September 20, 2020

It's a strange truism that the more ignorant anyone is, the more they assume they know. It's an invariable and highly observable truism. It's so strange that it does not have an easy to define explanation. But making the attempt might say something about it.

It appears that ignorant persons view rationality as a corruption, so when the see rationality, they assume they are looking at inferiority. Thereby, their own lack of rationality becomes superiority. And since the question is how reality is handled, the superiority is translated into greater intelligence.

There is quite a bit of evidence indicating that corrupters view rationality as a corruption. Therefore, the lack of rationality is assumed to be superior intelligence. It's seems like a joke, but observations indicate that such reactions occur in ignorant minds.

In fact, it appears that most people are highly forgiving of such ignorance based on the assumption that it is not being serious. Supposedly, when corrupters show us their stuff, they are simply joking. Since they are not assumed to be serious, they often pretend to be joking, while they couldn't be more serious.

We see Trump doing this all the time. When criticized for obvious absurdities, he, or more often his staff, will say he was just joking. But as time goes on, we see him imposing those realities in totally serious manner.

An example was Trump's claim that there should be less testing of the virus instead of more. When questioned in disbelief, Trump at first said he was just joking. But as time went on, we found that he was dead serious in trying to prevent more testing from being done.

Getting back to the central point, there is something about the simplicity of ignorance that translates into superior intelligence for ignorant persons. There is, in fact, a quasi philosophy that says simplicity is superiority. "Ockham's razor" is in that area.

Similarly, ignorant persons are quite self-righteous in scoffing at explanations, as if the absence of developed reality were superior to developed reality. Conservatives have a slogan (They align their philosophy of life upon slogans.) that says something to the effect that if you have to explain, you are already a loser.

Why would science and engineering be needed, if the absence of explanations were superior to explanations? The whys of that sort don't make sense in the way the minds of ignorant persons work.

The primary cause of irrationality is reactive behavior. There are reactions that develop through repetition over time in conflict with objective reality. Through operant conditioning, a chicken can be made to peck at a spot to ill effect. The reactive behavior of ignorant persons is functionally the same as operant conditioning, because there are positive reinforcements with it. But such conditioning occurs within fractions of a second, while long terms realities act in the opposite way. So such reactive conditioning develops in conflict with objective realities.

For these reasons, simple-mindedness looks superior to rationality to ignorant persons. Simple-mindedness solves a lot of their problems in the area of not being able to understand complexities. Being a quick fix to their inadequacies reinforces their reactions aligned upon using simplicity as a gimmick for indicating superiority through ignorance.