Look it up when you get home.

E.B. White once said that "No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing." I take that advice very seriously, and try to apply it to all aspects of communication and interaction. However, I feel that the predominant trend in our society is to do the exact opposite. Our schools, entertainment, literature, even our software, are all designed to cater to the lowest common denominator. This cultural attitude inevitably results in failure. The popular assumption that people are stupid is largely to blame for the New York State Regents math curriculum, the inconceivably terrible Dan Brown novels, Mark Russell, and the Windows Operating System.

My favorite American entertainer is Tom Lehrer. In the intro to his song "We Will All Go Together When We Go," after getting an unusually subdued laugh to a joke about a necrophiliac, he tells his audience, "the rest of you can look it up when you get home." It is precisely that intelligent mind-set (a characteristic feature of all of Mr. Lehrer's material, by the way) that makes him so much more enjoyable than any comedian performing today. Essentially, he is refusing to dumb down his jokes for those who don't get them. He is smart, and if you aren't, too bad for you, but he won't insult you by assuming that you aren't capable of comprehending a sophisticated joke at the eighth grade reading level. That's respect for the audience, you see, and I appreciate that very much.

Take Mark Russell, for example - when he peddles those banal jokes over and over again, he is basically saying "you people are too dumb to realize that this is pure crap." Similarly, I can only imagine that Dan Brown would publish the same (bad) book under four different titles because he assumes that the public is too dim to realize what is going on.

You know, I think that is just mean.

This attitude is most dangerous when evidenced in the school system. My friend (and a 30 year veteran of the NYC public school system) accurately commented on an earlier post when he wrote: "Kids are not stupid, they are very smart. There is no need to simplify or dumb down the material, because they appreciate and enjoy the complex." But many teachers don't realize that their students are smart enough to understand number theory and combinatorics, so they waste many months teaching fractions! Or they assume that kids can't grasp the complicated truth about American history, so they consistently propagate mediocrity with oversimplifications and misinformation.

However, nowhere is the assumption that people are stupid more apparent than in the slow to boot, quick to crash suite of products that Microsoft executives work so hard to promote. Why else would they presume that people wouldn't be able to tell that Windows Vista is the same broken NT kernel that they've been selling for years? Why would they prefer to market seemingly idiot-proof (but in reality, productivity-proof) dancing paperclip "features" instead of powerful command line utilities? Why would they continue development of IE instead of dropping out of the browser market and openly admitting the superiority of Firefox? Those of you who write and troll on Usenet, will surely remember the Strong Lusethropic Principle, which states that: "The more idiot-proof the software, the more it encourages the user to be careless and not think. Therefore, idiot-proof software actually encourages, contributes, and actually causes users to be stupid."

If you treat people like idiots, as you obviously do when you try to tell them boring jokes or sell them an inherently bad operating system, not only do you insult them, but you are also contributing to the overall decline of literacy and competency in this country. So, be nice to your users, students, readers, audience, and don't be distrustful of their intelligence.

I would like to note that this line of thought has primarily been motivated by Edward Tufte's brilliant book, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." And also, by all the aggravating absurdity that I am constantly exposed to simply by virtue of being awake.