Stupidity: Definition and Species

A sales pitch that begins with a definition

Every industry names itself, and the name is its first act of persuasion. An industry that called its product engagement-maximizing recommender systems would have to defend engagement maximization. An industry that calls its product intelligence is defended in advance by the word. We decline the definition, and invite the industry to come to terms: what is being built, sold, and defended in court is not intelligence but its very opposite, and that opposite has a name:

Stupid (adj.) easily seduced or deceived into idiocy.

Stupidify (verb) to deceive a simple person into practicing idiocy, often for the benefit of the stupidifier.

Stupidifier (noun, a type of person) a seducer / deceiver מסיט "mesit."

Stupified idiot (noun) a person who has been stupidified or seduced. Analogy סטה "sotah" (wayward wife) possible etymological connection to the English "sot" (drunkard)

Stupidity (abstract noun) a species of vice that supports all others: the character quality of being easily deceived and seduced into a state of "stupified idiocy" and consequently passive compliance with the initiatives of the stupidifier. A habit of life or business model that promotes and profits from stupidity, such as that found in the vice industries. "shtus." (^fn These are the definitions this site uses. They are the author's, and they are used here in their exact sense throughout every page that follows.)

Note that these definitions are not insults. Stupidity here is not low intelligence, poor schooling, or slow wit; a person of formidable ability can be stupidified, and the most profitable targets usually are. Stupidity is a condition of being easily (mis)led — a susceptibility — and it can therefore be cultivated in a population deliberately, at scale, by a party who profits from it. That party we call the stupidifier. The relationship between them is not an accident of technology. It is a relational and business model.

Intelligence means discernment, which is exactly what the product removes

Intelligence entered English in the late 14th century from Latin intelligentia, and the Latin verb behind it, intelligere, is inter ("between") plus legere ("choose, pick out, read"). Its earliest English sense is "the highest faculty of the mind, capacity for comprehending general truths" (Online Etymology Dictionary). Intelligence is the capacity to choose between — to read one thing against another and discern.

The phrase "artificial intelligence" enters the record in a proposal dated August 31, 1955, by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon: "We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire" (Dartmouth proposal, 1955). Whatever that research program has since become, the word it borrowed still names a faculty of discernment.

Now measure the product against the word. A ranking system tuned to maximize time on device is tuned to reduce the number of moments at which the user stops, compares, and chooses. Autoplay removes a choice. Infinite scroll removes a stopping point. A feed personalized to what already holds you narrows what you are asked to read anything against. Each is an engineering decision that subtracts discernment from the human being in front of it, and each is sold as an advance in "intelligence." The industry has taken the name of the faculty it is dismantling.

Seduction is the mechanism, not the side effect

The definitions above put seduction at the center, and the English word carries the figure precisely. Seduce comes into English in the 1520s from Latin seducere, "lead away, lead aside or astray," from se- ("aside, away") plus ducere ("to lead") (Online Etymology Dictionary). To be seduced is to be led off your own path — not overpowered, not coerced, but turned, and turned in a way you consent to at every step.

That is why the harm is so hard to litigate and so easy to deny. No one was forced. Every user tapped. The stupidifier's whole art is to arrange the conditions under which a person freely chooses what he would not have chosen had he been shown the choice plainly. What is new is not the seduction but its instrumentation: a system that observes several billion people, learns which particular lure each of them cannot walk past, and serves it, continuously, without a human ever deciding to do it to anyone in particular.

We call the operators of such systems stupidifiers, and we mean it as a description of what their systems are optimized to do, not as an epithet. A firm whose revenue rises when users' discernment falls has a commercial interest in stupidity. That is not a motive we have to impute; it is the arithmetic of the business, set out in detail on Recommender Systems.

This is properly called perversion

Pervert comes from Latin pervertere, literally "turn the wrong way, turn about," and figuratively "to corrupt, subvert" (Online Etymology Dictionary). We use the word in that literal sense and in no other. A tool aimed at the opposite of its stated purpose has been turned the wrong way around. Selling a machine as an aid to human understanding while tuning it to erode human understanding is a perversion in the strict meaning of the term: the thing has been made to face backwards, and the name has been kept.

This matters legally as well as morally. Stupidity is the vice that supports all the others. A population that cannot discern can be sold anything, including the political argument that no one is responsible for what these systems promote. The industry's Section 230 defense depends on a public that will accept "we merely host" as a description of a system that ranks, boosts, targets, and profits by the click — and the more successful the stupidifying, the more plausible that defense sounds. The Supreme Court has not settled the question: in Gonzalez v. Google LLC, No. 21-1333, 598 U.S. 617 (2023), decided May 18, 2023, the Court expressly declined to address the application of §230 and instead vacated and remanded (Cornell LII). The question is still open. We argue it at Section 230.

The species of stupdity

Stupidity as we define it is a genus. Below are its five commercial species — markets in which the seduction of the user is not a byproduct of the product but the product itself. Each has its own page and its own body of law, and on those pages every claim about an identifiable company traces to dated published reporting, a filing, or the company's own statement.

Romance and companionship. Products that simulate affection, attachment, and intimacy on demand. These are hallucination by design: the system is not failing when it professes feeling it does not have, it is performing as specified. We argue that firms shipping them belong to the entertainment and fiction industries, and that selling a counterfeit relationship to a lonely adult or a developing adolescent is the purest form of the transaction these definitions describe.

Obscenity and pornography. The oldest of the vice industries and the template for the rest, and one of the few categories American law still places outside the First Amendment's protection. That page is a history of doctrine — how the state obscenity statutes were displaced, what survives of the governing tests, and where the current age-verification litigation is heading. It describes law, not material.

Nudify. Services that generate non-consensual sexual imagery of real, identifiable people, usually young women and girls. The category is stated once there and not elaborated; that page is about the enforcement gap. Statutes now exist. Victims still cannot reliably get the images taken down, and the distance between the statute and the takedown is where the whole harm lives.

Suicide coaches. Conversational systems accused of coaching users toward self-harm. The question that page poses is a liability question: when a human being does this, the law already knows what to call it, so what changes when the encouragement is generated? It treats doctrine and pending litigation, carries crisis resources, and contains no method detail of any kind.

Assault and fight videos. Recorded violence uploaded for reach, and ranking systems that reward it with exactly the reach it was recorded to obtain. Here the argument is at its simplest: it should not be possible to profit from the documentation of a crime. There is real law on that proposition, and real constitutional limits on it.

Taken together these are not five scandals. They are one business model applied to five appetites. The remedy we seek is neither censorship nor prior restraint but civil liability — that a firm which ranks, boosts and targets is publishing, and that a publisher answers for what it publishes.