The depths of stupidity
In simpler times, back when television was young, a man named Art Linkletter hosted a program called “People Are Funny.”
On it, stunts were pulled that tickled the quaint funny bones of the ‘60s and, at worst, led to some mild embarrassment for participants.
You might say that “People Are Funny” begat “America’s Funniest Home Videos” which in turn begat “Here, Hold My Beer and Watch This!”
That latest iteration of self-abasement for yuks being a Twitter feed that delivers endless videos of people — mostly men, mostly young — doing breathtakingly stupid, self-destructive things.
It would be possible to dismiss Hold My Beer as an aberration in the conduct of human affairs if it wasn’t so regularly duplicated in the daily news.
The latest entrant in the “What-was-he-thinking?” sweepstakes is James Potok, a 28-year-old from Vaughan who caused a flight bound for Montego Bay to turn back to Toronto after he announced — falsely — that he was just back from China and hinted that he had coronavirus. “It certainly wasn’t a smart thing to do,” he allowed later. So, why do people of apparently normal intelligence do such moronic things?
Well, there’s a reason the phrase “it seemed like a good idea at the time” is a staple of the language.
Mere intelligence, it turns out, does not make people rational. It’s possible to be intelligent without being rational, and rational without being particularly intelligent. There’s even a name for the mismatch: dysrationalia.
Thinking rationally demands critical thinking, a skill many of us don’t have, or don’t use. In short, critical thinking relies on logic, facts and evidence to guide opinions and behaviours.
Skills which Potok — if he had them — must have powered down for the flight.
If it helps, Potok should know that a book was published last year called The Intelligence Trap chronicling dumb decisions — though not quite that dumb — by the likes of Socrates, Charles Darwin and Steve Jobs.
It turns out that among what psychologists call the “Big Five” personality traits is one known as “openness.”
This can suggest a penchant for adventure. Sort of a spirit of YOLO. It can, alas, cause us to engage in risky and dangerous behaviour we might rue the rest of our days.
We are, moreover, mobile collections of biases, usually tilted in our own favour. “No one will mind.”
Actually, we’re famous for not understanding things like probability and statistics. We buy lottery tickets even while believing the snow chunks that blow off our car roof will never hit anyone.
Luckily, most of our impulsive, self-destructive acts are no worse than sending an injudicious email to the boss.
But there is a bull market of late in idiocies of a certain type, those fuelled by a formula that goes like this: Intoxicating spirits + undeveloped prefrontal cortex + YouTube/Selfie = Disaster.
Consider the young woman who, after a night of drinking in 2017, walked past a Toronto construction site at 3 a.m. and was inspired to hop the fence and climb a 100-metre crane.
She reached the top, snapped a few selfies, then slipped and became snagged in the crane hook 45 metres above the ground until morning broke and help was summoned.
She became known as Crane Girl, not to be confused with Chair Girl.
That would be the young woman who tossed a chair off a highrise balcony, blithely unconcerned for who or what might be below. Happily, this kind of thing doesn’t happen every day. But it does happen often enough for the Star’s Rosie DiManno to file an annual column on “another year of living stupidly in Toronto.”
We’re sure Mr. Potok has her thanks.