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Notes -
It's not even dogmatism as such - my experience in life is that most extremely dogmatic people are actually relatively intelligent. It takes a certain baseline level of intelligence coupled with a sense of intellectual rigour to be really dogmatic. If you've put in the effort to understand a large system of doctrine and to commit yourself to it, you need to understand lots of ideas, how those ideas inter-relate, and so on. You can't do that if you're not intelligent enough to think in an abstract way.
The true fanatics for a set of dogmas can be very frustrating, but I don't think 'stupid' is the word I would use for them.
What somehow still manages to surprise me when it comes to general stupidity is how unreflective most people are, and how unwilling they are to engage in even the most cursory checks on the consistency of their own beliefs. They just float around and believe whatever seems to be convenient or trendy, and if you try to ask for consistency, for them to relate any of their ideas to each other, they either get angry or immediately retreat to some sort of cliché about how people should just live and let live.
There comes a point where I want to shake someone and yell, "But those things you've said contradict! You can't hold all those things at once! The jigsaw doesn't fit together! You have no idea what you're saying!"
I actually have a half-written effort-post sitting on my desktop that I've been trying to decide whether to post. I'm reluctant in part for privacy reasons, but also because I can't decide whether there's any value to it beyond me carping about people I know.
But to describe the post as presently constituted, basically it's mostly vignettes of conversations I've had with colleagues over the past couple years. These are people with PhDs in a variety of fields--English, Biology, Math, quite a variety really--who in the space of a single conversation have expressed to me totally contradictory things without seeming to notice. And in one case when I actually took the time to point this out, I was told--as if this made any sense at all in the context of logical contradiction--"well maybe in theory, but I'm more of a practical thinker."
I'm sure there are inconsistencies in my beliefs, insofar as I have any; I have the quokka's curse of always suspecting myself to be wrong. It's not the inconsistencies that worry me. What worries me is the casual way people encounter these inconsistencies in their own speech, and seem to either not notice or not care, as if they haven't even been listening to themselves. I know there are a lot of people who find the rationalsphere's apparent obsession with "signalling" tiresome, but I can't think of a better explanation for what most people seem to be doing most of the time when I talk to them. They want to signal intellect, or group membership, or status... but they simply do not value truth or logical consistency in any discernible way. "Social signalling" is the strongest hypothesis I've encountered for vast swathes of human interaction. And I don't even mind too terribly, when it's not actively frustrating my goals--sociability is an important advantage of our species--but I do not enjoy being reminded that it is rare even for highly intelligent or highly educated individuals to be able to consistently see beyond the signals.
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