Five Laws of Human Stupidity (1976)
harmful.cat-v.org
harmful.cat-v.org
What is "stupidity" other than a concept vague enough that you can just throw it at anybody to, in part, immediately raise yourself to some level of superiority, and essentially defame without actually having to argue anything? Obviously they are stupid, and since you realize that, you are obviously not, so what's there to argue, right?
Human intelligence, if that's what "stupidity" is supposed to be about, is many-dimensional. Even within a single dimension, most actions, opinions or expressions of such are not clear-cut more or less intelligent. Often you just happen to agree with one or see problems with another one. But it doesn't immediately mean somebody is "stupid". And it also ignores the "why". Maybe somebody is lacking education in a certain field, perhaps because of a lack of funds or opportunity because they grew up in a disadvantaged neighborhood. Or because of a medical condition. Or maybe they are just tired. Who knows. Oh right, they are "stupid", that's what they are.
And finally, even if somebody does something "stupid" .. don't put yourself on such a high horse. You likely also do "stupid" things. All the time. You don't realize it though, you'd otherwise stop doing that thing. So, if the conclusion is that we are all "stupid" in some way, they yeah, we can claim that there are "stupid" people all around us, but that's not a particularly meaningful statement.
Honestly, this was a very sad read.
Maybe "stupid" as a label is not great because it already has an established meaning different than the one being used here, but I find the basic observations contained in the essay to be useful.
Are those "stupid"? Presumably not. But if you allow for such non-material benfit, then what if your "stupid" people who are causing harm to others are actually deriving emotional benefits from it?
What it "stickin' it to the libs" makes them happy or feels to them like bringing a little bit of justice to the world?
How about someone who quits his job (losing money) at just the right time to cause his shitty boss huge problems (and a lot more money loss)?
Is that different? Do you really want to judge which emotional benefits are valid and which are not (and thus "stupid")? And call that a "precise definition"?
If that's entirely all of it then it's clearly a benefit. But conversely if "stickin' it to the libs" makes them lose their family, their job, or something else then the harm might outweigh the benefit and that would be stupid.
Seems straight forward to me.
I would say, though, that in almost all cases, emitting CO2 is more like bandit behavior than stupid behavior. If I drive 100 miles in my car, I probably benefit from that a lot more than the harm I cause directly to myself by emitting that CO2, which is almost certainly negligible.
You could make the case that it's B2 Bandit behavior (harm caused to everyone collectively is greater than the benefit to myself), but that would depend on why I made the car trip and how much benefit I got.
One could make the case that with climate change, human civilization as a whole is suffering because individually we're mostly engaging in B2 behavior. You might say that humanity is acting stupidly, but that would require us to define who the "other" is: non-human life? People who haven't been born yet? Space aliens?
It is only in aggregate, and possibly after the player's lifetime, when the negative consequences arrive.
No, it doesn't. The part that you mention is "law" 3 of 5. I stopped reading mid-way into the first "law" up to which the article already used the term "stupidity" multiple times as if it's obvious what that is and was so unbelievably presumptuous regarding people that are somehow less worth than the author that it became unbearable.
The irony here is that this itself is a very arrogant opinion.
If the former, I spent quite some time to argue in favor of my opinion in my original comment. You are welcome to argue the opposite. Just calling it "irony" is not much of an argument though.
If the latter, then I'd like to understand why. Do you argue that no matter how nonsensical some text, you need to read it fully before expressing any thought about it? Or do you mean something else?
If he/she said something like "This is my opinion and if you think different, you're stupid." then that would be arrogant. I don't see an inkling of that here.
3rd law: stupidity causes harm (definition)
There is a contradiction here. By this definition, if you select for attainment of any kind that would be sabotaged by the harm, you had better start seeing less stupidity. If you don't, it's a hint that your model of stupidity is wrong. Indeed, his model is wrong, but instead of taking the hint the author simply chalks the pile of contradictory evidence up to chance and sticks with his bad model: "Nature seems indeed to have outdone herself." No, dude -- the problem is not with nature, it's with your model.
That's kind of the point: you might expect that, and maybe it's true to some extent, but if you think there's some group of people somewhere that has some reliable method of excluding people who act in irrational and self-destructive ways, you're probably going to react the wrong way if you encounter such a person. The usual response is to assume some sort of nefarious plan. Maybe that person is executing a clever strategy to gain some sort of advantage? In actuality that person might not have any plan at all, they're just engaging in ordinary self-destruction and bringing everyone else along for the ride. Not recognizing that is a cognitive blind spot that people who don't do those sorts of things tend to have have.
Cipola does mention that while he considers the proportion of stupid people in circulation to be constant, a properly-functioning society will tend to give less agency to those people than a well-functioning one.
> It would be a profound mistake to believe the number of stupid people in a declining society is greater than in a developing society. Both such societies are plagued by the same percentage of stupid people. The difference between the two societies is that in the society which performs poorly: > > a) the stupid members of the society are allowed by the other members to become more active and take more actions; b) there is a change in the composition of the non-stupid section with a relative decline of populations of areas I, H1 and B1 and a proportionate increase of populations H2 and B2.
No, you've mistaken excuses for profundity.
> if you think there's some group of people somewhere that has some reliable method of excluding people who act in irrational and self-destructive ways
Yes, successful people, for many any definition of succesful that you respect. If one is successful, one clearly wasn't meaningfully self-destructive. If one is self-destructive, one expects to be systematically less successful. On average, in expectation, and with time lag. This isn't an observational trend, it's a definitional link.
Let's be concrete: if a professor makes a great discovery and then Cipola writes them off as stupid because he sees them struggling to tie their shoes, Cipola's model of stupidity is invalidated by the reality of the professor's useful contribution to society.
I've seen this happen.
> The usual response is to assume some sort of nefarious plan.
Cibola blamed the failure of his model on chance. He could also have chosen to blame it on conspiracy. He would still be wrong -- it's just a poor model.
> Not recognizing [self-destruction] is a cognitive blind spot that people who don't do those sorts of things tend to have have.
Sure, but this guy has enshrined Fundamental Attribution Error into a philosophy. It's not a blind spot, it's a blindfold.
It's only precise in the abstract. When it comes to concrete information, it's a BS non-definition. In real life scenarios of any real importance (that is, non trivial examples of Dumb and Dumber style behavior), it quickly gets difficult to define if harm was caused, who caused it, whether they've benefited from it (especially as benefits are not just monetary or advancing one's position on some job or some such), and so on...
I disagree. It's very quantifiable and utilitarian. It doesn't descend into moral judgment or elitism or simple dislike for a person's starting assumptions. Stupidity is just judged by its results.
So the "advantage" people are after is often an immediate and tiny satisfaction of their feelings, a perceived slight increase in their social status. Most examples in the article, such as not stepping aside when something is in your way.
And, frankly, being "ready for that" to some extent is a great piece of advice. Unfortunately.
The author has a very precise definition of stupidity. He very explicitly states that level of knowledge/education is completely orthogonal to being stupid. (As prevalent among Nobel laureates as it is among blue collar workers.) Stupidity, in his definition, appears to be an attitude more than anything else.
Are you a stupid person if you do this once? Twice? Frequently? (Does anyone do it frequently?) Are any of us not stupid? And what does this have to do with the normal meaning of "stupid"?
If I assume my frame of reference to be one where attitudes toward meat-eating is desired, then I am going to assume people who are vegan are stupid. Vegans will detract from my meat-eating ways, and the meat-eating ways of my friends and tribe.
If we can apply a frame of reference, then these laws of stupidity can be (comically) useful in the sense that "stupid" people will detract from your quality of life. "Stupid" people, per this article, seem to misalign with the views and desires of the "superior" (per your comment) person and thus cause friction in the life of the "superior".
In a weird way, I see this article as a funny way to remind us to be cautious with our time & energy. To be conscious about who we spend our time with, who to expose our ideas to, and who to ask for help. It might be an extremely satirical reference guide to make sure you catch yourself before you go too deep into relying on the wrong person for your job or favor, for example.
I wouldn't take it too seriously, because, well, that might be stupid.
But it’s not quite that. It’s a long form semi-comic screed from a time when it wasn’t especially controversial to put plain words to one’s frustrations.
I don’t share these particular frustrations. I don’t resonate with what’s being said. I think it comes from a pretty alienated experience where you’re convinced that there’s a lot of bad in the world and that it can be attributed to a few conceptual scapegoats that are simple and identifiable and that things would be so much better if not for this one (or two or ten) darn things.
But a lot of people do feel that way, and I’m not ready to hold my different experience over theirs. It would probably be stupid of me to do so.
> A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
contradicts his 2nd law
> The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
because if you select for accomplishment (or serial accomplishment) the definition implies that you had better start seeing fewer stupid people, but his 2nd law says you shouldn't. This isn't a nit, it strikes at the very core of why his model doesn't fit reality.
Here's a model that better fits reality: our assumptions about what "everybody knows" tend to be bad, both in an absolute sense and when conditioned on some particular level of education / accomplishment. Knowledge silos run deep, their shapes are strange, and people are really good at accommodating gaps in their knowledge. Clever people even moreso. So it's easy to underestimate the gaps, watch otherwise respectable people stumble over them, and think "how in the hell did that happen?"
If you attribute these gaps to an innate quality like stupidity, you will be unable to help people fill the gaps. Not because the people cannot be taught, but because your misunderstanding precludes you from being a good teacher. This makes his model damaging in addition to being incorrect and uncharitable.
Those may sound like harsh words, but they are not nearly as harsh as the mistake that eventually shook me out of a similar set of beliefs. Someone went from "stupidest person I know" to "smartest person I know," and that was a big hint that my model was wrong. We are a decade distant from that event, I've had the chance to run a lot of evidence past these two models, and "weird knowledge gaps" so thoroughly whips "innate stupidity" that I am slightly embarrassed I ever considered it true. Live and learn.
After reading this profoundly ungenerous article, I am inclined to be ungenerous here and assume that the "activities" the author refers to would be, by most of us, considered anti-social. "I'm just playing my music, why is everyone on my case? I'm a better driver when driving fast..."
Where I was born people trust the turn signalling and drive early. When I moved to the UK I (luckily) quickly realised you cannot do this here. Everyone waits until the car actually starts turning before driving. Even if it's signalling, no one trusts that, possibly creating less pressure for correct signalling. It makes traffic slightly slower but avoids the possibility of (this type of) accidents.
Counter-intuitively, worse drivers leads to fewer accidents.
"A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
Because gains/losses can be hard to quantify. Punishing people who violate rules of fairness is a useful strategy proven by game theory ("Tit for tat"), and there are indications it is a deeply ingrained human behaviour.
You might argue that even when it incurs losses to the punishers, its overall gains outweigh that, but those are future, hypothetical gains.
What about other cases where such future, hypothetical gains are less well-founded, but still expected by the "stupid person"? What about emotional gains?
It's not as easy to draw lines here as it may seem.
I've always used a rule of thumb.
Dumb = ignorant, seems to get better with more knowledge
Stupid = confidently wrong to the point of net negative for everyone, seems to get worse with more knowledge
There is another saying "You can't fix stupid" so giving them more knowledge doesn't help, it just expands their sphere of influence.
"Baka ni tsukeru kusuri nashi"
The medicine which can be applied to stupidity, does not exist.
> "The requested document at 'http://harmful.cat-v.org:80/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupi...' doesn't exist"
Law 0 of human stupidity is that those preparing a site about stupidity will code in plain HTTP links with :80, and not bother testing.
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. ...
<https://americandigest.org/dietrich-bonhoeffer-on-stupidity/>
The drunk driver who is highly capable has never been in an accident before. He does all kinds of stupid stuff because he is so capable. His reaction time carries him through. His instincts tell him just how far he can push things. Till he goes one step too far and mows down a family. I don't blame stupid, I blame confident.
A programmer is very clever. His code is perfect. The project is in the toilet because it's unmaintainable. But hey, not his fault nobody else can understand his genius code. The few who dig through it have to admit, wow, that's impressive.
The hacker steals the little old ladys life savings with a 0day he found himself. Where's the stupid? He won. He was untracable. He's somewhere on the beach in the Carribean, which is apparently a place people want to be.
The company makes an unsafe drug. The chemist was smart enough to do chemistry. The exec can manage a company. They didn't test well enough. People die. No stupid needed.
The math genius turned philosopher(Ahem... Kaczynski) sees the world through a very objective lens. By a system of principles, he determines tech is the enemy. He kills in the name of this ideology. There aren't many flaws in the reasoning, the only problem is he is forcing his values(Like people having survival goals instead of surrogate goals) on us.
Stupid people can use processes to decouple the results from their own skill and action. A confident person will not, and as such any imperfections they have show. And we all have imperfections.
Would you rather fly with a below average pilot who woul5 call the cops on anyone who doesn't follow the checklist, or the worlds best pilot in terms of basic talent, who doesn't think he needs a checklist and does a few show off dives in the flight just for fun?
Small print at the bottom of the page.
They don't.
Maybe read it in Patton Oswalt's voice?
But at the same time oh man do I so totally identify with this
And now I feel a bit guilty
Could you ellaborate? Do you find it cruel, wrong... stupid?
Just FYI: this is old, from the seventies I think.
That's just reality bumping into your egalitarian nature ;-)
The most dangerous people, though, are bandits who figure out how to use stupid people for their own purposes. They can turn uncorrelated human stupidity, moderated by the central limit theorem, into correlated human stupidity and use it as a weapon. They come with armies; they become the bosses.
A wise man once said that there is nothing more common than wasted potential, in that sense I agree with some of this article.
It does not spell that out right at the beginning, or even necessarily at all. But it is not discussing all possible uses of the word "stupid". "Wasted potential" definitely doesn't work for discussions about active harm being done (at some points).
(As such, another common critique I see is trying to decide if it's "right" or "wrong", but that's the wrong question. As it proposes a definition, one that I think undeniably does have the ability to be applied to the world, the question is rather if it is useful. I have found it so, but that's debatable. But that's at least the correct debate.)
I assume anyone who has had any experience with the world at all has "cause[d] losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain." Are there any non-stupid people?
Suppose this is why we have “specializations” - most people don’t seek out medical advice from an electrician (or vice versa) but that doesn’t mean the respective individual lacks “knowledge”.
[1] Not sure that I buy the actual numbers; the median has been around $30K for a number of years, up to 2019 at least. A $10K jump in 2 years?
"The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate."
If that held true for any estimate, the only correct answer is one hundred percent of the total population is stupid.
> This is a terrible view of humankind, society and the people around you.
> I would propose a more measured approach to this subject.
> This is so horrible on so many levels
> "stupidity" I'd rather think of this as "wasted potential"
> This article is bad.
> This is one of the most pretentious things I've read all year.
> [It's] a Hitler trap.
> No definition of stupidity is given
(This last one is particularly rich because a definition is, of course, given in the "third (and golden) basic law" in bold text outlined in it's own box!)
I don't really have anything to add to the discussion. To me TFA seems like a dry but funny satire. There's an element of truth to what it's saying, sure, but as far as any deeper meaning goes... "Be careful."?
Congratulations. You nodded along right into a Hitler trap.
</godwin>
"The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
The stupid person (according to Cipolla's definition) is a threat to the Aryan race in the same way that the stupid person is a threat to all people everywhere, and an Aryan is just as likely to be stupid as anyone else.
The Nazi movement, and propaganda in general, succeeds via dehumanizing the enemy, portraying the "other" as "less than human". My use of "Aryan" here was meant to shake you out of that hypnosis, which was created by a a series of arguments which sound logical when viewed in isolation, but have been framed in a restricted narrative chain that leads to the malicious conclusion. It was supposed to wake you up to the fact that once you have accepted the first five tenets unquestionably, you've essentially been brainwashed into the same state of believing the 'other' is less human, and thus measures against this group are acceptable --- which was the defining narrative of the Nazi party regarding the civilised Aryans and their duty against the evil caricatures that seeked to destroy civilisation as we know it.
To use your own words: if you were to believe that a 'stupid person' is a threat to 'people everywhere', you've been brainwashed by this argument into accepting that 'stupid people' are not 'people' (or somehow less than valid people), in the same way that Aryans were led to accept that jews were somehow less human than Aryans, and their exctinction was for the good of the world at large.
And since the term 'stupid person' is extremely vague and malleable towards any political agenda that could stand to benefit from abusing it, this becomes a very dangerous division to make. Not unlike the whole trend of people labelling everyone on the other side as "literally hitler" in modern US political discourse.
The whole thing is stupid.
Having said that, I think we do sometimes overestimate how clever we are, as a species. If you think about it, we literally just right now, in evolutionary terms, put together a technological society. The last 10k years of advances since agriculture and cities are 3% of the last 300k years since our last common ancestor.
That means we only just barely have enough intelligence to develop a civilization, the bare minimum required. Otherwise we'd have done it sooner. We're jumped up plains apes.
Still, this article contains no such discussion, no analysis, no examination of evidence or reasons why any of what is asserted might be true or if it is true. It doesn't even properly explain what it's talking about. Nothing you could even hang a discussion on. Pure rubbish.
I'm not the person you were replying to, but I think it's satirical because it's kind of funny, it's written in a style of exaggerated confidence, it's worded in an unnecessarily inflammatory way, and it has amusing diagrams. That doesn't mean I think it's just meaningless nonsense; a lot of satire does have something interesting to say about people or society. But I also don't think it was meant to be taken 100% seriously either. And maybe satire isn't quite the right word, because it's not really satirizing or parodying anything in particular other than overly pretentious essays.
> Check out the screed on gay marriage.
That wasn't written by Cipolla, they just happen to be hosted on the same site. The argument seems to be that government shouldn't be involved in defining marriage in the first place, for anyone. I agree with that. But since there are practical reasons why a society should want something like a legal notion of marriage recognized by the government, the part I would add back in (which wasn't part of the "screed") is that consenting adults should be able to mutually agree to formally recognize each other as belonging to the same family, and that should be recognized by the state. We can get rid of the unnecessary notion of applying a special legal status to the person you're sleeping with and allow people to form families for any reason, without necessarily any implication that they're sleeping together, and we can apply certain legal rights to members of the same family, like the right to jointly file taxes or to be on each other's health insurance plans.
Obviously there would be a lot of weird side-effects, corner cases, and implementation details you'd have to work out for that to be a workable thing.
I suppose this topic is guaranteed to stir up controversy: https://xkcd.com/592/
Given that reality, accusing gay people who want that right as well as being hypocritical, a right I have enjoyed as a heterosexual for 20 years next week, in order to get some level of parity is vile victim blaming.
The homosexuals get derided and belittled for daring to ask, while heterosexuals that comfortably enjoy all the benefits get a pass. Yes he criticises the institution, but the only group that gets criticised are LGBT. Utterly despicable.
From the article:
“A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.”
OK, fair enough its a sort of definition or has the superficial form of one, but it's not actually saying anything.