overeducating the midwits

and the death of reason

a few of us were having an interesting conversation about the issue of midwits over on X the other day. it was prompted by this missive from gatopal™ devon:

my response was this:

i suspect the fatal mistake that weaponized the midwits was educating them.

university used to be for the top 3-5% of intellects, a serious and seriously difficult undertaking suitable for and completable by only a very small group of people whose IQ cutoff was likely around 125. the standards were rigid and many aspirants to sheepskins went home empty handed.

jamming universities full of 100's and 110's broke the system, forced it to dumb down, and drove it away from ideas of logic and critical thinking and into doctrine and regurgitation because the "customer" was no longer capable of the former and thus had to be served the latter.

"understand this" was replaced with "memorize this."

this took the 110-115 cohort and filled its heads with nonsense that it was ill-equipped to comprehend in any meaningful sense. worse, this group was repeatedly told and thus came to truly belive that it had mastered the material and was encouraged to perform as if it had.

"we are educated! we know stuff!"

the whole idea of what it once meant to be educated had been lost and replaced with a fugazy both incapable and undesirous of spotting itself as fake.

the 90 IQ is not prone to this pratfall, but the 110 will avidly go looking for it.

there is literally no one on earth so stupid as the wise fool indoctrinated into dogma they have mistaken for comprehension and erudition.

they will fight tooth and claw against any disagreement or refutation because it not only invalidates their ideas but also their sense of self.

this is the core danger of the midwit education trap:

you're not actually that smart, but you have been told that you are and led to expect that if you act a certain way and espouse a certain set of ideas, that others will treat you as if you are “smart.”

it's a cargo cult.

the truly smart may have their ideas challenged and not only grow from this but relish it. their intellect is critical and adaptable. it flowers under dissent and refutation which represent an opportunity to demonstrate and validate one's capacity.

the end idea is not the signifier; the ability to perform the process of getting there is.

but the midwit cannot do this. he has memorized an answer that he cannot derive. he can only repeat it upon demand. challenge is a direct status threat and risks exposure as a midwit by being unable to "perform the process of getting there."

couple "if i am proven wrong, i no longer have any way to look educated" with "and the backrub circle of my similarly situated peers will shun me if i disagree with them," and you get a recipe for inflexible dogmatism which, i fear, has become a primary product of the modern adult daycare system DBA "secondary education."

this is not doing us any societal favors.

i’d like to amplify this a bit further:

i have come to realize that there is a trap embedded in this structure that is specific to the 110-115 IQ level and that has an odious contagion effect that arises from it.

it starts when you give them "a degree" and treat them as though they have a 125-130 sort of intelligence level. intrinsic to this is the pretense that someone who cannot really engage in deep, system-scale critical thinking is, in fact, capable of such.

to prop this up, you fill them with dogma and act as though they reached the answer by "understanding" when, in fact, all they did was memorize a multiplication table.

but they cannot really do math.

so, when faced with challenges to their answers or with new problems to which answers have not yet been added to the crib sheet, they have no ability to "do the work" only to go consult "the authorities" in order to learn what to memorize next. it's why they are so against changing their minds as a result of debate and why they cannot avoid being such hypocrites.

there is no ability to cross-check the list of “correct thought” for internal consistency.

they cannot see or derive the system that they so proudly evangelize and weave into warp and weft of lives and ideologies. everything is a collage of special case pleading and rote rationale.

"trust the experts" is all they can do. (and they will demand that you do it too)

it’s their only real out because they are incapable of actual expertise but seek to pass as experts. they have been elevated to a pedestal upon which they are supposed to act as though they possess an ability they can never have, only ape.

this is a technique utilized in many kinds of long-con confidence games. you get the mark wedded to some false premise or lie in which they have become complicit and then force them to keep backing it for fear of exposure.

they’re trapped.

so when "the experts" all suddenly change their tune and say "oceania has always been at war with eastsasia!" or "vaccines were never supposed to stop the spread!" those taken in all have no choice but to pivot and believe (or at least to espouse belief). they lack the tools to do anything else and their ego seeks to defend their unearned status.

this is how you use credentials to build a class of utterly dependent dogma slaves.

it’s also how you drive out all competence.

DEI is monstrous in this regard because any institution that is not consciously and deliberately a meritocracy will become an anti-meritocracy.

A's seek to surround themselves with other A's.

B's seek out C's and consciously oppose any participation by A's.

it's the only way to keep their positions safe.

the minute you start putting unqualified people in charge, they will go looking for even less-qualified people to work with and for them.

i have laid out this mediocrity downspiral in past posts.

soon the faculty and administrations of the universities that are determining the dogmatic delusions of midwits have all been chosen for being doctrinaire fools.

that’s quite a pernicious emergent order to set in motion.

where this really goes dark is that humans have limited zones of discerntment. the people that any given person tends to see as smartest and most credible are those about 15 IQ points (one standard deviation) higher than they are. this means that to a 95-100 IQ “average citizen” this 110-115 band is the strongest signal in the spectrum, the radio station coming through with greatest clarity and convincingness.

but this 110-115 band is so thoroughly polluted with noise over signal that not only is it often lost and dangerous to itself, but it provides the most effective contagion vector for the meat of the masses.

it starts spinning off on deranged ideological excursions.

“no, no, no!” says the 2 std deviation intellect. “these midwits are fools mired in special pleading and the claims they make fail on second and third order principles and do not represent general case responses.”

say the 95 IQ enthralled who can understand neither the words nor the critical concepts that reveal the midwit as midwit.

“i do not like you or trust you. you make my brain hurt. the midwit makes sense to me. i have made up my mind.”

they cannot be convinced or swayed by mental processes foreign to their mental capacity.

true, general case critical thought at system scale and with 3 and 4 order depth is an ability essentially confined to the upper 5% of americans (and probably the upper 2% of earth).

but if you tell 1/3 of people that they have this ability and trap them in dogma with which they must slavishly comply or be deprived of their coveted assumptive-intellectual perches, you can basically control them by controlling their dogmatic payload.

you do this by dominating educational institutions, credentials, and curricula.

and they in turn will dominate the center for you.

this really sets up a helluva societal pickle, doesn’t it?

i suspect it’s why so many marxist and “modern” authoritarian regimes have had such focus on mandatory public education and “everyone goes to college.”

and the answer is to basically dismantle the modern university system.

it has become FAR too inclusive and ill-suited to task, an emergent convection into the mass production of weaponized midwits shocked to life and sent tottering down to lay waste to the unsuspecting village below.

“using AI to pass all your school exams and papers” will only make this worse.

the “elite” universities whose diplomas once carried such significance are mostly already gone. they accept far too many for reasons besides merit or capacity and even they no longer teach any sort of real, critical thinking because not even their charges are capable of it.

it’s time to take the whole thing down.

it’s not fixable and does not need to be fixed. the idea that you need “a university” to learn is anachronistic, a meatspace fancy held over into a digital age. universites had to cluster people together because they were the only places where scarce resources (like books) could be found, and you needed all “the faculty” in one place so they could speak and collaborate and teach.

that’s all gone.

information is ubiquitous and near free. collaboration is instant and need not respect locality.

it has never been a better time to be a top 5% intellect and “the university” has never had less to offer to such people.

and so the world will move on.

and so the world will change.

and it will smell like freedom.

because it will be.

and the end of the age of the overeducated midwit will come at last.