The five universal laws of human stupidity | Hacker News Reader

The five universal laws of human stupidity

qz.com

52 pointsawl13010 comments

http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidit...

The article doesn't have much substance besides long quotes from the original, and the original reads better.

Actually even the given article is not really-really the "original" (the illustrations by Donnelly were added for the publication in Whole Earth Review (Spring 1987), and the article misses a few paragraphs, the small preface by "Mad Millers" and the tiny, but useful "Appendix") the actual book, "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity", written in the early '70's was originally published in 1976 in a very limited number of copies (for friends and colleagues only) and it was only published (in Italian as "Allegro ma non troppo" in 1988) and the original English one in 2011 (the Author M.Cipola died in 2000).

The 2011 "original" version is on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/The_Basic_Laws_of_Human_Stupidit...

Law 2 is specially right. Stupid appears in every segment of society. And stupid never knows they are stupid.

I would say one can be a genius in one part but totally clueless in another. IQ doesn't guarantee you a free ride.

If we want to take the original article seriously. Which it has merit on many issues even if written with humor.

Then lets talk science.

"And stupid never knows they are stupid."

Stupid people do know they are stupid, and this meme really is in itself stupid.

What stupid people can't accurately gauge is their level of stupidity. This is the actual science. But they do know they are stupid and below average on things.

The concept stupid is the same percent in all segments of society is also ridiculous. So from a risk management point of view saying "Stupid appears in every segment of society." is a bad point. It has to be managed differently in different locations.

And IQ does give you free ride, if you increased your IQ (via magic) you would get benefits in life for free without extra work.

Law 2 is actually: "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person" which is different.

>I would say one can be a genius in one part but totally clueless in another. IQ doesn't guarantee you a free ride.

This is the cause behind so many quacks and pseudoscientists.

For example, most of the 'scientists' that creationists like to say agree with their ideas just coincidentally happen to have their degrees in subjects other than biology:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lists_of_creationist_scientists...

Also, a lot of others that end up going from a non medicine related field to peddling questionable cancer 'cures' and homeopathy.

You can add meteorologist to the list of scientists that think they understand Global climate change.

On a related topic, competence, I have come to realise over time that I and many people I know have a bias towards people in professions they don't know much about, believing that most of them are good at their jobs. Reality is that as the case with general population, majority are incompetent, careless, and well, downright stupid. Be it doctors with a decade long training/education, plumbers, lawyers, programmers, etc.

Surgeon's law[0] applies to people too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

"We can do nothing about the stupid." Sure we can -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_(nerve_agent)

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