#stupidism

In 1863, the world’s first underground railway opened in London. On its first day, nearly 40,000 thrilled Brits made the short, speedy journey between Paddington and Farringdon. The future of transportation had arrived.

One hundred and sixty-three years later, I was at my desk in San Francisco, clicking around the Vegas Loop map, trying to figure out where the world’s dumbest form of transportation could take me.  In 2016, billionaire Elon Musk decided he was sick of traffic. Because Musk believes every thought he’s ever had is the first of its kind, he decided to revolutionize transportation. His mission was to build underground highways, creating a tunnel system below surface streets that would zip people around in a way that congested, outdated freeways could not. Las Vegas, which has never seen a gimmick it didn’t love, signed on to become the first American city with a Loop.  

The scale is ambitious to the point of stupidity. Once its 104 stations and 68 miles of tunnels are complete, the Vegas Loop site says it “will serve up to 90,000 passengers per hour.” About 642,000 people live in Las Vegas, plus an additional 110,000 tourists on any given day. That means every single resident and tourist need to ride the Loop multiple times per day to average 90,000 passengers an hour. For reference, the Tokyo Metro moves 6.5 million people a day around an area with 33 million residents. You do the math. 

To supplement this sad little system, the Loop added $12.50 rides to the airport. But because there’s no tunnel there yet, it’s just a regular route on regular surface streets. Oh sorry, were you imagining a train? Autonomous cars? Nope. The Loop is operated by human drivers in Teslas. Elon Musk is creating a race of mole people driving endless circles below Las Vegas. 

Take as an example these two beliefs: (1) that technical understanding and mastery of the natural world translate into the ability to project indvidual/community will onto one’s surroundings; and (2) that the Gallic provinces consist entirely of cured pork bits. The second is obviously absurd - Gallia sit omnis divisa in partes tres, but those partes are geographical delineations of land, and land is clearly not made of processed pork. One could make the argument that this land could be, say, traded for barrels of pork; or that, like stardust, all pork eventually decays or is shat out and turned into soil. It may be that in some obscure medieval document, the entire region was declared to be made out of pork! In similar fashion, (1) appears to be self-evident: the development of the arts and sciences allowed e.g. Galileo to espy the moons of Jupiter, or Toby Fox to create Undertale. And yet certain animals and humans can do things effortlessly or instinctually that most people would struggle to do even with  training (consider hunting dogs bred solely for spotting/tracking/retrieving, or savants like Mozart and von Neumann who played with notes/numbers like they were Lego blocks).

I think this disparity handily illustrates the principle of caution: we are meatsacks who default to heuristics and pattern-matching, and it is easy to fall into generalizations or jump to conclusions. Perhaps we missed an angle, or forgot to drop a zero in the calculations - whatever the case, it is prudent to remember that we are but meatsacks, and approach truth-seeking with thoroughness and respect.

As meatsacks, we are inevitably going to mess this up somehow - maybe due to lack of caffeine, or lack of perspective! This brings us to the principle of compassion, which, put reductively, is: we’re trying to do the best we can with the best we’ve got, and as hunks of meat, that’s not a lot. But we can watch each other’s backs and pull each other up, which is a damn lot more useful than pissing on someone for not knowing how to pull themselves out of the mud. The keyword here is “growth mindset”. I’m a huge believer in the “lucky 10,000” concept popularized by Randall Munroe: at any given time, there are about 10,000 people in your continent of choice who aren’t aware of <common thing>. Why ridicule them for not knowing <common thing>, when you could celebrate them being the lucky 1 out of 10,000 to discover it!

And this brings us to the third leg of the Stupidist tripod: curiosity. What queer meatbags we are, that we have gained the ability to look upon our world and comprehend it. And how much there is to comprehend! The great temptation of adulthood is to pick a lane and stay in it; to affiliate oneself with tribal beliefs; to trade the promises of discovery for the secure stasis of prestige. All well and good, until the ever-changing world shifts under our feet, and we are forced to remember how to wonder, how to adapt.

I started out this essay wanting to talk about core conflicting beliefs, and ended up with a primer on Stupidism. I guess that’s just how the ball rolls! Feel free to adopt the conflicting beliefs above, which, since they’re quite lengthy, I’ll sum them up for you:

Knowledge is power.