Infinite Stupidity

This really cool article isn't really about stupidity - here is the brief:

A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.

Well worth reading the entire thing. One interesting point he makes about innovators -- back in the days when we were organized by tribe, we needed a couple innovators per tribe, so 2-3 for 150 people or so and the rest of the people could copy the good ideas of the innovators. Nowadays, since our societies are so much larger and better connected, we really only need 2-3 innovators per 100 million in order to survive and get by because information can be shared so quickly and easily. This rewards smart copying rather than doing the hard work of actual innovation.