From the article <a href="https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/against-intelligence" source="Hinternet" author="Justin E.H. Smith">Against Intelligence</a>, <bq>Our default <b>folk-theory</b> of the sky and its objects, as a vestige of the closed world cosmology, is one in which <b>distances between star systems is not significantly different from those between the planets of our own system.</b></bq> And even <i>those</i> distances we grossly underestimate. The planets are light minutes if not light hours apart.<fn> Months and years of even the most optimistic feasible journey time. But this lack suffuses most of how most humans---most animals---experience the world: in bewildered miscomprehension of the most basic mechanisms affecting our lives. Most of us don't know any more about how our world works---what supports us and what we are breaking---than the so-called brute animals. At the simplest level, we don't know how the things that we've become dependent on work, on any level. Cars? Phones? Constructions? Transportation? Any technology? We haven't the foggiest idea how anything works---not even how it <i>might</i> work. We are woefully underequipped to reason about the world. Because we're not even aware of an alternative explanation, we don't even notice that we've actually made a <i>choice</i> to believe in our fantasies of how the world works---with each of us at the smack-dab center, in the starring role---with a religious fervor that we would never, ever lend to science or logic or even, heaven forbid, morality or ethics. We don't know how to deal with pandemics, we don't have a clue how to address climate change. We will go down without a fight, a look of uncomprehending ignorance on our dumb faces as the curtain goes down and the house lights come on.