Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing
psyche.co
psyche.co
WWI did have moments of extreme stupidity. But the real problem was that, for the first time since castles vs. troops without cannon, defense was stronger than offense. Machine guns, barbed wire, and trenches could resist most attacks. When that wasn't enough, both sides had plenty of railroad capacity and could move reserves around fast enough that no breakthrough got very far. There was much logistic cleverness behind that. It worked well.
When defense is stronger than offense, wars stall. Which is what happened in WWI. Nobody could force a decision. Until tanks and aircraft entered the battlefield.
We have that today. Guerilla warfare can go on for decades. Neither side can force a decision. If the guerilla side gets ahead, they control entire areas, which means they have vulnerable centers that can be attacked. If the other side gets ahead, the guerillas hide in the population until the heat is off. "A guerrilla swims among the people like a fish swims in the sea." - Mao. Neither side can force a decision, although one side may eventually wear down the other over a long period.
Modern militaries realize that their tactical doctrine may not work, but they're also aware that new, proposed doctrine may be worse. There have been societies that couldn't even think about that problem. Many, from the Aztecs to the Zulus, are extinct.
kwaZulu remains part of the Republic of South Africa, despite recent troubles from Zuma/Zulu loyalists.
In the seminal book "On War" which was published in 1832 and is still required reading in many military academies, Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz explicitly says that defense is stronger than offense.
Maybe this intensified in WWI
If you consider "defense" as an organization attempting to provide a service securely, and "offense" as all the security threats they are exposed to, it seems hard to argue that the defensive side has any sort of advantage over all of the attackers.
Let's say we have fortifications. People are needed to man them. This is understood by everyone. Entry points are checked, etc.
Compare with 'cyber' systems. How many people are adding features, working on bugs and the like, versus how many are even looking into security vulnerabilities?
Translating to the physical domain, it would be as if we were building a fort, then moving almost everyone to build extensions or new forts, with a handful responsible for the security of all fortresses - and the paths in between them! In the dark.
The fact that most systems are not immediately "owned" speaks volumes on how difficult this is to accomplish. Barring zero days, the main way one gets compromised is by making mistakes (not patching, leaving systems unsecured, etc). That is, there's a door that's open and unguarded...
If, all else being equal, it takes a force of 1500 attackers to overwhelm 1000 defenders, defense is still stronger than offense, but you can still expect to be able to make progress relatively easily.
If, on the other hand, it takes 5000 attackers to overwhelm 1000 defenders, suddenly you have to make very different kinds of calculations about what is worth the cost, and what is even strategically feasible to take without destroying your army's ability to fight.
Force ratio doesn't have to be strictly numerical, though. Offense can have better weapons, rely on element of surprise, and we also like to attack during really bad weather because it sucks a lot more to be dug in during a rainstorm than to be on the move. There's also some advantage in indirect fire in that it's easier for artillery to hit a stationary target than a moving one, so provided your artillery itself is mobile enough to survive counterbattery strikes, that goes to the offense. Unless the defense is so well dug in that artillery can't even affect it. So it depends on a lot of things.
But in general, defense always has the advantage. They get to choose where to fight, they can prepare their positions, they don't need to expose themselves.
I guess it's reversed in cyberwarfare if you want to think of it that way, but it's really not analogous. It's never been all that difficult to sneak a small surgical force inside an enemy perimeter, but you can't take and hold land that way, which is what attack versus defense force ratios are thinking of. This is more of a law enforcement thing, which has always relied on either having more cops than criminals or extremely harsh punishments. The issue here is we can't enforce the law against foreign actors if the host nation won't help. When actual Americans have been caught breaking into American computer systems, they've totally had the book thrown at them and I think that really has deterred domestically launched cyberattacks. It's not like the NSA can't find you, but if the only way to actually stop you is to send in Seal Team Six, that isn't worth starting a real war over.
I'm curious about the "they get to choose where to fight" question, actually.
I can see where this would apply on a tactical scale, like if I'm preparing an ambush. But on an operational scale, doesn't the attacker choose where and when to fight?
Strategically, there is a lot of value in the attack because you can choose the time and place of fighting to your advantage. This didn't pan out on the Western Front of WWI for a variety of reasons.
Huh? Castles couldn't beat troops without cannon. If you got besieged, your options were to be relieved by an external army, surrender, or lose.
That's a modern-transportation perspective. Unless the siege happens to be on a waterway and you supply that way.
Land-based logistics for pre-modern armies was _hard_. The standard solution was to keep the army on the move and forage as you went, so you kept stealing food from new peasants, but that's not an option for an army laying a siege. On the other hand, if the castle/town knew a siege was coming they would move things like livestock from the surrounding countryside inside the walls, and the grain stores were likely _already_ inside the walls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Nuremberg explicitly mentions supply as a problem for the besieging army in that case, and that's an early-modern army, not premodern. http://hundredyearswar.com/Books/History/Sieges.htm also says "the siege was often lifted because the besieging commander ran out of food to feed or money to pay his troops".
In practice, what this meant is that you would not even start a siege unless you had some idea that you could ensure supply, which was the common situation.
The resilience that suddenly was there in WW1, was that there were so many people you could throw into the fire, suddenly.
The Black Death killed an estimated 40-50% of Europeans between 1347 and 1351, but the survivors were not doomed. In fact, living standards increased as the amount of agricultural land per person increased.
The Black Death killed 40-50% of the population indiscriminately. Wars killed able-bodied men in their prime almost exclusively—removing a huge chunk of those best able to bring in the harvest (many able-bodied women can help, of course, but some percentage of those are pregnant or caring for babies for much of the day), without removing a proportional chunk of those who cannot contribute as much but still need to eat.
Definitely not true and increasingly not. Civilians, especially old and vulnerable die due to violence of soldiers, general violence, lack of food, medicine, having to move without support and so on. Armies extract very much needed resources and destabilize places.
Plus, civilians are often targets - WWII notoriously killed more civilians then soldiers.
Being soldier of front line is massive risk factor. But they are not exclusively victims, as non soldiers people die due to their activity everywhere they go.
And sure, wars could target civilians, and sometimes did. But what you can be guaranteed of in a war is that soldiers will die.
They very often do. It is not exceptional. In pretty much all wars, civilians die. Cities, villages, farms get attacked and destroyed along people in them. War where civilians don't die would be an exception.
Also, wars happen where people live.
> I was referring to wars prior to WWII
In those, civilians died too, cities/villages were attacked for fun and profit and all that.
In addition, prior wold wars, armies lived off the land. Meaning taking food off whoever happened to live there, by force if necessary. Meaning, additional deaths off lack of food.
That sounds like a factor in determining how long an attacker can sustain attacks, but the underlying hypothesis is that defense far outweighed the ability to sustain attacks.
To quote the OP:
> "But the real problem was that, for the first time since castles vs. troops without cannon, defense was stronger than offense."
Viral warfare is an absolutely stupid idea. It’s almost assured that the weapon would escape containment and find its way into the population, and as we’ve seen vaccines are of limited benefit if enough people won’t take them.
I really do suspect that if, for example, some basement biohacker terrorist decided to release an engineered bird flu with high fatality, once having staged their distribution mechanism, they wouldn’t be able to arrange for the other countries to contain it simply by providing input information about what was about to occur.
It’s true that they would be small incidents, but essentially if you can disseminate the knowledge widely enough, and the effects are horrific enough, probably you would have de facto containment.
I have dreaded the scenario since my 20s, and that was a long time ago, and the scenario is many, many times easier than it was at the time.
Although if you were to go in that direction COVID-19 would be a minor inconvenience when it comes to warfare so I'm not too sure what you're aiming at there. The Spanish "used" diseases that were a heck of a lot more severe.
(And it should go without saying, but the concept of biological warfare is so abhorrent that it should never be considered as an option.)
Did the Taliban lock down? Of course not.
So we've done this experiment and you're simply wrong.
The original SARS and MERS were too deadly to spread widely. In order for the attack to work, you don't need a disease which is lethal. All you need is a disease which makes your enemy ill enough to attack their infra, while you're immune (e.g. via full vaccination, or because of group immunity from antibodies).
Right now, Israel is practically immune to COVID (and was the quickest to get vaccinated), while their surrounding regions are not. This could give them an advantage in warfare, should they decide to initiate such (legit or via proxy). Which, incidentally, is also why is was clever of Israel to pay large sums of money for the vaccines.
For one thing, the initial wave of smallpox wasn't an attack, it was just an ordinary infection. Incredibly deadly but it wasn't deliberately introduced.
For another, comparing smallpox with covid is so thick-headed that I'm not interested in discussing things with you anymore.
Irrelevant.
They would be full of grief and anger at losing some of their grandparents, but that won't affect their ability to fight and would be likely to motivate them to continue.
Smallpox had up to 90% mortality in Native American populations, across all demographics. Fair to say it was a different beast.
This dynamic crops up pretty often in historic wars, in which it's less the technology that determines the result but how well the humans are trained. The Civil War in the US was also a slog because of the poor level of training among both enlisted and officers. There was a tendency among poorly trained or untrained volunteers to 'go to ground' to hide from gunfire. Neither infantry nor cavalry really learned how to charge properly because of deficiencies in training, which made the battles go on for a lot longer than they would have otherwise.
It was a similar situation with WWI. It is very, very complicated to coordinate artillery and infantry and to properly plan a successful penetration through fixed defenses. This came to be more or less a solved problem by Germany under Ludendorff's new doctrine.
A lot of the breezy summaries about WWI about it being static also only apply to the western front, because there was lots of successful maneuver warfare in the east. That's why Ludendorff got the job to try to end the war in the west after his success against Russia.
We see this every day with the technology industry: often we have a technology that works well years before we can get people to use it properly or to make it user-friendly enough for everyone to understand readily. Coordinating artillery with infantry movements required lots of work in math/statistics and drilling plus lots of data collection to make the plans and timetables realistic.
This sounds like what Iain Banks referred to as an OCP - an Outside Context Problem [0].
As TFA describes:
"Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes."
I suspect the cautious thinkers are always alert, to the point of being hyper-sensitive, to this risk - manifesting in imposter syndrome through excessively cautious, highly qualified caveats around their messages, etc.
We circle back towards a generic DK effect, while introspection leads to further introspection.
off-topic
I agree fully that a "modern" military will always win against one that depends on "old" doctrines exclusively. I have interesting tales of both English and Zulu officers on how the war proceeded, how the Zulu court knew their fate and had come to choose death, and the English officers who did not want war to begin with.
Most military strategists understood before the war broke out how important recent tech developments (e.g. machine guns, improved artillery, etc) were in the defense. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, most military thinkers felt that it was best to bypass defensive fortifications. They understood that charging trenches and machine guns would lead to horrendous casualties. They wanted to fight a war of maneuver to counter strong static defenses. This was essentially a no-brainer.
What they did not foresee was 1) how rapidly ad-hoc fortifications (i.e. trench lines) could be extended; and 2) the massive amount of ammunition expenditure by artillery. That part is critical... because it means that advances had to slow down to account for the logistics train. Which meant that fortifications couldn't be as easily bypassed... which meant trenches could be extended further...
And thus, quite rapidly, the entire western front was covered in trenches/fortifications. At that point, it all becomes political. The governments want a win. At any cost. And orders are orders. When you can't go around, there's not much you can do but charge forward (after an huge artillery barrage, of course... which leads to more logistical headaches)
In short, the military leadership in ww1 wasn't any more "stupid" than usual. They were simply stuck between a rock and hard place.
They may have well known how many lives it would cost and did not care.
There was no way that either side was going to budge when that was the status quo. When the Hundred Days offensive kicked off, and Germany was being pushed back on the Western Front, and with their home front on the brink of collapse due to blockade-induced starvation, they did indeed initiate peace talks.
From the planning of the former chief of staff of the german army 1905:
[Along the entire line, the corps] will move on the enemy from position to position as in a siege, advancing by day or night, digging in, advancing again, digging in, etc. They will use all the instruments of modern technology to shake the enemy’s confidence behind his lines. The attack must never be permitted to come to a standstill, as in the East Asian war.
come to a standstill = trench warfare; The reason he emphasizes that the attack must come not to a standstill is the dramatically larger armies employed in a future european war make massive fronts of trench lines inevitable. There are multiple commentaries that make exactly this point.
Once the germans failed at the seine the military reported to the political leadership that the war was lost precisely for this reason.
>> The governments want a win. At any cost.
Well, germany believed it had excellent winning odds. But if a compromise treaty was offered to germany by the entente it almost certainly would have been accepted; that was actually the expectation of many german officers. The problem for the entente was that the reason the germans were in favor of a compromise peace was they believed a war would break out again a few years later that they would be in a dramatically stronger position to fight. Russia, for one, was ruined by the summer of 1915. Germany would have benefited a lot more from any temporary peace economically because they would have access to world trade again. Germany's allies would have come out a lot better as well.
Basically, any peace offer by france or britain would have been equivalent to a german victory.
I'm not sure trying to improvise a way through a novel kind of conflict counts as stupid so much as untrained. Maybe there was someone in WWI saying "This is obviously wrong and won't work - we should do this other thing instead."
Maybe there wasn't. At this distance it's hard to tell.
We tend to call someone stupid when the quality of the predictions is worse than some population median, and the self-harm seems both unsurprising and trivially avoidable.
Stupidity is only loosely related to IQ. Low IQ people don't have the horsepower to make good models, so they're often blindsided by challenges. But high IQ people can have bad beliefs and poor models. Without self-correction and a reality-testing loop they're just as likely to believe wrong and dangerous things.
One of the most toxic things that happens in politics is re-framing a problem away from rational competence towards emotive and narrative non-logic. If you can succeed in this, you can make people stupid. Emotion and narrative, especially ego-gratifying and tribal narratives, are reliably unrealistic models that lead to poor predictions.
In politics emotional and even irrational narratives are a centerpiece of how effective leaders lead.
In virtually all sufficiently complicated human affairs there is NEVER enough facts and visibility at hand to make objective decisions. Moreover, now more than ever, influencers and thought leaders can easily cherry-pick whatever facts rhyme with their narrative and sound completely rational and "facts-based" to those who lack (or have been conditioned to lack) critical thinking skills and experience.
All effective leaders, regardless of whether they're good or evil, democratic or autocratic make decisions and motivate people by appealing to emotion, history, cultural background. "Logic and rationality" of course is necessary for success but it's only one component. The finest leaders are fully in touch with their subjectivity _and_ can also draw from deep knowledge and rational thought.
I mean, what you say is true - effective political leaders were/are like you describe. But I question whether we need that kind of leadership, and I'm convinced we should not glorify it. Being effective at manipulating and abusing people at scale is not a trait of a good person.
https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox
Also love how you applied that to the current big problem of politics.
Now it's got me thinking about certain people who don't have the horsepower to generate good models, who are successful in life, despite their stupidity, because they still avoid bad decisions. And how certain behaviors and beliefs can mitigate stupidity quite well.
There were. Some of the ideas were good, and eventually took off, some were good-ish but needed more development (aircraft and tanks, for example), and some just didn't work. But to this disinterested observer, nothing really worked well enough.
But mostly, the war ended when the governments and economies of the nations fighting could no longer withstand the strain and started collapsing. (Russia is the most obvious example; Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were sketchy going in; Germany and France were the military superpowers but Germany finally fell apart with France about this far > < from large scale mutinies. Oh, and Britain finally paid off its WWI loans in like 2015.)
Huh? Germany lost. It couldn't have defended its territory by the time it surrendered. Britain and France could have easily fielded armies of the same size into 1920 if needed. There was no financial risk for them once America entered the war. The mutinies for germany began once it was clear that the war was hopeless. In comparison, the mutinies the french arm had suffered in the aftermath of the nivelle offensive were long gone by this time.
As likely, or even more likely. Experts on a subject can be those that get it wrong the most, especially (as you point out) in fields where there is no proper measurement apparatus to conduct reality checks (like psychology before neurosciences), because they are those that dig the most in possibly wrong directions.
Reminds me of a quote: "The eminently false mind is the one who never feels that he is going astray." (Joseph Joubert) (original: "L'esprit éminemment faux est celui qui ne sent jamais qu'il s'égare.")
A stalemate might have been the best available outcome at the time where other alternatives would allow enemy advances. I believe the only "solution" was the tank which had yet to be invented and it's invention was a direct consequence of the stalemate. It doesn't seem right to call someone stupid for experiencing a problem that led to an invention.
I would only call the pre-tank strategies "stupid" if the decisions discarded available information and solutions.
An instruction to the units of the 3rd Guards Rifle Volnovakhskaya Red Banner Division No. 0590 / op in addition to the previously given instructions on the preparation of assault groups (November 1, 1944).
To the regiment commanders of the 3rd Guards Rifle Volnovakh Red Banner Division
In addition to the previously given instructions for the preparation of assault groups, the divisional commander ORDERED:
1. In each rifle battalion, create an assault group consisting of: a rifle company, a reconnaissance squad, a sapper squad, a chemists squad, a platoon of 45-mm guns, two heavy machine guns.
2. For the convenience of the actions of the assault groups, divide them during the performance of combat missions into the following subgroups: barriers, blocking, cover and capture.
Allocate sappers into the barriers subgroup, three - five submachine gunners; provide the subgroup with crampons with ropes, probes, scissors for cutting wire, whistles, small axes, small infantry shovels, extended explosive charges of three kilograms each, pointers to indicate passages.
In the blocking subgroup, assign 3-4 sappers with universal charges, anti-tank mines or anti-tank grenades to blow up a structure or to throw grenades through an embrasure, before a platoon of shooters to deliver anti-tank mines, explosives and bottles with a combustible mixture, 2-3 chemists.
In the cover subgroup, allocate the heavy fire weapons attached to the assault group (anti-tank rifles, 45-mm guns, heavy machine guns).
Provide the cover subgroup with whistles, rocket launchers.
In the capture subgroup, assign a platoon of riflemen, a reconnaissance squad, 2-3 chemists, 2-3 sappers.
Arm the capture subgroup with grenades, knives, termite balls, bottles with a combustible mixture, smoke hand grenades.
3. The unit commanders should conduct training sessions with the assault groups for at least 4 hours every day, during which to work out the issues of the assault group's offensive, attacks by enemy bunkers, bunkers, methods of destroying bunkers, bunkers.
4. The composition of the assault groups should be submitted to the division headquarters by 10.00 2.11.44.
Chief of Staff of the Division (signature) No. 0590 / op 1.11.44
I don't agree that tanks had reached some ineffective impasse. Quoting wikipedia:
> By 1918, tank capabilities and tactics improved, their numbers increased and, combined with French tanks, finally helped break the stalemate. During the last 100 days of the war, Allied forces harried the Germans back using infantry supported by tanks and by close air support. By the war's end, tanks become a significant element of warfare; the proposed British Plan 1919 would have employed tanks as a primary factor in military strategy. However, the impact of tanks in World War I was less than it could have been, due to their late introduction and the inherent issues that plague implementing revolutionary technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trench_warfare
Plan 1919 was going to use 30,000 new faster tanks.
He's saying that tanks became less effective during WW2, at first offense was overpowering defense thanks to tanks, airplanes and improved logistics. During WW2 defense started getting closer to offense, at least on land (air power improved greatly and it was the thing which facilitated all major offensives).
For example during the Battle of Kursk German tanks couldn't break through the Soviet defense because they didn't have air superiority. The Soviets (and almost everyone else) had learned by that point how to organize an effective anti-tank defense.
Haig so, for all his support pf veterans after the war, IMHO never understood what he really did. The Germans wanted a decisive battle, which they didn't get. Haig wanted a break through, which he didn't get neither. What both got, on the western front, was a war of attrition. A war the Entente could afford, and was winning. Haig saw that his break through attempts worked, just out of the wrong reasons. I never got the idea that understood that. Calling that stupid is harsh, but maybe not entirely wrong. By the way, Haig wanted to use tanks to brake through German lines, the hole should then be exploited by horse mounted cavalry.
"But to me, World War I is the dividing point where modernity goes from
being optimistic to being pessimistic. Because when you put the words
"machine" and "gun" together, they both change. At that point, war is no
longer about a sense of adventure and chivalry and a way of testing your
nation's level of manhood; it's become industrial, and horrible."
That sounds like a dangerous glorification of pre-industrial war.
That makes a lot of sense actually. For example, Red Army has shrunk its cavalry dramatically during the pre- and early WW2 period, down to 13 divisions (about 80 thousand people) in favour of tank divisions... and then when the Germans came, the Soviets suddenly found themselves lacking highly mobile forces, so they reverted that decision: during the 1941, almost 110 new cavalry divisions were created. And the Soviets have been using cavalry (in form of cavalry-mechanized groups: tanks plus cavalry) throughout the rest of the WW2 precisely for the purpose of penetrating deep into the rear of the German lines and interrupting supply and reinforcement movements there. And no, they weren't charging with swords drawn, they were essentially mounted riflemen.
So Haig was pretty much on the spot: make an opening with tanks, rush into it with cavalry. Sure, mechanized corps would perhaps be better but you gotta fight with what you have.
Cavalry and machine guns don't really mix.
I suppose this hangs on one's definition of stalemate, but I'd consider the nine months of the siege of Petersburg to qualify.
I was thinking of the famous battles chasing each other around the map that included entrenchment but didn't stall as significantly. I can see an argument that Petersburg is the last stand of an exhausted defeated army digging in at their capital with the attackers choosing to siege rather than purely an unsolvable tactical impasse created by entrenchment technology... but it's probably that too.
With that said, I have a hard time agreeing with the definition of stupidity put forth in the article, as far as I understand it. To me stupidity is that state of mind that one may find oneself in before the first cup of coffee in the morning, or when stress (or ignorance) prevents one from intelligently considering all the relevant facts in a case etc. It is not something I would assign as attributes of persons lest it be someone I really didn't like, or (shudder) groups of persons, nor qualitatively separate from "dumbness".
Sticking to an outdated military tactic has far more reasons than one persons "stupidity", and what's up with mentioning South Africa in the context of "a kind of misguided innovation" influenced by "ideas and terms taken from the United States"?
Looks to me like the author is attempting to accrue academic points on the topic of stupidity, in order to use the insult more effectively against opponents.
This is very different than the condition to which the author is referring. I’d call it something like “false transfer” where one reasons about a complex, novel phenomenon using a (previously mastered) mental framework that is unsuitable or inadequate for the task.
Perhaps we could call it a generalized Dunning-Kruger effect?
Ok thanks. But I guess I'll stick to calling it stupidity. If it walks like a duck and all that.
I try to think in terms of bias: "what biases do I possess that may cause me to yield an outcome that is negative?" or "what bias does person X have that lead them to those actions or words?"
I feel it promotes empathy, questioning and understanding. Not name calling. At least, it's helped me to figure out some surprising things about myself and others!
Calling someone ugly is also an insult, but that person might get binned right at the bottom of a Hot or Not style survey.
I'm not in love with the author's framing of what it really is, but I agree that 'stupidity' is something which intelligent people exhibit on a regular basis.
But the word itself is ambiguous, such that trying to pin down a definition has to wrestle with the fact that we would also call someone who is rather low intelligence "stupid" if we don't mind insulting that person in the process.
This distinction is such a perfect distillation of something i've struggled to articulate for a long time.
Stupidity is the disposition to the state of stupor - that break in reactions for need of processing in an unexepected situation, as if suddenly beaten.
Golob stresses the root in not having the cognitive instruments to solve the cognitive impasse.
Cipolla stresses the economical consequences of those who does not have the intellectual framework (of utility) to understand that their personal gain, or incapacity to build it, should not be reached through a catastrophe for the rest of us. ..."That guy who shoots me to spend a weekend with my wife in Montecarlo" [does not have a proper idea of weights].
Haig may have known everything about the previous generation of warfare, that doesn't necessarily make him intelligent. It makes him knowledgeable.
Now, he was also likely intelligent enough to apply his knowledge of then conventional warfare to various then conventional situations. And this likely made him excellent at his position. In so much that he was appointed a leader of his nation's army during WWI.
But he lacked the intelligence to achieve anything novel. He lacked the speed of thought to see where the current situations couldn't apply to his breadth of knowledge. He lacked the ability to deduce where his knowledge could be adapted to this new situation.
That's why "smart" people seem "stupid". Because they're likely knowledgeable, not intelligent. Every single person I've considered intelligent, it wasn't because they knew a lot of facts. It's because they're always a couple thoughts ahead of most people. They're able to see what others are getting to, sometimes before the others even know they're about to get there.
Intelligence is a multiplier. It's not a thing on its own. That's why most decent intelligence tests test abstract reasoning.
We also make the mistake of confusing success for intelligence. That if someone is successful, they must be intelligent. That's not the case. Success is multi-faceted and there is no one thing that will make you successful.
For instance I know that I should not put diesel in my car. I know that it will fuck it up. The reason I know this is that it's literally in the manual. And the only reason I trust the manual is that it was written by the people who built the car. I defer to their expertise.
But not for one second do I believe that it means I know why I shouldn't do that. Or how a combustion engine works. Or that I can diagnose and repair my car's engine if it breaks down.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49348225-the-basic-laws-...
• http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidit...
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_M._Cipolla#The_Basic_Law...
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2570448 (as someone else linked)
>> Stupidity has two features that make it particularly dangerous when compared with other vices. First, unlike character flaws, stupidity is primarily a property of groups or traditions, not individuals: after all, we get most of our concepts, our mental tools, from the society we are raised in.
I would argue that it's not the misapplication of existing ideas, but ignoring the reality in front of you and doing something that goes against it. You might be going against it by habitually applying the wrong mental model, but it's only "stupid" in cases where that model seems obviously wrong (to others, or if you step back, etc) in a relevant way.
An example from a game: We are losing. We can win if we score one goal (2 points). There is only enough time for one quick play. Obviously we should make our best offensive play (including putting the goalie on offense and leaving the net open), but someone on the team gets the ball and takes a very defensive (slow) approach and the clock runs out. We lose. That was stupid - taking your time was never going to result in a win. It is a case of using the wrong mental model, but the reason it's stupid is because it obviously can't work in the given situation.
Product development example: The widget makes too much noise - the gears are noisy. Options: 1) change the material and test again. 2) hey the gear geometry can be improved - tweak design, make new tools and new parts. Management picks option 1 because we have a tight schedule and need to show improvement. OK with no other information, but this becomes really stupid when you hear that the material had already been changed once with no measurable effect.
Government example: People thinking they can legislate outcomes without any consideration how people or a system actually behave. Prohibition for example.
A lot of the seemingly obvious explanations for that war is just wrong, and tainted by the official narrative that came later. One example among many: French revanchisme about Alsace-Lorraine did not factor in starting the war, or at least not significantly and very indirectly. It was a hot topic in the 1890s, but that had been almost entirely absent from the political debate for 20 years by the start of the war. The reason you might think otherwise is simply that it was used during the war as a motivation to conjure up patriotic morale.
This is something I’ve believed very strongly for many years. I’ve met some amazingly stupid geniuses who believe things so absurd it actively hobbles their ability to function. I’ve met many others who advocate almost psychotically destructive (to others) beliefs that they have meticulously rationalized. Totalitarian politics of various stripes is a petty common case.
It’s one of several reasons I am deeply skeptical of the cult of IQ. Even if you accept that intelligence is a single dimensional trait, it is not clear to me that more IQ equals better. More IQ seems to often result in a superior capacity to rationalize delusional thinking.
Thinking is a practice, an art, and how you think matters quite a bit. A person of average intellect who thinks rationally is going to do better than someone with a high IQ who is insane or delusional.
Oh, yes. You can tie yourself up in knots. You can blind yourself to the truth. This is why virtue goes hand in hand with wisdom. Without virtue, you're a fool. Or, if you prefer, stupid. No respect can be extended to foolishness. There is no tragic greatness to be found here, only pathetic degeneracy.
As someone once said, in order to believe the 100 stupidest ideas ever conceived by the human mind, all you need is a PhD.
Golob's concept of "stupidity", in these terms, seems to be quite similar to Charlie Munger's reiterated idea of the "man-with-a-hammer syndrome: to the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail".
Edit: Those who do not know the Psychology of Human Misjudgement speeches by Charlie Munger, are warmly encouraged to find it. A revised version of the otherwise most famous speech at Harvard in 1995, seems to be here: https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/
That is not the way "stupid" is used. "Stupid" is a property assigned to an individual.
It is not nowadays generally accepted that General Haig's strategy in WWI was stupid, or even wrong. If he was doing what all generals are said to do (fighting the last war), then arguably he was in agreement with the best minds in the business.
> Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.
Close but no cigar. Human computation requires forcing of phenomena into crude, somewhat distorting pigeonholes to do any symbolic processing on it. Reality is simply too combinatorially explosive to not use any compression.
The foolishness arises when the distortions are systematically wrong; when you're stuck in a blind spot and keep focusing on the wrong subset of the data. It is a framing error that is specifically anti-adaptive.
Besides, you can have the entire array of conceptual tools, and still be foolish; picking the right tool cannot be reduced to an algorithm or a tool itself. It is a recursive problem of finding relevance.
> Historically, philosophers have worried a great deal about the irrationality of not taking the available means to my goals: Tom wants to get fit, yet his running shoes are quietly gathering dust. The stock solution to Tom’s quandary is simple willpower. Stupidity is very different from this. It is rather a lack of the necessary means, a lack of the necessary intellectual equipment. Combatting it will typically require not brute willpower but the construction of a new way of seeing our self and our world.
This is a false dichotomy. Avoiding getting into the metaphysics of will and whether or how it exists, Tom also doesn't know how to construct a way of seeing his self and the world to get into running. He still doesn't know what is good for him because if he did, he would have done it (or done something else good for him). His problem is ignorance just like the other guy, not willpower.
> First, unlike character flaws, stupidity is primarily a property of groups or traditions, not individuals: after all, we get most of our concepts, our mental tools, from the society we are raised in.
Collective intelligence and individual intelligence are similar machinery and both subject to blind spots and foolishness. In fact, the collective intelligence usually performs better on certain failure modes; it is easier for two people to find each other's blind spots than one person inferring their own. That's what for example therapy is (although unidirectional). It's just when it fails, it also fails spectacularly.
> We can now explain why stupidity is so domain-specific, why someone can be so smart in one area, and such an idiot in another: the relevant concepts are often domain-specific.
There is evidence against this; general intelligence predicts picking your meta-heuristics better for cross-domain problems; this is definitional after all.
> So stupidity is tough to fix.
Entire history of wisdom traditions and practices are dedicated to the suffering that comes with foolishness. They do not pass on conceptual tools though, because this is not an algorithmic problem. They pass on practices you participate in, which aim to train you to increase your likelihood of picking the relevant tools and finding out when you're stuck in a foolish framing.
[1] Sacha Golob, who turns out to have a paper this article was based on, at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/110433270/Golob_A_New...
Really? Maybe he knows and choose some other (stupid) option. Because I really feel like Tom sometimes.
I had no idea there was such a thing. Care to link to some relevant resources?
Buddhist interpretation of ignorance overlaps more with Socratic interpretation than our current use of the word. It is not a mere lack of knowledge in “propositions”. It is an existential state. If you think about it framing problems are also ignorance problems; ignoring relevant information/perspectives/action in our problem formulations.
I'm not so sure I buy this one. A few years ago Amazon decided to silently delete 1984 from people's Kindle devices. One common refrain was that this is 'only the kind of stupid decision a collective can make', because no individual lacks the common sense to come up with that idea.
It's the kind of bureaucratic stupidity that you get out of mechanic, group momentum. I don't think individual stupidity is like that at all, there is a qualitative difference. Individual foolishness is maybe sentimental or stubborn or attached, whereas collective foolishness is sort of autonomous.
Kind of like a cult. Not only are blind spots harder to spot in homogenous groups, they even can conjure delusions up that nobody would ever even come up with on their own, because it takes the force of a 100 people to convince you that something is real that doesn't even exist.
There is no such science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupidity
James F. Welles, Understanding Stupidity
"The term may be used to designate a mentality which is considered to be informed, deliberate and maladaptive." Welles distinguishes stupidity from ignorance; where stupidity means one must know they are acting in their own worst interest in that it must be a choice, not a forced act or accident. Lastly, it requires the activity to be maladaptive, in that it is in the worst interest of the actor, and specifically done to prevent adaption to new data or existing circumstances."
= = =
Otto Fenichel, "The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946)"
"Every intellect begins to show weakness when affective motives are working against it". He suggests that "people become stupid ad hoc, that is, when they do not want to understand, where understanding would cause anxiety or guilt feeling, or would endanger an existing neurotic equilibrium."
The problem with this definition is taking a very narrow meaning of "knowing" which most of the time means "propositional knowing".
A basketball player knows propositionally that they need to put the ball through the hoop, but they will miss in a likelihood in proportion to their lack of procedural knowledge. This doesn't they are being stupid, they actually didn't fully know how.
To apply it recursively; we might know the definition of stupid but that helps so little to save us out of doing stupid things throughout our lives.
You haven't mentioned which terminology you're talking about but assuming it is one of combinatorial explosion, compression, framing or heuristics; these are not computer science exclusive jargon, these are information processing terms, something both humans and computers do, and as such used in cognitive science contexts pretty extensively and correctly.
> This occurs too often on HN and often conceals gross misunderstanding behind a veneer of technical jargon.
Unless you're ready to point out what the gross misunderstanding was, your point is moot.
I think there's a lot of people who have a higher bar than that (or lower bar depending on your perspective), but there is good traditional agreement;
You can't fix stupid.
That's one of its defining features.
Regardless, it's sometimes necessary to work year-round on maintenance & repair.
And everyone knows the effort involved polishing a turd and putting lipstick on a pig takes up all the time in between emergency restoration sessions.
This is something you need to get rid of whole-hog.
What if this is one of the ways we’re being stupid?
One of the other properties of stupid is that we don’t know when we are being stupid, because if we did we could have gotten ourselves out of it.
Is a long way of saying "thinking you know something that you actually don't." It's about hidden assumptions, and if there's any psychology to it would be hubris.
Yes. And those noble (in USA context) ideas when they get into the wider world serve mostly the popultist conservatives because they rely on so many things that are local to USA that opponents only need to point and laugh at how remote those ideas are from non-US reality to get people on their side.
What we have here is rather someone ‘acting as if they were stupid’. It’s not just that they failed to apply the concept of betrayal, but that they literally didn’t think of it: it was effectively ‘offline’, due to emotional and other pressures. In this kind of case, agents possess the necessary intellectual tools but unwittingly lock them away. This marks an important contrast with dumbness – we can make ourselves stupid, but we don’t make ourselves dumb.
This is also an idea that Julia Galef illuminates in great detail in her book "The Scout Mindset." She describes this as the difference between "Scout Mindset", which attempts to figure out what is correct, and "Soldier Mindset", or "stupidity" the way this article describes it, which attempts to fight to confirm what one already believes to be true.
I don't think stupidity is the same as lack of intelligence or wisdom. Highly intelligent people can behave stupidly, too.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this. I arrived that stupidity is lack of intelligence/wisdom AND/OR inability to make use of intelligence/wisdom.
For example, one way you can be intelligent and yet stupid is if you lack self-reflection and/or are dishonest with yourself. This impairs ability to acquire wisdom -- honest observations about truth of yourself and the world around you, may make you repeat same mistakes without realizing what is causing them, etc.
Being unable to learn from your mistakes (maybe because you are not honest enough to recognize them as mistakes or recognize true causes) basically prevents you from advancing as human being. If your level of advancement is below your age you might be labeled as "stupid".
However, the caveat is that the latter brain is more suited to the world right now, with society becoming information rich and complex, and with nuanced social norms (not just x is good, y is bad). Of course I’m biased here.
This is a false dichotomy. If I am trying try accomplish X, it is absolutely true that I am trying to accomplish X. Both you (the observer) and I can acknowledge this fact.
> adjudication of what is stupid is inevitably subjective
No, because as you yourself say...
> it depends on the objectives and interests of the subject
and what objective you're pursuing is factually the case as I already stated.
Furthermore, objectives and interests are not arbitrary and brute facts, but ultimately related to human nature. It is possible in principle, even if not in practice, to determine whether an objective being pursued is wrong, stupid, etc. It makes no sense, for example, to say that someone isn't stupid because he is pursuing the objective of suicide successfully. The objective itself is stupid because it is objectively (not "subjectively") contrary to the good of the subject (euthanasia supporters notwithstanding) to kill yourself and because it is factually the case that the ("subjective") understanding the person has of what is good for him is stupid.
How does the observer know what someone else is trying to accomplish? The observer cannot peer into the person's mind.
Because it allows entrepreneurs to come up with solutions for the "stupid" that simplifies problems.
An even greater virtue is "laziness".
Trillions of dollars are made off the laziness of people not wanting to do one thing or another. Isn't humanity great?
I'm only saying, see it as an opportunity and not a problem. Because it is what is it, and we can never change it. Best to live in a world of what "is" than what we would like it to be.
It’s interesting that the author tucks this line neatly into the middle of an article otherwise focused on a generalized notion of stupidity. The implication is left unsaid, wisely.
Most western governments: "Don't worry, COVID is just like the Flu"
A hallmark of human stupid I've noticed is the "It's what we're supposed to do" factor. We know its dumb but we do it anyway because "its what the job description says", or "its what the boss would want" or so on. Where we abnegate our judgement for that of another is often the root of it; when that other's judgment is unknown to us, it's always stupid.
https://wset.com/news/local/us-rep-greene-congratulates-crow...
Honestly it's pretty disgusting that you're going to pretend Republicans haven't been downplaying the virus and doing what they can to prevent localities from taking precautions against it for over a year now. Either you're dangerously ignorant to the steps Republicans are taking to prevent us from handling this virus or you're deliberately spreading misinformation. Either way, you're a net negative to the discussion and actively causing harm with your misinformation.
I don't deny your claim about "celebrating low vaccination rates and pushing anti-vaccine misinformation". But you are simply wrong that Greene and people like her represent the government. They don't. (In the same way that AOC, say, doesn't represent the government. And, in fact, AOC and Greene can't both represent the US government.)
> Either you're dangerously ignorant to the steps Republicans are taking to prevent us from handling this virus or you're deliberately spreading misinformation. Either way, you're a net negative to the discussion and actively causing harm with your misinformation.
Yeah... maybe you ought to cool it with your accusations when you are actually misrepresenting my point.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/05/boris-johns...
Ever dealt with statistics? Take someone who assumes all phenomena can be described by a normal distribution---in those cases where it isn't, they will consistently come up with an incorrect answer from perfectly correct math.
Yes, that is what it boils down to, at high-enough levels or over long-enough timespans.
The most recent cases of this are about the COVID vaccinations. When I hear people say why they are not getting vaccinated, almost always they've elevated something in priority/importance above something else which is more important.
i guess the author must be stupid. /s