About Love Island

An interesting piece about the dimness of contestants on Love Island, although the closing paragraph raises rather more questions than it answers:

All reality TV is a stage, and the men and women upon it are mere players. It is impossible to know whether the Love Island contestants know where Barcelona and Rome are, but are performing ignorance for the amusement of viewers, or if they really don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Are you not entertained?

Making yourself look stupid in order to be liked isn’t entirely a new idea, and in the current mood of anti-expert populism it almost certainly happens in circles other than reality TV; idiocy has become weaponised. But back to the adventures of the orange people in Majorca: couldn’t we have maybe one show per series where they all have to pretend to be cleverer than they are? Although, if we accept the findings of Messrs Dunning and Kruger, the main problem is that they probably don’t know how clever they are (or aren’t).

PS: Earlier vaguely relevant musings on the wondrous science of agnotology.