Not Understanding Science doesn't make you Dumb

28 Aug, 2026

A lot of people are rude and dismissive to people who have scientific misconceptions. Often, they belittle people who don't understand how, say, seasons work. They say this makes a person unusually stupid.

This seems wrong to me, both on a descriptive and moral level. Ethically, people are rarely blameworthy for being stupid, so they should not be made to feel bad about it. But, equally, not understanding science does not make you stupid. Intelligence is only tangentially related to how learned you are. Many intelligent people are too busy to learn about science. Or perhaps they live in a place where myths abound and knowledge is hard to come by — Aristotle was a genuis, but he still thought the Sun orbited the Earth. In our age of smartphones and AI chatbots, this is less true than it used to be. But, through no fault of their own, many people still get poor educations and inhabit social worlds where learning is not valued.

This attitude also betrays a certain niaveity about how much one knows. Reality has surprising degree of detail, and knowing things is hard. Even if you're very well - educated, you'll still be profoundly ignorant about most things. I am most of the way done with a hard STEM degree, I'll probably go to grad school after that. But, yesterday, I watched the lunar eclipse. And it occurred to me that I didn't know why they appeared ruddy rather than just dark.¹ Unless it's practically relevant, this is the case with most things. Do you know why the seafloor spreads? Do you know, in detail, how plastics are made? Do you know why raw acorns are toxic? Chemically speaking, do you know why soap works? Do you know why wine bottles are shaped the way they are? Do you know why antibiotics work? Do you know, in detail, how the internet works?

Perhaps you know one or two of these things, especially if they're relevant to your career or something you're passionate about. But I doubt you know all of them. All of us are ignorant. There is too much to learn and life is too short to learn it. This is a sad fact about the human condition. No amount of native intelligence can overcome it.