A few years ago I attended a conference on machine learning. There was a connection due to the company I worked for at that time so we got a few free tickets. The conference itself is not really the point, though. Instead, I want to talk about a most curious side event that perfectly illustrates why we ended up in clown world. The organizers of this conference had launched an outreach program and approached some of the local schools, presumably those with a focus on natural sciences. They were invited to present use cases of artificial intelligence. I was not quite sure what to expect and neither was probably anybody else.

Three groups of students went up on stage. We learned that these were the finalists. Their projects were all pretty nonsensical, revealing that they did not really know what was going on. There was also a group that was led by a girl, a little girl boss, to be more exact. She pompously explained her revolutionary idea for using artificial intelligence to improve the world. It was based on training an AI on images of water sources in the African wilderness. It was pretty racist, which nobody seemed to have picked up on. She showed us pictures of a few waterholes in the desert, inquisitively asking how we could know that the water was safe for human consumption. With her hypothesized app, African bushmen were supposed to take pictures of waterholes and let the AI tell them whether it is safe to drink the water in front of them. I had hard time not laughing out loud when I heard this.

I was not surprised that this girl and her group won the competition. After all, the other groups were purely male and we cannot support teenage boys in the current year. Some academic on stage waxed lyrical about how great her app idea was and how much it pleased him to see that there was so much interest in artificial intelligence in today’s youth. Afterwards, there was a lame Q&A session in which this girl got the chance to talk about how satisfying it was for her to combine her interest in artificial intelligence with her never-ending worries about climate change. The next wars will be fought about water, we learned.

Her idea was obviously utterly stupid. While you can certainly train an AI to determine whether water looks clean or not, you cannot, based on visual inspection, determine whether water is safe to drink. You need to have slept through basically the entirety of your Physics and Chemistry lessons to think the opposite. In fact, you cannot even determine if some clear liquid is water, which is why there is the basic precaution in laboratory environments, and also households, to not leave any liquid unlabelled. What if you have the great idea to store some leftover white vinegar in a plastic water bottle, forget about this and later on accidentally take a sip? This may sound far-fetched, but this is precisely how accidents happen. Thus, I have zero tolerance for this behavior in my private life. (I had an argument with my father in law on this very issue, which my wife had to mediate.)

I am not at all against encouraging girls to study a technical subject. Quite the opposite. It would be a positive for society if girls exercised their mind by studying a serious subject. However, praising them for idiotic ideas is highly counterproductive for society. This girl most certainly walked away smugly, thinking how smart she is when in reality her idea was utterly absurd. At some point, however, reality will push back on such nonsense. Granted, given the right circumstances such as peak clown world, people can coast for years, for instance by making up research on man-made climate change. Most people, however, are not so lucky. There is a physical reality and also an economic reality, and both cannot indefinitely be pushed back.

I recall similar case of a girl being encouraged in her delusions. A guy I knew wanted to boast about his girlfriend and how smart she was because she had just enrolled in a degree in “nano science”. The guy was in his late 20s, so I first complimented him on dating an 18-year old as I did not think he had it in him. He quickly corrected me. As it emerged, his super-smart girlfriend graduated from high school two years late and had dropped out of some b.s. bachelor’s program. After reading about nano technology she got “really excited” about it and enrolled. I could not help but dryly state that there was no way she was going to make it, which seems to have upset this guy. The reason she could enroll was that there were no entrance requirements apart from having a high-school diploma. The first one or two years consist of foundational courses in mathematics and physics anyway, and about 50% of students normally already quit during the first semester. This woman was completely ill-prepared for this degree program. Nonetheless, her boyfriend, friends, and family all encouraged her to, presumably, follow her dream and become a kick-ass nano scientist. It boggles the mind. She did not waste a lot of time as she got washed out within a few weeks. The next time I ran into that guy, he no longer told me tall tales about his highly-intelligent girlfriend.

For giggles, I just typed “femtrepreneur” (= female + entrepreneur) into Google, my least favorite search engine. To my great amusement, this is a term that seems to be quite frequently used. Surely, many governments love to fund “femptrepreneurs” with taxpayer money. In the United States, this grift lasted for easily half a century, but now Elon Musk is cleaning house. For any product to succeed there needs to be clear demand, which is normally based on solving a problem. In the case of supporting girls so that they feel good about their stupid ideas, it is not clear what the value is supposed to be. The likely outcome is that they develop a completely exaggerated view of themselves. I wonder if this dynamic was also behind the ascension of Elizabeth Holmes, the purported second coming of Steve Jobs, into the pantheon of Silicon Valley, and her subsequent downfall which led to her getting locked up for over a decade.

In clown world, there is a strong tendency to avoid hard truths. Similarly, we avoid competition. Standards get lowered across the board so that stupid children no longer feel stupid. How can they be stupid if they get A’s in every subject? Of course, just because you hand out A’s like candy you are not turning children into hard workers, let alone geniuses. The opposite is the case, i.e. we hamstring the most gifted children as we no longer allow them to excel. For society, this is disastrous and we see the effect all around us. Had we kept standards high, clown world could not have become the dominant force in society. It may be unpleasant to tell someone that he or she is perhaps not quite as smart as they think but in the long run it is not only better for society, but also for these people.