Against Folly in the Digital Age

May 2025 

Why even the educated are misled by images, numbers and their own minds—and what to do about it

It is a peculiar—and peculiarly modern—tragedy that the more educated a person is, the more likely they are to be duped by nonsense. Not the crude nonsense of flat-earthers or snake-hand charmers, but the respectable kind: dressed in decimal points, camouflaged in colourful charts, or whispered in the tone of technical authority. Today, the half-informed are not being misled despite their intelligence—but because of it.

This, I would argue, is not merely ironic. It is scandalous. The modern mind, armed with credentials and Wi-Fi, strides into the jungle of public discourse with the confidence of a colonial officer—and just as often ends up in quicksand.

The new tools of obfuscation are not pitchforks and pamphlets, but infographics and algorithms. The deceits of the digital age are laundered through metrics and memes, passed from phone to phone like sacred writ. A bar graph, with a truncated y-axis, does more mischief in a day than all the demagogues of the 20th century managed with megaphones and manifestos.

Enter Garrett Hardin—a man known, if at all, for giving environmentalists a vocabulary and libertarians a headache. But in his lesser-known work, Filters Against Folly, he offered something more enduring: a way to think. Not what to think, mind you, which the educated are already far too eager to do—but how.

Words Are Weapons

Hardin’s first “filter” is literacy. Not the kind that allows you to navigate airport signage or read restaurant menus, but the kind that lets you notice when words are being used to deceive rather than describe. Euphemism, after all, is the Vaseline on the lens of political language. When a nation bombs a village, it is not bombing but delivering ordinance. When a company fires half its staff, it is not firing but restructuring. Orwell would have recognized the trick. So would Goebbels.

Language is not the servant of thought—it is its master. Wittgenstein warned us that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Hardin might have added: the distortions of our language are the distortions of our reason. Every time you hear a word like “non-negotiable” or “sustainable,” ask not what it means—but what it hides.

Numbers: The New Priesthood

Then comes numeracy. In the modern age, to mistrust numbers is to invite derision; to believe them unquestioningly is to invite ruin. The graph has become the holy relic of our time—glowing, minimalist, and statistically vacuous. But as Hardin noted, even perfect arithmetic can be applied to premises that are themselves lunatic.

Consider the Delaney Clause, a regulatory gem which banned any food additive shown to cause cancer in any dose, however microscopic. One molecule of rat-unfriendly compound, and it’s outlawed. That the human body contains carcinogens naturally, or that toxicity is a function of dose, was apparently lost on the policymakers.

We are awash in data but parched for wisdom. The problem is not the decimal point—it is the absence of judgment standing behind it.

And Then What?

The third of Hardin’s filters is the most elusive: ecolacy. Not a pretty word, but a necessary one. It is the mental habit of asking the question that most ruins tidy plans: “And then what?” Every economic policy, every social reform, every Silicon Valley brainstorm—each one is presented as if it exists in a vacuum. But the world is not a set of isolated compartments. It is a system of systems, and every action sends ripples.

The modern mind, schooled in linear models and quarterly projections, is ill-prepared for feedback loops and lag effects. That is why we build apps to boost dopamine, and then wonder why attention spans collapse. Why we incentivize test scores, and are shocked when schools teach only to the test.

Fermi vs Folly

If Hardin’s trilogy forms the skeleton of mental defence, a certain Italian-American physicist supplies the muscle. Enrico Fermi was the kind of mind that makes the word “genius” feel like an insult for lacking imagination. He could estimate the yield of an atomic bomb by watching how far a handful of paper scraps fluttered through the air.

His method—Fermi estimation—is deceptively simple. Break a complex question into parts. Use round numbers. Think in orders of magnitude. Above all, ask: is this even plausible?

When someone claims a billionaire could solve poverty with a tweet and a cheque, the Fermi-trained mind instinctively recoils. Not out of ideology, but because it has done the back-of-the-envelope math. The point is not precision, but sanity.

The Mind Is a Minefield

And still, even this may not be enough. For the final enemy is not propaganda or math or media. It is ourselves. Our splendidly evolved, poorly debugged minds—full of biases, shortcuts, and heuristics that make evolutionary sense but intellectual chaos.

We overweight vivid anecdotes. We anchor on the first number we see. We see patterns where none exist, and ignore them where they do. This is not a failure of intelligence—it is what intelligence looks like, when it is not properly watched.

Behavioural economists—those cross-bred heretics of psychology and finance—have mapped the terrain. The lesson is humbling: error is not an anomaly; it is the rule. The only defence is not to deny your fallibility, but to anticipate it.

The Arrogance of the Educated

This, then, is the real peril of the digital age: not misinformation, but misplaced confidence. It is the hubris of the credentialed class, certain that a PhD is a prophylactic against folly. But as Hardin might have said—and Fermi would have confirmed—ignorance wrapped in complexity is still ignorance.

The challenge is not just to see clearly, but to see that one does not see clearly. To question not only what others claim, but what you yourself believe. To doubt, not out of cynicism, but out of respect—for truth, for reason, and for the astonishing ease with which even the brightest minds can go astray.

So arm yourself—not with more facts, but with better filters. The age of noise has no mercy for the complacent. And the worst victims of folly are not the uninformed, but the overconfident.