With my little buddy, somewhere in the Arabian Desert

“You can’t fix stupid.” Ron White

One of the most disturbing videos I’ve seen in the last couple of days (and that’s saying something) is this press conference involving a potentially second generation Somali woman, Nasra Ahmed (she’s 23) who apparently got wrestled by ICE after spitting on some agents during a detainment and banged her head. She was being used as a prop in a press conference, by an ensemble of civic leaders who, of course, want ICE gone. It’s become obvious that Minneapolis/St. Paul has evolved into a hub of public corruption, and apparently the various NGO and political leadership have some belief that everything will just return to normal, and the illicit federal dollars will just start flowing again if the current federal Republican administration will just go away, taking ICE with them.

All this is pretty sordid, of course. But what the video shows is not that. What the video shows is a group of leaders, along with their prop, that are obviously functioning low on the complexity scale across all their behaviors. They don’t really appear to be all there — especially the young woman. And while it’s easy to chalk this up to nerves (her interlocutors definitely want this to be the case, and when they realize she’s atom-bombing on the big stage, get out the shepherd’s crook) there’s something else afoot. They are not processing data at anything necessary to be a compelling force in society. Ahmed’s story is monotonous and repetitive. And her handlers are not much better.

ChatGPT says that Ahmed is likely born in the US, and her accent likely indicates she was raised in this country. Her father, also the father to six more siblings, is likely married to his cousin, and is definitely an immigrant. The problem is that these people would be considered hopelessly stupid. Various aggregations of Somali IQs indicate the average is 78. And while this might be OK back in their Somali homeland, it is problematic when navigating in, or integrating into a complex society like the US. They aren’t mentally handicapped per se (or whatever the politically correct term is.). And our expectations of them are to be able to navigate all our complex systems — like filing taxes, or purchasing a home. Good luck. None of these things are simple. And across the board, even in the last 40 years, our culture has been shot out of a cannon as far as information complexity. It’s all been done for all sorts of ostensible reasons of fairness, justice and whatnot. But even simple tasks now are not simple.

And we are both importing, as well as creating through the decline in educating our own children, a whole sub-caste of people who just cannot keep up.

We have current measures like IQ, or even SAT scores, that are brandished like some means of accurately sorting who goes where. But academia has really not shown any interest in really diving deep into the epistemological roots of knowledge, or how they are functionally used. The amount of interest in work like mine, in the limit, approaches zero. But I’m not the only one working in knowledge complexity. I often cite the Grand Old Man of epistemology, Michael Lamport Commons, and his model for hierarchical complexity (MHC) as a more agnostic form of understanding which thoughts are harder thoughts for human brains to think. One of the more interesting, which comes more naturally to intellectuals, is cross-paradigmatic reasoning (e.g. a giraffe is like a penguin… etc.). But this mode is almost inaccessible to more and more people. They don’t even understand why you would draw such an analogy. Or even what an analogy is in the first place. This is difficult for most advanced cultures to accept — surely, everyone uses analogies. But analogies are difficult in the neural sphere. I’ve been fortunate to be in enough classroom situations, and have students NOT get it, that I know this is far from a sure thing with undeveloped audiences. Not the analogy itself — but the IDEA of a dissimilar comparison.

One of my buddies I’ve been working with, Dr. Joseph Biello, is a mathematician and atmospheric scientist at UC Davis. While I do not teach any introductory classes, Joe still has to shoulder the burden of teaching introductory calculus every other year or so. He remarks on how slippage in intellectual capacity is haunting his efforts. And what he talks about is the variability — the range of ability of students. It’s not just having the background classes (everyone’s go-to explanation when trying to explain why students suffer in math.). It’s that the range of kids in our classes is becoming so extreme, we cannot, through tutoring or other extraordinary efforts, lift those kids into passing Calc 1.

There’s something else going on — and that something might be called Structural Memetic Reach. They cannot think the thoughts necessary to pass Calculus 1, because the fragmentation of thought, and their ability to process rule-following algorithms, cannot permit it. They are memetic inferiors to the kids who can pass and actually even understand the material in the class. It’s a DIFFERENT problem. And trust me — we, in academia, are not discussing this in any meaningful framework that would matter. Most go back to the notion of remedial work, and poor teaching.

But the reality is that it’s more like mathematical dyslexia. The symbol set we’ve used to define the principles of Calculus, which really is more about understanding how to relate different rates than anything else, for those that know nothing, or are intimidated by the notion of calculus, appear in a hopeless jumble above the students. They simply cannot make these things into anything resembling a coherent narrative, because that level of complex narrative structure, that requires first mapping some words to symbols, and those symbols to sequences, and then those sequences to an algorithm/rule, don’t reside in enough connected circuits in their heads. You’re not going to teach these kids Calculus, any more than you would hope to teach a monkey calculus. The circuits are just not there. And no — the kids are NOT monkeys. But we are starting to see divisions in cognitive complexity that sort the haves versus the have-nots.

(I should note — calculus itself is kind of a hot-button term for lots of the math-phobic, who may be limited in their mathematical ability. But I happen to think there’s also a lot of bad math instruction out there too. )

In earlier times, this complexity problem sorted itself out through representative scales of human societies. In the 1800s, if you wanted to be a true internationalista, you had to board a sailing ship. You were a microscopic part of any given population. And even 50 years ago, you had to get on a jet if you wanted to evolve your worldview. But with the globalization of the Internet, the forces driving complexification are literally everywhere. That dumps on our head the problem that folks with the hardware for complexity can access knowledge and become higher level thinkers. But if you don’t have the requisite background or hardware, you’re really screwed. You are going to be shunted into a lower caste whether you like it or not.

Relational modalities, as I’ve written extensively about on this blog, are going to matter. Coming from a high trust society, even one in decline like the US, is still an enormous advantage with regards to cognitive ability. But if you start in a tribal society, it’s going to be almost impossible to bootstrap yourself into higher modes of thought complexity. It’s not just work ethic, or tribal taboos. You don’t even know what you’re missing, because those modes are literally above your head.

And this is going to drive conflict. Lower complexity societies live in a world where violence is part of life. What happens when a lower complexity cohort abuts a higher complexity cohort? Does anyone think this is going to work out swimmingly? Civilization, and especially Western civilization is a real thing. It’s a way for lots of people to live next to each other, with enough complex systems, so everyone has enough and people don’t kill each other, while persisting through knowledge transfer to younger generations so they can assume future roles necessary to keep the whole machine rolling. When we fail to understand the core elements of complexity in our civilization, and openly attack it because of some nonsense moral value, we are shaping our own demise.

In the near future, there is going to be a cacophony out of academia that this baseline of thought doesn’t exist (the idiot post-modern nonsense), that anyone can be educated, and all we need is a little more time. As universities lose enrollment, the wishful thinking that education can cure all ills — all we need to do is tweak the software — is going to come on fast and hard. Higher education is a major industry in this country, and one that caters to the export market. But aside from creating a pleasant respite for four years for those that have the money, there is going to be a growing caste of people who simply can’t do Calculus, or other complex thought, for hardware-based reasons. And there aren’t enough smart people in universities either who can meaningfully confront this problem. When it comes to teaching, I always laugh when I hear people say the problem is that people just need to take some courses in the College of Education. I’ve met vanishingly few people in those Colleges willing to even talk about this. And they never ask me to come lecture. Note to audience — as we sort through all this, it can’t just be intellectuals at the table. Intellectual communities are prone to psychopathic takeover. After they figure out how to rate and rank, they inevitably want to kill all those in some arbitrary outgroup.

We’ve just started to run into the brutality of a Brave New World, a la Huxley, but along information complexity lines. And it’s not going to get better. What we are going to do with those that have true ability, vs. those that do not, will decide our fate as a species. If there’s a distant anthropological analogy, it’s more akin to what Homo sapiens sapiens probably did to Homo Neanderthalensis – kill them all off. It’s my fervent hope that we recognize this in advance of the crux.

Addendum — I’ve done a lot of work on knowledge complexity. Here’s a graphic that can help you understand a little. IQ does not dent this, primarily being a measure of sophistication — not evolution.