I’ve always known this, but people just cannot think credibly. Being able to think clearly and assess data, information and the world as it actually coheres is so rare that I can call to mind — maybe — five people in the entire world (of living, public-ish figures) who do this routinely.

I don’t even agree with all of them. Or even most of them most of the time. But they are thinking. Which is so incredibly rare that in a world of eight billion people that only five make the cut. Fuck, that’s grim.

A great example of this lack of cognitive capability is AI. Tons of people write about it. Loads of people have opinions. Few of them understand it or use it. Most have no clue other than (most of them) hate it. Here’s where the cognitive breakage occurs. To some extent the inverse is true of the cheerleaders but among the AI-haters, they are not able to separate these four very-much-disparate contentions:

1) A lot of the AI companies are scummy.

2) I personally hate AI.

3) AI is often misused.

4) And that in many contexts and for many use cases, AI works incredibly well and is improving rapidly all the time.

How, just how, can people not separate these drastically different postulates? And truly, I am not here to defend AI. It’s here and it’s not going anywhere. My aim is to attempt to reason — as much as is possible — about how very poorly nearly all of humanity cogitates. They just cannot do it. It is absolutely beyond them. High IQ, low IQ. It doesn’t matter. They cannot think in any real sense.

By the way, my list of the five living people who can actually, credibly think:

• Zeynep Tufecki
• Tyler Cowen
• Nancy Cartwright
• Murray Shanahan
• Camille Paglia