Fads are a part of the human experience. Stupidity is part of the human experience. Stupid fads are what happens when these two aspects of the human experience meet and have offspring.

Not everything that is a fad is stupid. In technology, every new thing that is useful goes through a Fad Phase before people stop misapplying it and the utilization of that technology goes down to the plateau of productivity. It can be hard to tell if the useful thing is a misapplication of a fad or not. The trick is to develop a sense of taste with respect to people who use the fad. Smart people will try a fad because they have a specific, well-defined problem they want to solve, with some reason to think the fad will solve it. Stupid people tend to go all in on fads because they’re cargo-cultists or pursue Resume Driven Design.

Fortunately, there is one indication that I think can tell you if a fad is a Stupid Fad: Stupid fads have stupid names. A stupid fad is only popular amongst stupid people, so they end up giving it a stupid name because they’re too stupid to come up with a better one.

Today’s stupid technology fad: “Vibe Coding” - more properly titled “Not thinking while a machine does you work for you, poorly.”

A now-discredited stupid fad from economics: “Modern Monetary Theory” - where nothing about it was modern, it ignored everything we know about money, and completely lacked theory.

Two points make a line, so this is probably a bad heuristic. But I wanted an excuse to post something, and here it is. I’ll see if it holds up now that I’ve invented it.