How To Live Successfully Alongside Stupid People
October 27th, 2025. Van Holloway, one of Donald Trump’s African Americans, offers a reality check to anyone stupid enough to think Trump’s $250 million ballroom is just another ego-stroking, money-wasting vanity project:
Y’all really mad at a ballroom that’s gonna cost $250 million, that Trump is paying for himself, and y’all wasn’t mad at a basketball court that cost $376 million? And we paid for that sh*t? […]
Do your research!
And sure, even before doing your research, you might wonder how anyone could believe that a basketball court cost $376 million, you might note that Trump’s gold-encrusted ballroom will now cost over $600 million, more than twice the original quote, and that taxpayers will foot at least half that bill, you might even have done the twenty seconds of Googling required to learn that Obama’s basketball court cost $76,000, over 3,000 times less than Van claimed.
But hey, Van has a right to his opinion.
March 16th, 2026. “A.I. accelerationist,” Marc Andreessen, takes time out of his busy schedule to correct anyone stupid enough to think that self-examination is a well-established, psychologically healthy practice:
…if you go back like four hundred years ago […] it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective […] Like all of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are manufactured in the 1910s, 1920s […]
Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff at any prior point. It’s all a new construct.
Of course, some brainiac might point out that Marcus Aurelius (widely regarded as one of the greatest men of history) wrote the famously introspective Meditations around 1,900 years ago. Or that Socrates noted that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” around 2,500 years ago. They might even point to the well-documented, globe-spanning tradition of introspection prior to the 1910s.
But that doesn’t make Marc’s truth any less valid.
October 21st, 2024. Political commentator Emily Wilson enlightens anyone stupid enough to believe that “statistics and data” are valuable, even essential tools for understanding the world:
Every young, left-wing social media person […] they get shot to the top of the algorithm because they seem smart. They’re really not […] I was like, “Look, sweetie, I’m sitting here, and I’m able to talk for four hours on every subject, guess how much research I’m doing; zero. Literally just common sense.
Y’know, and it’s different, because when we have to do research, it’s actually really hard to find unbiased research to prove our points. That’s why I try to go off of just common sense of living every day and going through life.
Emily has never asked herself whether her highly personalised experience of “going through life” tells her anything useful about the lives of ~8 billion people. She’s never learned that the purpose of research isn’t to “prove your points” but to discover which points are true. She is unperturbed by the fact that her “research-free” approach to debate once left her accidentally defending slavery.
Because Emily is still…Emily is entitled to…ugh, okay, maybe we need to talk about people like Emily.
You’re not supposed to admit that some people are stupid.
You’re supposed to say they’re confused or misinformed. You’re supposed to defend their “lived experience” and “alternative facts.” You’re supposed to treat obvious stupidity the same way we treat early-onset baldness and abnormally large facial moles; an unfortunate, incurable condition that decent people politely ignore.
And this means we never really talk about what stupidity is.
Stupidity isn’t necessarily a sign of low intelligence. Some of the world’s most impeccably educated, bafflingly influential, and lamentably powerful people are painfully stupid.
Stupidity isn’t a synonym for ignorance or inexperience, 99% of people are harmlessly ignorant about 99% of subjects 99% of the time.
No, stupidity is what happens when you combine ignorance with confidence. It is the toxic mixture of wrongness and absolute belief that you can’t be wrong. And it’s long past time that we treat this problem with the seriousness it deserves.
Because right now, stupidity is dragging us into self-contradicting, stockpile-depleting, schoolgirl-murdering wars that have made the world a worse place by every measure, wars where the obvious and widely predicted geopolitical consequences were confidently ignored, defended by people who don’t even have the integrity to feel ashamed when they’re caught in a lie.
Stupidity is why potentially fatal diseases like measles and whooping cough, diseases that have long been treatable and were nearly eradicated, are making a comeback, enabled by people who think skimming through a few scientific papers is “doing their own research.”
Stupidity (and corruption) is why hundreds of thousands (and potentially millions) of the poorest, most vulnerable children on the planet are dying completely avoidable deaths, cheered on by people who will support any amount of suffering as long as it’s justified by one of their trigger phrases like DEI or “Shakira law.”
Stupidity has infected the highest levels of politics, it’s been legitimised by decades of circus-level “debates,” it’s poisoned our ability to talk to each other like human beings, and most dangerous of all, it’s started to feel normal.
It’s no longer surprising to see people literally covering their eyes and ears when presented with facts they don’t like.
It’s no longer remarkable to see otherwise sane people defending bigotry or genocide or anything as long as it’s being done by “their side.”
It no longer matters if politicians are corrupt or dishonest or outright incompetent, because their supporters are too hopped up on spite and tribalism to hold them accountable. As JD Vance recently noted, the level of criminality that brought down President Nixon would barely be a 12-hour news story today.
This is the real problem with stupidity; it removes accountability for weak, corrupt leaders, it normalises hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty until it’s impossible to have real conversations, it’s a virus that weakens our collective immunity against bad ideas.
And obviously, none of these people are interested in a vaccine…
For the first time since we started measuring them, IQ scores are falling across the developed world.
Critical thinking skills, literacy rates, our ability to focus on anything longer than a YouTube short, the cognitive musculature that protects us against stupidity is wasting away.
And it’s hardly surprising. Because if you decided to build a system that made people as stupid as possible, you couldn’t do much better than the world we have right now.
Social media has normalised people “informing themselves” via clickbait headlines and context-free clips, AI companies encourage us to offload critical thinking and creativity to their hallucination machines, amoral grifters earn millions convincing people to hate immigrants and minorities and anyone who makes them think too deeply, and we’re all expected to blindly defend the opinions we develop in this way to the bitter end.
And yet, when we actually talk to each other, when we’re willing to listen, when we extend each other the same basic dignity we expect for ourselves, almost all of us agree on the important stuff.
Whether it’s apartheid or women’s rights or whether or not the Earth revolves around the Sun, the story of humanity is the story of brave, thoughtful people dragging stupid people towards a brighter future.
The question is, how many people will suffer needlessly in the process? How long will humanity be forced to move at the pace of the slowest kids in the class? And most importantly, will we live up to the values we claim to believe in before we’re all too stupid to remember why they matter?