How Stupidity Forms: Cognitive Loops and Self-Correction

People are not born stupid. At birth, they are simply ignorant, not stupid. Ignorance means that one does not yet know and can still learn. Stupidity more often begins when a person gradually loses the capacity to correct himself.

Education should help us understand the world, distinguish evidence, compare different views, and learn to adjust when we are wrong. But when education trains obedience, fixed positions, and approved answers without cultivating independent judgement and self-correction, it can turn an uninformed person into a rigid one. The problem is not education as such, but forms of education and information environments that teach people to defend conclusions rather than test them.

I have seen an IT professional who takes an absolute rejectionist position on AI. He refuses to use it and refuses to recognise any practical value in it. There is nothing wrong with criticising a technology. AI has genuine limitations, risks, and exaggerated claims around it. The real question is whether someone still allows opposing views to enter his thinking and his public discussion.

At first, people offered different views under his videos, and he argued with them. Later, the comments were almost entirely praise and agreement. An outsider cannot know whether dissenting comments were deleted or blocked, but the visible outcome is that only one kind of response remains. However extreme his claims become, the replies are variations of “You are absolutely right” and “At last someone dares to tell the truth.”

That is how a self-enclosed loop forms. Without rebuttal, there is little opportunity to recalibrate a judgement; every approving response then encourages the same direction of travel. Praise does not necessarily make a person clearer-minded. It can also harden an existing prejudice. Professional experience does not automatically produce intellectual openness. Someone may be knowledgeable and experienced, yet still build an elaborate self-justifying system by excluding disagreement and retaining only supportive voices.

This pattern is not limited to debates about technology. Someone may post a video of making dumplings and drinking red wine. There is nothing wrong with that. Others may find the pairing unusual, or say that they are more accustomed to eating dumplings with vinegar. These are ordinary reactions to material put into public view. Discussion in a public space should normally address the matter at hand. A different view about a video, an action, or an expression is not automatically a personal judgement, let alone a personal attack.

The situation changes when a person turns a comment on a specific matter into a judgement on his person, and then rejects it outright by saying, “You do not know my past.” Everyone has a history and private boundaries they need not explain to strangers. But publishing something publicly does not make every differing response an insult to one’s character. Public expression can retain private boundaries while still remaining open to ordinary discussion of what has actually been presented.

This way of avoiding public discussion is often an unintentional psychological defence mechanism. It automatically reads a concrete objection as an attack, then excludes it by appealing to personal history. In the short term, that may protect self-esteem and avoid discomfort. In the long term, it cuts off external feedback and creates a loop that is difficult to correct from within. What is being protected is no longer merely a personal boundary, but an existing judgement that is not allowed to be tested.

As adults live longer within established patterns, their thinking gradually settles and forms many stable psychological and cognitive loops. A loop is not inherently bad. Some are healthy and open. A person forms judgements from experience but remains willing to face new facts, different experiences, and necessary criticism. External feedback helps him retain what works and revise what does not. Such loops make a person more mature and give his judgements a better chance of staying close to reality.

Other loops are negative and destructive. They treat disagreement as misunderstanding, malice, or attack, while treating praise and agreement as proof of correctness. A person becomes increasingly closed while feeling increasingly good about himself—more certain that he is lucid, right, perhaps even one of the few who truly sees what is going on. The issue is not whether one has a position. It is whether that position still has an opening through which reality and other people can correct it.

Language ability has a practical bearing on this. Speaking several languages does not guarantee better judgement, and a monolingual person may be clearer-minded than many multilingual people. But that does not mean there is no difference. Someone who can use several languages usually has more opportunities to encounter different sources, cultural backgrounds, and explanatory frameworks. The same event can be described, debated, and tested differently across different linguistic worlds.

More information does not automatically produce the right conclusion, but it creates more opportunities to compare views, notice blind spots, and revise one’s judgement. This is why someone who relies on one language and one information environment should be especially willing to hear different views from people who can access a wider range of material. They may not be right, but they may have encountered evidence, experience, or interpretations that one has not. The irrational response is not simply being unable to read another language; it is treating all inaccessible information as irrelevant, or assuming that those with access to more information must therefore be more limited.

There is a simple way to resist destructive loops: deliberately encounter some information one does not like, and give serious attention to opinions one is instinctively reluctant to accept. This does not mean picking fights with oneself, surrendering one’s position, or accepting every criticism. It means leaving an opening in one’s judgement rather than sealing the cognitive loop completely.

Another way to put it is that our views, judgements, and habits need to meet a certain degree of friction. They should not always travel with the wind. They should sometimes face reality, unfamiliar situations, and the test of different experiences and opinions. The friction should not be so severe that it produces pointless self-denial, but it should not disappear altogether. It should bring a little discomfort, perhaps even a little pain—a healthy resistance. That resistance keeps thought from becoming rigid and allows established judgements to remain alive and adjustable.

Views that meet no friction easily become self-repetition. A person who is confirmed only by agreement, familiarity, and comfort may not be becoming more correct. He may simply be becoming harder to correct.

Self-knowledge does not mean continually doubting or negating oneself. It means recognising that there may be things one cannot yet see, and therefore leaving an entrance for correction. Stupidity is not an intellectual deficiency. It is a cognitive condition in which a person keeps shutting down feedback, refusing correction, and ultimately trapping himself in an echo chamber. A person truly begins to become stupid not when he says something wrong, but when, from a certain point on, no one can any longer tell him effectively that he is wrong.