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👋 Hey dumdums,
Last week, I spent forty-five minutes trying to set up a "Smart Air Fryer" that promised to make toast using a proprietary five-step app with two-factor authentication. It would have been faster to toast the bread with a lighter and a mild sense of self-loathing.
That's what smart people do. They invent complex, unnecessary systems to avoid simple, humbling truths.
I was thinking about this while reading Lane Brown's recent piece in New York Magazine, "A Theory of Dumb," which argues that humanity is experiencing a kind of "model collapse." IQ scores are dropping. We're compressing all knowledge into "vibes" and "cores" and "enshittification." We've given everyone a printing press and discovered, to our horror, that most people have nothing useful to say.
Brown is a good writer, and he's not wrong about the data. But I think he's diagnosing the wrong patient.
The problem isn't that humans are getting dumber. Not really. It's that a very specific type of smart is becoming obsolete, and its owners are panicking.
The Midwit's Model is Collapsing
Brown's piece ends with the "midwit" meme. A bell curve where the simpleton on the left and the genius on the right both arrive at the same simple conclusion, while the anxious try-hard in the middle ties himself into knots explaining why simplicity is naive.
He presents this as a cautionary tale. I think it's a diagnosis.
The Midwit is the person with just enough education to make things complicated but not enough wisdom to make them simple again. He sees a clear, intuitive insight and responds with a 17-paragraph rebuttal about methodology. He mistakes his own confusion for rigor.
The Midwit is also, and I say this with love, the voice of most institutional knowledge. He writes the 5,000-word explainers. He adds the "well, actually" caveats. He's the reason your company's vacation policy is eleven pages long.
And his model of the world, the one where complexity equals intelligence, is collapsing. Not because people are dumber, but because they've stopped pretending to be impressed.
Here's where Brown gets it wrong (imho)
He frames our era of compression (ie, the TikTok explainers, the memes, the "slop") as cognitive decay. Information gets passed through so many filters that meaning disintegrates. We're all playing telephone with reality.
But compression is also how intelligence evolves.
When Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College, he wandered into a calligraphy class and learned about serifs and spacing. Completely useless knowledge. Ten years later, it became the entire design philosophy of the Macintosh. He compressed an art form into a product.
That's a famous example.
Here's a less famous one.
I once watched my daughter explain the entire plot of Severence to her friend in four sentences and a hand gesture. Her friend had never seen the show. By the end, she understood it better than I did after four seasons. That's not decay. That's transmission efficiency.
Brown worries that we're losing nuance. I'd argue we're losing unnecessary nuance, the kind that exists mainly to signal that the speaker attended the right graduate program.
The Fortnite Kids Might Be Fine
Brown mentions, almost as a throwaway, that while abstract reasoning scores are declining, spatial reasoning is up. He jokes that "the kids who are really good at Fortnite" are the only ones whose brains are adapting.
But what if that's not a joke?
The ability to navigate rapid, chaotic, three-dimensional change, to process new information and adapt in real time, might be more valuable in the coming century than the ability to write a well-structured five-paragraph essay. The essay was optimized for a world of stable institutions and slow feedback loops. That world is gone.
I'm not saying Fortnite is education. I'm saying the skills it accidentally trains (ie, spatial processing, rapid adaptation, pattern recognition under pressure) might matter more than we think.
The Midwit dismisses this because it doesn't look like learning. It looks like fun. And fun, to the Midwit, is always suspicious.
Dumb Word of the Day: Bikeshedding (n.): The tendency to spend disproportionate time on trivial details while ignoring what actually matters.
The term comes from British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson, who in 1957 described a fictional committee tasked with approving plans for a nuclear power plant. The committee rubber-stamped the reactor design in minutes, too complex for anyone to feel qualified to argue about, then spent the rest of the afternoon in heated debate over what materials to use for the staff bike shed.
Parkinson's formulation:
"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved."
There's a related adage called Sayer's Law:
"In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." It's been used to explain why academic politics are so vicious—because the stakes are so low.
Used in a sentence: "The executive team spent three hours bikeshedding the font on the crisis communications memo while the actual crisis quietly metastasized in the parking lot."
(should you choose to accept it)
The De-Midwit Challenge: Find Your Simple Sentence
The Midwit believes complexity equals intelligence. Your job is to prove that simplicity is the higher form.
Find one system, relationship, or process in your life that you've overcomplicated. Now compress it to its core truth in a single sentence.
If you can't get it down to one sentence, it might be a system you should quit.
Example of a Midwit System: "My relationship with my uncle is governed by a seven-page emotional protocol that dictates when we can discuss politics versus local real estate."
The Simple Sentence: "My uncle is a fire hazard who smells faintly of mothballs and bad opinions."
Find your sentence. Be the person who understands the vibe so completely that the Midwit has nothing left to add.
Lane Brown thinks we're in model collapse. I think the Midwit's model is in collapse, and that's not the same thing.
Next week: The terrifying genius of "slop," and why sometimes bad data beats no data.
Until then, resist the urge to explain yourself.
David 🎉
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