A Stupid Achievement

Apr 10 2025 The New York Times

Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime

A few quoted from the piece, emphasis is mine.

The percentage of fourth graders who score below basic in reading skills on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests is the highest it has been in 20 years.

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Andreas Schleicher, the head of education and skills at the O.E.C.D., told The Financial Times, “Thirty percent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child.” He continued, “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”

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What happens when people lose the ability to reason or render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Donald Trump’s tariff policy. I’ve covered a lot of policies over the decades, some of which I supported and some of which I opposed. But I have never seen a policy as stupid as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side — from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified.

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Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence.