Growing Up Anti-Intelligent |
The title sounds like an insult. It isn't.
Anti-intelligence is not stupidity or some sort of cognitive failure. It's the performance of knowing without understanding. It's language severed from memory, context, and even intention. It's what large language models (LLMs) do so well. They produce coherent outputs through pattern-matching rather than comprehension. Where human cognition builds meaning through the struggle of thought, anti-intelligence arrives fully formed.
For adults encountering this now, the adjustment is jarring but manageable. We formed our cognitive architecture in a world of scarcity and friction. We know what it feels like to not know, to sit with confusion, to construct understanding piece by piece. Anti-intelligence is something we use, adapt to, resist, or integrate.
But what happens to minds that form in its presence from the beginning?
Major theories of cognitive development, from Piaget's stages to Vygotsky's scaffolding, align on a shared assumption that children learn by encountering constraints along a developmental path. And there are critical bumps along the way, as........