Posts Tagged ‘stupidity’
“‘Scenius’ stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”*…
Zachary Hastings Hooper on Mark Wilkerson‘s Pub Rock, an appreciation of a now largely forgotten legacy…
The history of popular music is one of continual evolution, with one generation inspired by and then replaced by the next. Think the Beatles and Rolling Stones usurping their idols Buddy Holly and Muddy Waters. In the U.K., conventional wisdom holds that the pretension and precision of early 1970s prog rock acts like Yes and Genesis were smashed by the intentional amateurism and outrage of later-decade punk rockers such as the Sex Pistols and the Clash. This is perhaps best represented by the image of Johnny Rotten’s “I Hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt.
Pub Rock (Bloomsbury), a new book by Mark Wilkerson, biographer of Pete Townshend and Thunderclap Newman, shines some light on the overlooked genre of pub rock that catalyzed the shift from prog to punk. Wilkerson traces the genre’s birth in London pubs in the early seventies and its gestation of the world-shattering punk and New Wave scenes that followed.
I’m the audience for this book. As a teenager honing his musical tastes in the late eighties, I was introduced, by MTV and college radio, to the sounds of angry young men like Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and Graham Parker. Digging into their back catalogs, I discovered that Lowe especially was deeply intertwined with something called pub rock; his old band, Brinsley Schwarz, had been a major player in that scene. At the same time, I realized that Stiff Records—home to Lowe, Costello, and Parker, as well as the Damned and Madness—was run by two pub rock managers [see here]. In a sense, I’ve been waiting for this book for decades. And now that it’s here, I’m happy to dust off some old records while cueing up some new (to me) selections.
Wilkerson characterizes pub rock as “simply music that was played in pubs. A diverse mix was represented there: Roots rock, country, R&B, soul and rock’n’roll—both the good-time variety and the harder-edged stuff.” Unlike the sounds dominating airwaves and filling stadiums, pub rock was unadorned and earnest. It was neither glam nor grandiose.
While sonically similar to more mainstream rock and roll, pub rock had a slyly subversive allure. These seemingly square guys (yes, they are all guys) were about to birth punk. Every budding music snob tries to earn their bona fides with obscure knowledge. So learning that the dude behind “Cruel to Be Kind” had a previous professional life and that “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace Love and Understanding” was a cover gave me an undeserved sense of superiority.
Pub Rock is part of the 33 ⅓ Genre series of primers on musical subgenres. It hews to the imprint’s mission, offering a quick, accessible entry point to a genre with little or no knowledge required, just curiosity. Like any good synopsis of a genre or musical scene, it sends the reader off to their favorite streamer or record store in search of a new listen or three.
In the age of the algorithm, we’re accustomed to being told, “If you like X, you’ll like Y.” However, snapshots like Wilkerson’s go beyond the “what” to tell you why you should add Dr. Feelgood or Brinsley Schwarz to your playlist.
As the book’s title indicates, the scene grew around a series of pubs in London. Groups like the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Band strongly influenced the nascent pub rock bands, but as Wilkerson notes, pub rock arose as big-name British acts were increasingly focused on selling out stadiums in America, and economic pressures were closing the venues that sustained the sixties scenes. Pubs, which had historically featured jazz acts, gave new bands opportunities to hone their skills and build followings. Wilkerson posits that intimate venues forced bands to up their game: proximity to Carlsberg-swilling audiences meant that you had to play your instruments and entertain the crowd without hiding behind light shows and heavy amplification.
The pub rock movement yielded a couple of minor hits, notably Ace’s “How Long,” now a staple of yacht rock radio. But many of its key figures became leaders in the punk and New Wave era. Ian Dury from Kilburn and the High Roads became the iconic leader of the Blockheads, while John Mellor from the 101ers became the even more iconic Joe Strummer of the Clash. Ace’s Paul Carrack had chart-topping success with both Squeeze and Mike + the Mechanics. The aforementioned Lowe went on to chart success as a solo artist, producer, and songwriter. Parker and Dave Edmunds enjoyed long careers. And pub rock’s DIY ethos—finding new places to play, hauling your own gear, building audiences from scratch—directly inspired the punk and New Wave scenes that followed.
It’s been said the Velvet Underground and the Ramones only sold a few copies of their debut albums but everyone who bought them started a band. It could be suggested that, similarly, everyone who encountered Eggs Over Easy or Brinsley Schwarz at the Tally Ho did the same. Artists as diverse as the Sex Pistols, Costello, Madness, and the Stranglers trace their roots to pub rock shows…
“Punk’s Pub Crawl,” from @ctrrelpol-washu.bsky.social.
For more, and videos of exemplary pub rock performances, see “Raising the bar: the chaotic story of pub rock.”
And for more listening suggestions, see “A beginner’s guide to pub rock in five essential albums.”
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As we give credit where credit is due, we might recall that it was on this date in 1976 the one of the core pub rock bands, Dr. Feelgood, scored their only No.1 UK album when their live LP Stupidity went to the top of the charts– the first ever live album to go to No.1 in the UK chart in its first week of release.
Hear it here.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”*…
David Krakauer (President of the Sante Fe Institute and Professor of Complex Systems there) argues that it takes intelligence to get things spectacularly wrong…
I have never heard a rock described as stupid. And the same would be true of a river, a hurricane, and even a thermostat. Stupidity seems to be a sophisticated form of behavior despite its ignominious associations.
Human beings can land autonomous rovers on Mars, sequence a genome in hours, and engineer nanometer circuits. And yet conspiracy theories, anti-scientific political movements, and institutional hatred proliferate on a scale that might embarrass the meager success record of a medieval alchemist.
One might say that stupidity implies a capacity for getting things right before it can get them spectacularly wrong. Stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence but its evil twin, the dissimulating Cain to a cerebral Abel. And perhaps surprisingly, the degree of stupidity available to any system scales directly with the intelligence that system possesses—more intelligence begets greater feats of stupidity. It would be a stretch to call a bacterium stupid, and we know that cats and dogs achieve modest feats of it. But human beings, equipped with language, abstraction, technology, institutions, and ideology, can be stupid on a truly civilizational scale. This is not a joke; it is close to a law of nature. A law that might very well be our undoing.
We have thousands of research programs on intelligence, and not all of them are intelligent, including studies of IQ, AI, animal cognition, and collective problem-solving. These take place in celebrated departments and are published in prestigious journals devoted to understanding how minds make hard problems easy. These days we cannot take a step without crashing into another article on intelligence and AI. Researchers from all fields without any knowledge of intelligence research and its history have become self-declared “thought leaders” in natural and artificial intelligence.
Yet stupidity gets almost no attention at all. It is treated as a mere absence, as if once we subtract intelligence what remains is stupidity. It is likened to a form of psychological darkness experienced after you have switched off the lights of deliberation. But this is a mistaken belief. Darkness does not do anything pernicious in the way that stupidity does. Stupidity takes an easy problem and, with great effort and misdirected ingenuity, makes it hard. That effort is the key to grasping stupidity, in that you need sophisticated machinery to be genuinely, consequentially stupid.
Here is how I like to think about this from a scientific perspective. If intelligence means making a problem of difficulty X easier, by deploying tools, using mathematics, and adopting strategies that reduce its cost, then stupidity means making a problem of difficulty X harder. And contrary to expectations, the most reliable way to make an easy problem hard is to bring to bear an impressive apparatus of complicated theories, elaborate beliefs, and sophisticated algorithms that sound tremendously convincing but perform worse than doing nothing. A person who does not know the answer to a question is merely ignorant. A person who constructs an ingenious hundred-page argument for the wrong answer is stupid. As great writers, artists, and philosophers throughout time have understood, such constructions require intelligence of a high order…
[Krakauer explores a variety of types of human stupidity, then turns to AI and draws his conclusion…]
… Artificial intelligence is by design the most powerful cognitive artifact ever created. It is engineered to minimize user effort by performing tasks that humans would otherwise find time consuming or impossible. The problem of course is that the better the tool gets the less the user needs to think for themselves. And in a vicious spiral, the less the user thinks the more dependent they become on their tools. That is until the tool disappears and the whole system collapses.
If intelligence is a necessary precondition for stupidity, and intelligence and stupidity scale together such that it takes real intelligence to be spectacularly stupid, then super-intelligence will be the opening act to an era of super-stupidity.
AI hallucination might be the first evidence of this dynamic. Large language models produce fluent, confident, detailed text that is, with some regularity, factually wrong. And this is not a simple bug but a structural feature of systems that optimize for appeal and plausibility rather than truth. And the danger is not that the AI will be wrong, after all, humans are wrong all the time, but knowing this, humans have invented means to detect and correct errors. We call this the scientific method.
The danger is that an AI will be wrong in ways humans can no longer detect because the very capacities that would catch the error have been outsourced to the machine or exceed the capacities of human minds. We face the prospect of a stupidity so sophisticated that it becomes indistinguishable, to its beneficiaries, from intelligence. This is the parable of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the answer to the ultimate question, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is 42.
I would like to make a modest proposal and suggest that we need a science of stupidity as rigorous as our emerging sciences of intelligence. This will not require billions of dollars of investment. It would involve inquiries into the mechanisms by which intelligent systems produce stupid outcomes. It would include studying the evolutionary dynamics that maintain stupidity despite its selective costs. It would promote the development of design principles that distinguish tools which enhance cognition from tools which replace it. And it would include surveying the institutional conditions under which collective intelligence degrades into collective stupidity.
Stupidity is not what remains when intelligence is subtracted, it is an active mechanism with its own logic, its own dynamics, and a capacity for unbounded growth parasitic on ingenuity. In a world obsessed with ever more powerful cognitive technologies, understanding stupidity is not merely an academic exercise, it might prove to be the most intelligent thing we do…
An essay on our undoing: “What Makes Humans Stupid,” from @sfiscience.bsky.social and @nautil.us.
Apposite: “How we meet the future” (“If we couldn’t make generalisations, we would be paralysed by the world’s complexity. Does that ever excuse stereotyping?”)
* Albert Einstein
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As we investigate imbecility, we might recall that it was on this date in 2008 that the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago “topped out“; construction was completed over the next few months. Donald Trump had announced in 2001 that the skyscraper would become the tallest building in the world, but after the September 11 attacks that same year, the architects scaled back the building’s plans, and its design underwent several revisions. When opened in 2009, it became the second-tallest building in the U.S. It surpassed the city’s John Hancock Center as the building with the highest residence (apartment or condo) in the world and briefly held that title until the completion of the Burj Khalifa several months later. The property has been beset by problems from its opening; they continue to this day.
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