...Or praise the court, or magnify mankind,
Or thy grieved country’s copper chains unbind;
From thy Boeotia though her power retires,
Mourn not, my SWIFT, at ought our realm acquires,
Here pleased behold her mighty wings out-spread
To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead.
Alexander Pope's Dunciad is one of my favourite pieces of poetry ever. It's a mock-heroic epic skewering the dull and worthy of Pope's time: hack writers, bad poets, pedants, shitty managers... everyone, in sum, who might deserve the label "dunce". I'll admit part of the appeal is personal: I love mock-epic, Iambic Pentameter and Pope in general. That said, Pope's skewerings of the intellectual scene he existed in have enduring appeal: who, after all, hasn't wanted to go after a writer significantly inferior to them who nonetheless has much more reach (coughs Casey Newton coughs)? Above all, the humor is remarkably modern. Pope has the publishing industry of the day pissing and shitting on paper and publishing it, competing for who has the greatest "output". Of course, nothing has changed since then, and this allows me to segue into my discussion of our modern dunces, the chief of which is Sam Altman, who behaves in remarkably similar ways.
Sam Altman is one of the dullest, most incurious and least creative people to walk this earth. This is, after all, the person who once tweeted 'i am a stochastic parrot and so are u', in response to Emily Bender's (entirely incisive and absolutely brilliant) critique of what his large language models are actually doing. Let's take a look at this for a moment: in response to Bender pointing out that ChatGPT and its competitors simply encode relationships between words and have no concept of referent or meaning, which is a devastating critique of what the technology actually does, the absolute best response he can muster for his work is "yeah, but humans don't do anything more complicated than that". I mean, speak for yourself Sam: the rest of us have some concept of semiotics, and we can do things like identify anagrams or count the number of letters in a word, which requires a level of recursivity that's beyond what ChatGPT can muster. The fact that this is the best response the guy can muster is pathetic, and I can only conclude that he simply can't understand the criticism well enough to respond to it effectively, and thus his immediate instinct is to devalue the entire body of work associated with it. This is a truly dunce-worthy piece of thinking: "I can't understand something, therefore there's nothing worth understanding".
It shows in his work too. After all, there's almost nothing that ChatGPT is actually useful for. It certainly can't write in any way that's valuable, beyond the bare minimum of generating vaguely acceptable written artifacts of the sort we're expected to produce in our society. It can't generate any text that I'd describe as beautiful, and it's comprehensively incapable of writing anything true. Asking it to write fiction results in leaden prose, plots that would make a self-publisher on Amazon cringe and some of the worst structure I've ever seen. The verse, if possible, is even worse. And beyond that, it's completely impossible of expressing an opinion that isn't heavily-averaged slop. As a tool for writing, it's worse than useless, and anyone with even a little experience of making their living from their ideas and their writing knows that. The fact that Altman doesn't thus tells us something very important: the guy has never meaningfully interacted with any kind of worthwhile literature in a serious way. He thinks about literature in the same kind of way that a bourgeois family thinks about a Thomas Kinkade painting: it's something to tie the room together. And when you think of art in that way, automating it is natural: vaguely pretty artistic slop is, after all, just a commodity in this worldview. And AI art generators have a lot in common with Kinkade and 1930's Soviet social realist art, right down to the style. Even down to the faintly Plasticine-like textures. And if all you can imagine art being is "something pretty to tie a room together", AI art and AI literature naturally makes an amount of sense. In short, Sam Altman doesn't understand art, therefore he devalues it, and so he's chosen to incinerate massive volumes of money trying to automate artists away.
And it isn't just Altman: all the beau-monde of the tech world are like this. Paul Graham's essays are particularly bad for it, with clever verbiage and the aura of the man concealing the fact that he's claiming that some pretty damned stupid and craven people are in fact brilliant because they support him having his money. The guy was a painter, and did engage with the art form seriously, so he's marginally less awful than some other people I can talk about, but still. And do I even need to talk about Marc Andreessen and his absolutely dogshit "techno-optimist manifesto"? It's garbage: it has no structure to speak of, there's no thread of argument, and it really is just a venture capitalist that can't write spewing whatever thoughts he has onto paper as though they were gospel truth. It also devalues any kind of work that isn't the kind he does, as though thought, care and consideration were optional luxuries. The whole sphere of tech is faintly idiotic in this way.
The mind of the dunce
From all this work we can begin sketching an outline of the psychology of the modern dunce. First and foremost, the dunce is incapable of valuing knowledge that they don't personally understand or agree with. If they don't know something, then that thing clearly isn't worth knowing. Even if the information is clearly and unambiguously communicated to them with supporting evidence, it'll simply slide off their brains. We see this at play in the tech ecosystem, where people persist in attempting to "disrupt" industries that are mostly functional, in large part because the tech-bros in question simply can't stand to see people who aren't like them thriving and doing well. So now we have to deal with AI slop trying to supplant artists, failing miserably at it and still somehow destroying a whole bunch of careers.
Secondly, the dunce takes current social structures to be a law of physics. How things are is how things always will be, and attempting to change it will simply lead to pain. The idea that anything about how we organise our society could be socially constructed simply slides through their brain without sticking. We've seen a remarkable number of examples of this kind of behaviour in the wake of the shooting of the UHC CEO, including some truly spectacular pearl-clutching articles about how the "Brian Thompson was the real working-class hero" of the piece. The reason these articles all fall so flat isn't that the shooting of the CEO was right (I'd certainly not recommend it as a political tactic), but that they come from an underlying assumption that the US healthcare system is the only way that healthcare can be provided: that it's a law of physics. Of course, all you have to do is look outside the country to prove that this simply isn't the case, so the fact that all these columnists just assume as a default that massively inflated medical bills and massive numbers of medical bankruptcies are just the way things have to be really exposes just how dunce-worthy their thinking is. There is no way that someone capable of writing one of these articles is capable of any real insight, and yet these are the people who overwhelmingly write our opinion articles. A saturnian age of lead indeed.
The dunce is also constitutionally incapable of self-reflection. To an extent, this is probably deducible from the last point, but it goes further than that. A healthy person, when faced with evidence that what they're doing is bad, wrong or sloppy, will try and change what they're doing in some way. It may work, or it may not. A dunce, by contrast, will launch the exact same assault on the Isonzo river eleven times. When faced with evidence that their latest AI is kinda bad and doesn't actually do anything useful, the dunce will simply deny the fact and double down, burning more and more money in pursuit of AGI that simply isn't going to happen. When faced with reasonable criticism of their work, the dunce will simply ignore said criticism and write about what he wishes his critics had said. And when faced with evidence that their managerial strategy is failing and wasting massive amounts of developer effort, the dunce will simply try yet another variation of SCRUM and hope that fixed the problem. The dunce is therefore constitutionally incapable of ever actually fixing their problems: instead, they'll repeatedly run head-first into situations that upset them, make them ten times worse for themselves, and then blame the situation on something else. Just take a look at the Democratic Party after Trump's election victory: they immediately descended into mutual recriminations, but at no point has anyone in the party really considered blaming themselves for the problem: it is, after all, much easier just to throw trans people under the bus.
Finally, the dunce has terrible taste in whatever field they work in. This isn't just coincidental: it's for the structural reason that both form and function are subject, in the dunce's mind, to ideology and gut bias. It's more important that a piece of work be Agile, Christian or that it be disruptive than that it be good, true or beautiful. But quality, of course, requires sacrifice, and if you do not sacrifice other things to achieve quality, you sacrifice quality to achieve those other things. It's thus no surprise that so much art, writing and software development done in the modern world is just kinda shit: it's more important that it hew to some kind of party line than that it be good (as an aside, this is why I don't like a lot of queer literature: it aims to be queer literature more than it aims to be good writing). The dunce, moreover, does not have the aesthetic sense to understand that what they've done is bad: they simply do not have the taste to distinguish good work from bad work. Hence, it doesn't matter how leaden the characters, how slow the SQL or whether the technology in question actually does anything: if what's been produced is ideologically sound, it's good. This, by-the-by, neatly explains the recent obsession with generative AI: it aligns with the ideology of those pushing it, so all of its defects simply don't register.
A confusion of dunces
With that in mind, well, we all know that the world we currently live in is full of and largely run by dunces, don't we? While Trump himself probably doesn't fit the bill (he's too floridly idiotic and rage-fuelled), so much of his administration absolutely does. The current New Zealand government that just cut funding for any science that doesn't have immediate economic benefit (which somehow includes agricultural science in a country with a mostly agricultural economy) also fits the bill: they're so stupid, incurious and damaging that they think this is somehow a good idea, and they are utterly unwilling to listen to anyone telling them how stupid it is, while simultaneously they expect everyone whom they criticise to believe what they say as gospel. Wes Streeting and his abhorrent ban on puberty blockers for trans youth is another prime example of dunce-worthiness: he ignored the vast bulk of available evidence, including labelling evidence from doctors who worked with trans people as being biased a priori and thus excluding it from the data he considered. He essentially made a massive decision that threatens the lives of millions of trans people on the basis of "trans icky": what can you call a person like that if not a dunce?
Looking a step down, our corporate leaders managers are mostly dunces. Who else would see a code base with no functions, no loops and credentials hardcoded into the source and think "that's not a priority, we need to make progress"? Who else would look at a twenty thousand line view featuring the same boilerplate repeatedly copied with minor alterations, completely undocumented and so messy that it took a capable engineer almost six weeks to even start untangling it, and blame the engineer for clearly being incompetent? Who else would see that SCRUM and other Agile management techniques of its ilk demoralise, demotivate and break their workers and think "clearly we need more SCRUM to be productive"? Who would think they know how to manage software engineers better than software engineers do?
Your average manager is incurious, ill-read, obedient to authority to the point where they basically can't think independently and utterly incapable of understanding that other people sometimes know things better than they do. They don't read, they don't learn, they don't care beyond the simple dictates of the company. They don't even reflect on their behaviour or consider that maybe how they're running things is wrong. They just... do what's expected of them. For those of us who aren't like that, working under people like this is hell. It is, after all, impossible to be at all confident that you're doing well if the person judging it doesn't know what good or bad work looks like. It's impossible to write code that meets the needs of people when the people in question can't articulate what they need and might, in fact, not need anything. It's impossible to fix problems in society when the people holding the purse-strings simply can't perceive that the problems exist or that they might affect people they care about.
A society beneath contempt
We simply can't afford this shit. We're heading into an increasingly unknowable, increasingly dangerous future, full of instability, rapid change and marked by the increasing threat of climate change and massive economic instability. We need leaders who can meet the challenge. We need people like Bismarck, Clausewitz, Disraeli and Cavour. These were all leaders who, while opinion might be deeply divided as to their political legacy, were not dunces. They were capable of valuing knowledge that they didn't personally hold, they were able to understand the importance of social structures being able to change (Bismarck's strategy for blunting the socialist movement did, after all, involve the state replicating mutual aid networks that socialists had pioneered), and they had good taste. They were classically educated, well-read and cared for the arts; while Frederick the Great may have banned ballet from the opera, at least he cared enough about opera to do it (as an aside, a large part of the justification for the ban was male nobles showing up, leering at the dancers and then talking through the rest of the performance, so I'm fairly sympathetic to the ban). And as much as many of these people were autocrats, they were able to build strong, stable, functioning states and organisations that built much of the social infrastructure that we rely on these days. They were capable of addressing complex social problems. They were not dunces.
Our current leaders, by contrast, are just as autocratic, but have nowhere near the intellectual or emotional agility they'd need to address the pressing issues of the day. Half of them seem entirely incapable of even registering that the problems exist due to them being completely unable to look outside of their own mental framing. Sam Altman simply can't comprehend that the tool he's developed is basically only useful for running propaganda campaigns on social media. Marc Andreessen is stuck in a loop of being completely unable to see how his wealth and power are completely unearned, and consequently keeps shitting himself in print. And I won't even go into what the hell Elon Musk is doing.
I'm sick of living in a world run by these people.
We're stuck in a world where the purse strings and the levers of power are held almost entirely by these absolute dunces. In order to survive without being pushed to the margins of the world, we have to pretend that we're dunces too, because any part of us that challenges their internal framework makes us a threat. We have a media environment that exalts these very stupid, very unserious people as the pinnacle of wisdom while silencing and marginalising the people doing actual, serious analysis. Our educational system is basically designed for creating uncreative, incurious people, and our workplaces only ever reinforce that.
Our cultural and artistic institutions are crumbling for lack of time, money and interest. Our scientific institutions are absorbed by more and more incuriously "practical" pursuits at the expense of anything else. Our TV and cinema are overwhelmingly shit, and fewer and fewer people read at all. Our politics is increasingly dominated by the very dunces that we so decry. This is a miserable, impoverished, closed-off existence, completely devoid of roses and with not nearly enough bread. Who on earth wants to live this way? The fact that so much of our society is simply willing to do this to us marks it out as a society beneath contempt. It needs to end and be replaced by something more worthy of our time, money and engagement.