Universal Stupid Constant

So I have been having discussions about science, philosophy, politics, religion, and things like that for a really long time. I spend a lot of my day discussing these sorts of things with all sorts of people. By now I have heard all the arguments. I teach many people, and fortunately I get to spend a lot of time listening to their boring drivel. Teaching philosophy gives me the opportunity to have people feel free too expound on "their" philosophy of life (as if I care).

So I have come to a number of conclusions about people and the way they are. Here is one of them: Most people have a stupidity constant. That is to say that people do not mature and have their stupidity levels decrease over time. What happens is that people often realize that they are stupid about something and try to improve, but inevitably it comes with a comprable rise in stupidity about some other belief.

You have perfect examples in college students. You find that when they come in they believe in every folk tale they heard as children. Columbus discovered America, The Earth is flat, God exists, mathematics is useless, evolutionary theory is based on an athiest guess, other types of people are barbarians while yours are perfect, rain causes colds, . . . whatever. There are many things we learn in college that enlighten us about the world and improve us as human beings. In almost every case though there are people who then take what they have learned and become wiser and at the same time feel that they must become stupid in some other area. So they start embracing these leftist trendy political causes despite the fact that it contradicts a whole bunch of things that do make sense. They learn that (and this I read in an article by M. Levin) that since soem of the things they learnt must be false, then all of them are. So they do a 180 degree turn on EVERYTHING. This is silly, because it is rare that people start their education with beliefs that are 100% false. So they end up discarding even the good ones.

Thus there is likely a constant amout of stupidity that exists in humans. It ought to be measured and recorded as a universal law of psychological thermodynamics. This is related, of course to Sidney Morgenbesser's "Universal Tzorus Constant", the law that states that the amount of tzorus in the world is a constant. ("Tzorus" is Yiddish for Pain of all sorts.)