Wit & Attitude Quote by Neal Stephenson

Stephenson’s jab lands because it flips the polite hierarchy we’re trained to accept: education as moral proof of intelligence. He grants the obvious distinction - educated people do, in fact, “know more facts” - then yanks away the prestige we attach to that advantage. The line is built like a trapdoor. You nod at the first sentence, then drop into the second, where “stupid or intelligent” becomes a separate axis entirely.

The subtext is less anti-school than anti-credential. Stephenson is targeting a cultural moment in which expertise gets mistaken for judgment and information abundance gets mistaken for wisdom. In a world where facts are searchable, the real scarcity is interpretive skill: knowing which facts matter, how they connect, when they’re being misused, and whether your mental model survives contact with reality. “Educated” can mean trained to perform competence, to speak fluently inside an institution’s incentives, to win arguments in the approved dialect. None of that guarantees clarity, curiosity, or the ability to update beliefs.

There’s also a quiet warning for the self-satisfied reader. If you’re educated, you’re the implied target; Stephenson refuses to let you cash your diploma as a personality trait. If you’re “ignorant,” the line offers no romantic consolation either. Facts are still facts - they do change what you can do. His point is sharper: stupidity isn’t a lack of data, it’s a failure of thinking. Intelligence is not storage; it’s motion.