It's not that intelligent people have become stupid. It's that the incentive structure of public conversation rewards cocksureness regardless of actual intelligence. Smart people who admit uncertainty get steamrolled by confident idiots, so they learn to sound more confident than they feel, which degrades the quality of public discourse, which makes everyone stupider, which makes cocksureness even more adaptive. The result is a doom spiral. https://x.com/jawestenberg/status/2012666217857991051?s=20