.  They tend to resolve problems by fighting.  When they dislike something a person has done, they will start a fight.

The first of these I think is...pretty much morally neutral?  

The second of these I think is fairly clearly morally bad.

These things are definitely correlated with one another.  People who are good at fighting are probably also more prone to fighting (since when you expect to win a fight you might be more likely to start one).  And people who are prone to fighting are probably also better at it (since when you fight a lot you get good at it).

But they're clearly not the same thing.  My friend's Chihuahua is highly prone to fighting, but not very good at it.  And a retired Marine veteran might be very good at fighting but not very prone to it.

When we are talking about fighting, though, we recognize these two as different things.  We can describe someone as 'violent', which pretty much means #2.  We can call someone 'a gentle giant' to imply #1 but not #2.  And so on.

When we discuss intelligence, these two different things get muddled together:

1. This person is good at thinking.  They are naturally intelligent, and find problems easier to solve than other people do.
2. This person is prone to thinking.  When confronted with a problem, they attempt to solve it by thinking.  They do not simply take a gut reaction and insist on it in defiance of reason.

Sadly we don't really have different words for #1 and #2 here.  We use 'smart' and 'stupid' to refer to both of them.  And this is something of a problem because, while the two are again correlated, they are not the same thing, and the correct response to the two is different.

Being 'stupid' in sense #1 is...I mostly agree with the pro-stupidity people here?  Being smart is better than being stupid, but holding natural stupidity against people who cannot help it is a bad thing to do.

Being 'stupid' in sense #2 I think is bad, and I think can legitimately be held against people.

And...to be frank, I feel like most stupidity in our current world is of type #2?  I remember going to high school.  If you consider these two sets of people:

1. People who failed high school math because they were genuinely not intelligent enough to do it.
2. People who failed high school math because they put no effort into it.

I think it's reasonably clear that group #2 is orders of magnitude larger.

So, on one hand, I agree that it would be better if people were smarter on average.

On the other hand, you're using a lot of scary labels. ... Actually, after reflecting a bit, "Stupidity is a mental illness" is the only scary label. But it is a REALLY SCARY label. As in, my overton window is probably shifted, I dunno, 2 or 3 or 4 standard deviations in your direction, compared to the average person. I know about nootropics (at the very least, that they exist). And I'm sort of familiar with this community. And I still got scared reading this.

One of the issues is is that it takes something which has previously enjoyed somewhat protected status (intelligence), and puts it on a same level of importance as ... ... I don't have an example. Weird.

I know a lot of people who are stupid in one way or another. I would hate to see "treatment" forced onto them because they're not as smart as we'd like. I get the feeling that not speaking up now means being next on the list - "when they came for X I didn't speak up because I wasn't X, when they came for Y I didn't speak up because I wasn't Y, and when they came for me there was no-one else to speak up for me".

I don't know what constitutes "stupid" for you. Is it people with, say, an IQ of 70, where their intelligence impairs them on a daily basis? Or is it people who are capable of holding down a job, but live paycheck to paycheck and vote in elections based on very questionable grounds (I don't have proper examples for you)?

I think that because there is no definition of "stupid people" provided, this becomes scary. You're targeting a population group, which was previously okay, but now they're no longer okay, and this feels like you're trying to invoke "look at these people, they need to be fixed", and maybe I'm shaping some of that feeling myself, but I don't see the underlying tone of doing good. This isn't helping others, this is helping yourself. Maybe everyone benefits. But this essay reads as something that helps just you.

In short.

Promoting research into intelligence boosting drugs: Yay

Destigmatizing stupidity into favoring intelligence: Yay

Classifying stupidity as a mental illness, forcing things like the American health system onto people who are already missing one of the success factors in life: Nay.

...

And I don't think mental illness is seen as something positive either. People with mental illnesses are dangerous, not fit for society, scary, should be kept someplace safe... I think that's the sentiment you'll get if you ask the average person (maybe they're stupid too? I don't know). Now, I don't mean to say these traits apply to people who are stupid, I mean to say that people on average think these traits apply to people with a mental illness, and that as a result, you don't want to be mentally ill, and reclassifying people who are stupid as mentally ill won't go over well. Even only because people won't actually say they can't see the emperor's clothes, lest they lose their job.

Honestly, I think if you want to go this way, you'd be better off trying to develop things that people can use for their kids. They'll buy organic foods "because it's more healthy", so they might also buy intelligence boosters for their kids so they can go to a prestige university and do great in life.

And you don't want to classify stupidity as a mental illness. You want it to be seen as a physical injury. You go to the hospital, they fix you, you're better. No shrink visits, no endless talks, no getting locked up in an internment facility.

The contents of this post seem unnecessary ableist to me. We're building a society for all people and thus statements like these carry a rather bad taste:

This could backfire horribly. We could see affirmative action for stupid people. Harvard would boast about how many stupid people it admitted.

This statement shames people which the article previously stamped as "stupid". People with disabilities have the same right to prosper just live everyone else. It seems to me that your post carries with it the assumption that "having less 'stupid' people" somehow translates to a better human condition. It's hard to see how shaming people who suffer from "disability" or "being stupid" translates to a better society. Perhaps it's exactly the opposite which helps society to prosper: accepting people with disabilities, giving them the resources they need, helping them to create policys and rules which help other people with the same disability etc.

Would you take a pill which alters your thinking patterns in a way some other person considers better? I'd argue that a lot of people don't suffer from "being stupid". Impairing normal functioning and being a source of suffering is necessary for something to be labelled desease[1], something which you did not showed.

Stupid people controlling technology and civilizations developed by smart people are an existential threat.

David Freedman is right. Believing in meritocracy also leads to believing that "smart people" should excert control over civilization and technology. This is in harsh contrast to democracy, where civilization should be directed and altered by the civilization itself (populus). When some part of the civilization is "stupid" then they should be equally represented in the governing system instead of favoring people deemed of correct "intelligence" or "age" or "religion".

people will argue that stupidity isn't any worse than being smart (much as some deaf activists claim that deafness is a culture, not a disability)

The linked article does not state that deafness is a culture but instead that deafness can be used as cultural identification. A very valid assumption given that deaf people have it far easier interacting with other deaf people and their media instead of non-deaf people.

“Stupidity is the result of corrupt decisions, caused by relative intellectual deficit, ignorance, cognitive biases and others. These prevent or distort the collection and storage of information and its intellectual processing, producing decisions without thinking, biased, false, irrational, stupid. " 

Kuke Lito, 2019.

I thing it would be very difficult to make a disease out of stupidity, much less to treat it as one.

Stupidity is more dangerous than malice. Evil can only persist so long in its destructive nature sowing wreckage before people identify its obvious ills and rise up against it forcing it away or even destroying it by sheer force. It's only a matter of time until people unite and rise up against something malicious.

Stupidity on the other hand is a total loose cannon. The stupid person can not only not be relied upon to accomplish anything of substance but is liable, without their own knowledge or consent, sabotage just about anything they come across without rhyme or reason. The worst kind of stupid has the good intentions necessary to gain the support of others and enlist people in their cause, not so much by intention or recruitment but just because if you're nice, kind, well meaning and respectful you are far more likely to go a lot farther. There is no point arguing against a stupid because they are not capable of understanding or projecting into the future actions and their consequences. And it is because the stupid lacks insight into how their toxic ideas, attitudes, decisions and behaviors affect others as well as the world around them that they can keep sowing a path of destruction that is very difficult, if not impossible to limit.

I know a highly educated and well spoken person who is a expert at noticing and making snide remarks about other cars on the road, but he does all the same things; text, not stay in his lane, constantly tail-gates, swerves accross traffic to make his exit, doesnt pull forward so the person behind him can make their order, doesnt pull up to the car ahead of him in the left turn lane (causing traffic jams behind him). But somehow will say "i wish people used their brains more" when somebody tailgates him.

The truth is, people who flaunt their IQ around rarely critisize themselves and only see things from their perspective.

A diminished IQ, would nor could, be indicative of a mental illness, and I say this because there are plenty of daily examples, you can tell just by observation, that postulate "stupid" people are actually quite healthy. I could actually argue that people conceived as "stupid" present themselves as more charismatic and agreeable then their intelligent counterparts, furthermore, having an easier time acquiring acquaintance with other people.

I urge you to read the first book of the Evans Third Reich trilogy, in which one of the interesting topics mentioned revolved around eugenics. I fear that the way you've framed your point will prime people towards this direction.

To approach "stupidity", an already vague concept, from a diagnostic point of view would be a disaster. One reason being the history I linked to earlier, eugenics was a popular -enough sentiment then to be a problematic primer, and I fear that while having stupid people around is an existential risk, I think another existential risk exists in trying to optimize on human intellect without a firm foundation on the concept of "stupidity" and its communicability to the general public.

Another issue I have is your seemingly apparent faith in the psychiatric approach. The DSM 5 is, to put it lightly, a highly biased diagnosis tool with practitioners who may not be using the tool appropriately. This may not be exactly relevant, but I've noticed that the better practitioners in the social and psychiatric fields don't trust this resource. In fact, some will go out of their way to say it is an insurance scam. I personally haven't had a chance to delve into the history of the DSM, but I have noticed that the constantly shifting variability in diagnostic definitions and criteria hint at the idea that a) the DSM isn't perfect and, more importantly, b) large heaps of money is being made off of the vague notions described by this tome. Pretentious writing, even in such technical documents, are great examples of such attempts. Taking the diagnostic approach might make the stigma problem WORSE by labeling the "unfit" for later treatment, especially with an already pretentious diagnostic system. The message you're trying to send is a virtuous one to be sure, but trying to use the current psychiatric infrastructure to tackle this issue is a trap. A very profitable trap.

We're not very good at destigmatizing and treating depression. why would we want to carry that model onto anything else?

Saturday night live needs to apologize for a skit they did on mental illness by calling people stupid. It was very offensive and I am a mental health professional who feels like suing them.

Rather than forcing people to undergo an alteration of, for example, their genes, you can simply make it a requirement to receiving funding. For example in welfare states (or in a libertarian society, private charities). Other enhancements can be done in a similar fashion, or voluntarily obviously.

If you heap scorn on 'stupid' people or by attribute whatsoever, it's great to note the cause, many times it is probably psychological projection with an underlying anxiety of not being up to part to one's standards.

"We have the tools to do this--we could, for instance, sequence a lot of peoples' DNA, give them all IQ tests, and do a genome-wide association study, as a start."

I remember a few years ago the Chinese offering free genomic scans for the sufficiently intelligent. Did anyone sign up for that? Anyone know of how that story turned out? I assume they weren't going to share that info.

If you think these are equivalent, I can only hope nobody depends on you for mental health advice.

Depression responds to placebo better than pneumonia does. That's what I mean when I say it responds well to placebo. But depression still responds to modern psychiatric care better than to placebo. That's the linked analysis' main takeaway from the study ChristianKl mentioned.

SSRIs alone do somewhat better than placebo. Modern psychiatric care is way more than SSRIs, these are only one of many tools. There are also anxiolytics and iodine and MAO inhibitors and relaxation exercises and CBT and a whole bunch of other things that all work better than placebo for some patients. And all of them only became available a few years or decades ago.

No I don't. Enlighten me.

That's a bit different and goes back at least to "how can anyone be so stupid as to risk the fires of the eternal damnation". Treatments tended to be... rather drastic.

A necessary condition for anything to be a illness in people not too old to have children should be that it reduces reproductive fitness. Having a sufficiently low IQ does, but having a moderately low IQ, from what I've read, might be correlated with greater reproductive fitness.

You are literally talking about eugenics.

L. : While obviously being rational is good, LW as a community seems to be promoting elitism and entitlement.

s: Rationality can be scary that way. But it is about seeking truth, and the community does happen to consist of smart people. Denying that is false humility. Similarly, a lot of ideas many people support just happen to be false. It's not our fault that our society got it wrong on so many issues. We're just after truth.

L. : How does it serve truth to label people which aren't smart as mentally ill?

s: That's terrible, of course. But that's not a flaw of rationality, nothing about rationality dictates "you have to be cruel to other people". In fact if you think about this really hard you'll see that rationality usually dictates being nice.

L: Then how come this post on LessWrong is the most upvoted thing of the last 20 submissions?

s: ...

s: I can't defend that.

L. : Oh, okay. So I'm right and Yudkowsky's site does promote entitlement and sexism.

s: wait, sexism?

L. : Yeah. The last thing I saw from LW was two men talking about what a woman needs to do to fit the role they want her to have in society.

s: Okay, but that's not Yudkowsky's fault! He is not responsible for everyone on LW! The sequences don't promote sexism-

L. : I heard HPMoR is sexist, too.

s: That's not remotely true. It actually promotes feminism. Hermione is-

L. : I'm sorry, but I think I value the thoughts of other people who are more knowledgeable about sexism over yours. At least you condemn this article, but you still hang out on this site.

Scott Alexander has said that it's society's biggest mistake to turn away from intelligence (can't find the article). Even minor increases of intelligence correlate meaningfully with all sorts of things (a negative correlation with crime being one of them afaik). Intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe. A few intelligence points on the people working on Friendly AI right now could determine the fate of our entire species. I want to make it extra clear that I think intelligence is ultra-important and almost universally good.

None of this excuses this article. None of it suggests that it's somehow okay to label stupid people as mentally ill. Rationality is about winning, and this article is losing in every sense of the word. It won't be good for the reputation of LW, it won't be good for our agenda, and it won't be good for the pursuit of truth. The only expected positive effect is making people who read it feel good. It essentially says "being intelligent is good. Being stupid is bad. Other people are stupid. They are the problem. We are better than them." Which is largely true, but as helpful as making an IQ test, and emailing a friend saying "look here I am verifiable smarter than you and being smart is the most important thing in our society!"

Okay, but that's not a content critique. I just said I think this is bad and went from there. If the article was actually making a strong case, well then it could still be bad for having an unnecessarily insulting and harmful framing that is bad for our cause, but it might be defend-able on other grounds. Maybe. We want to do both; to win and to pursue truth, and those aren't the same thing. But I strongly feel the article doesn't succeed on that front, either. Let's take a look.

It's great to make people more aware of bad mental habits and encourage better ones, as many people have done on LessWrong.

sure.

The way we deal with weak thinking is, however, like how people dealt with depression before the development of effective anti-depressants:

seems to be true.

"Stupidity," like "depression," is a sloppy "common-sense" word that we apply to different conditions, which may be caused by genetics (for instance, mutations in the M1 or M3 pathways, or two copies of Thr92Ala), deep subconscious conditioning (e.g., religion), general health issues (like not getting enough sleep), environment (ignorance, lack of reward for intelligent behavior), or bad habits of thought.

There is an implicit assumption here that being stupid requires some kind of explanation, but nothing at all in the article provides a reason of why this would be the case. Stupidity is not depression. The reason why it makes sense to label depression as a mental illness is (I assume) that it corresponds to an anomaly in the territory. Suppose we had a function, depressedness(human, time) which displayed how depressed each person on earth has been for, say, the past 10 years. I would expect to see weird behavior of that function, strange peaks over intervals of time on various people, many of whom don't have unusually high values most of the time. This would suggest that it is something to be treated.

If you did the same for intelligence, I'd expect relatively low change on the time axis (aside from an increase at young age and a decrease in the case of actual mental illnesses) and some kind of mathematically typical distribution among the person axis ranging from 60 to dunno 170 or something. I feel really strange about having to make this argument, but this is really the crux of the problem here. The article doesn't argue "here and here are stats suggesting that there are anomalies with this function, therefore there is a thing which we could sensibly describe as a mental illness" it just says "some people are dumb, here are some dumb things they do, let's label that mental illness." To sum the fallacy committed here up in one sentence, it talks about a thing without explaining why that thing should exist.

It is implied that people being ashamed of admitting to depression is a problem, and I infer that the intention is to make being stupid feel less bad by labeling their condition a "mental illness." But it clearly fails in this regard, and is almost certainly more likely to do the opposite.. It's sort of a Lose-Lose dynamic: it implies that there is some specific thing influencing a natural distribution of intelligence, some special condition that covers "stupid "people which explains why they are stupid – which likely isn't the case, in that way having low IQ is probably worse than the article was meant to imply, since there is no special condition, you just got the lower end of the stick – while also being framed in such a way that it will make unintelligent people feel worse than before, not better.

And where is the reverse causation of believing in religion causing stupidity coming from? Postulating an idea like this ought to require evidence.

The article goes on to say that we should do something to make people smarter. I totally, completely, whole-heartedly agree. But saying high IQ is better than low IQ is something that can and has been done without all of the other stuff attached to it. And research in that direction is being done already. If you wanted to make a case for why we should have more of that, then you could do that so much more effectively without all the negativity attached to it.

Here are the accusations I am making. I accuse this article of not making a good case for anything that is both true and non-obvious, on top of being offensive and harmful for our reputation, and consequently our agenda. (Even if it is correct and there is an irregularity in the intelligence function, it doesn't make a good case.) I believe that if arguments of the same quality were brought forth on any other topic, the article would be treated the same way most articles with weak content are treated: with indifference, few upvotes, and perhaps one or two comments pointing out some flaws in it (if Omega appeared before me, I would bet a lot of money on that theory with a pretty poor ratio). I'll go as far as to accuse upvoting this as a failure of rationality. I agree with Pimgd on everything they said, but I feel like it is important to point out how awful this article is, rather than treating it as a simple point of disagreement. The fact that this has 12 upvotes is really, really really bad, and a symptom of a much larger problem.

This is not how you are being nice. This is not how you promote rationality. This is not how you win.