We have more to fear from stupid people than evil ones | Hacker News Reader

We have more to fear from stupid people than evil ones

bigthink.com

58 pointsaxiologist60 comments

> Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that stupidity is worse than evil because stupidity can be manipulated and used by evil

This pretty much refutes the headline .

It’s a false dichotomy to begin with, but if stupidity’s biggest issue is that evil can manipulate it, clearly it’s the preeence of evil that’s a bigger threat than the presence of stupidity.

That's a bad argument but there is a better argument. An evil person will hurt other people for his own benefit, but a stupid person will hurt other people even at his own detriment, which makes stupidity even more pointlessly destructive. I'm cribbing from Carlo Cipolla's "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" here, and for him this is a definitional feature of stupidity: "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."

> An evil person will hurt other people for his own benefit, but a stupid person will hurt other people even at his own detriment, which makes stupidity even more pointlessly destructive

This could probably be refined a bit; you're on the right track but the logic doesn't work.

I think we can all agree school shooters are Evil. They almost always commit suicide to avoid arrest. Damage to others is extensive, damage to self is mortal, and yet they go through with both planning and execution.

Mitigating all risk of collateral damage in the commission of an evil act is not a requisite for Evil. If anything, acceptance of harm to self makes it more evil.

> "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.

Your boy Carlo has clearly never been through an acrimonious divorce.

"I think we can all agree school shooters are Evil."

There is a question where evil ends and insanity begins. Totally self-destructive actions such as this strike me as insane.

It would be a different story if the school shooter wanted to establish his own gang rule by sheer terror (say, in a country where law enforcement is weak or absent, e.g. Haiti). That would be textbook evil.

I'm not sure evil ends there. The 9/11 terrorists also died intentionally from their own actions, but mere insanity doesn't explain such a coordinated attack. It's just that they see their own death as a necessary sacrifice in a larger struggle. The same may be true for some mass shooters, especially the ones clearly motivated by racism or other bigotry: sacrifice your own life to take out more of the enemy. In their mind, it's probably no different than a soldier risking his life to defend his country. (Well, maybe that counts as delusion and is still insanity, but also evil.)

Yeah the 9/11 hijackers valued the mission over their own lives, which is usually considered a valorous attitude, except in this instance their mission was evil. And this illustrates another point: if you’re evil but not stupid, you’re going to be more capable which means you can do a lot more damage if you want to. We should prefer the evil to be stupid so as to undermine their effectiveness.

That being said, stupidity is still far more common than evil, so the damage done by the stupid-but-not-evil probably outweighs whatever damage mitigation we experience from the stupidity of evil people. (And it’s worth noting that many if not most evil people are quite stupid, at least in terms of common criminals.)

> There is a question where evil ends and insanity begins. Totally self-destructive actions such as this strike me as insane.

That gets nebulous though. Even a murderous schizophrenic isn't evil. Failed military offensives that end in your execution aren't the product of insanity. Firefighters aren't insane for running into burning buildings. Self-destructive actions can be rationalized. Whether you agree with the rationale is not the point.

Like terrorism, school shootings are intentional and initiated to do as much damage to others as possible, usually in response to some personal grievance. There's always a shitty "reason" for it.

Insanity--real insanity--would be more like sending a pipe bomb to a random daycare center for absolutely no reason whatsoever. There is zero predictability. Nobody did anything to "deserve" it.

I've seen some kids try to play at "insanity" by doing shit to people for no apparent reason (and being all "tee-hee I'm so insane lmao #murder"), but when you dig into forensics you find they researched the eventual victim and only engaged once they say or do something objectionable (the new face of "hate crime," perpetrated by the types most likely to call others out for the same). This is not insanity, it's very-calculated evil.

Well, it ultimately depends on how you want to define insanity.

Most of the school shooters aren't schizophrenic. They usually aren't complaining about hearing voices or hallucinating. When the media claims they had a "history of mental illness" it usually means mild to moderate depression, anxiety, ADHD, things of that nature.

Some of them will claim to have a political or ideological cause but most of the time their manifesto (if they bother to write one) consists of something like "Everything is meaningless bullshit and I am going to prove it by killing a bunch of random people for no reason".

> "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."

I think this comes down to motivation. Are they causing losses to other people just because they didn't think, or miscalculated? That's being stupid.

Or are they causing losses to other people because of spite? That is, they may not gain in any material way, but they may gain in satisfaction. That's being evil.

I think it’s relative to your own value system. If a man dies rescuing his family from a house fire, that’s a loss for him in some sense but in that man’s own value system, it’s a win because he values his family’s lives over his own. The word “spite” implies a certain pettiness that usually indicates that you don’t actually value satisfying the grudge more than what you’re losing so you’re just being stupid. My mom always used to say, “don’t cut off your nose to spite your face”. But if you brood and premeditate on a resentment until you wholeheartedly accept it and are still willing to make personal sacrifices to satisfy it, that’s less “spite” and more “revenge”, and it becomes evil.

That sounds kind of like "guns don't kill people, people kill people."

Guns are made to kill people. Are stupid people made for evil?

the vast majority of guns are not used for killing people, the entire frame of your response is flawed.

This is a strawman, they never said “the vast majority” or “used”.

They said “guns are made for killing people” which is absolutely a true statement, many guns are specifically made for killing people.

>guns are made for killing people

As a consequence guns can be used as a deterrence as well. Since their primary purpose is to cause great harm, people that value their lives and not commit stupid actions.

Yep also completely true.

well in that case, pencils are made for killing people and my evidence is that a pencil has been used to kill a person.

That's not true at all. An ar15 was specifically made for war against people (lots of them), and then refined for war against people. A pencil was made for writing things down.

Pencils are made to spy on people, we know this because that one pencil was made with a microphone in the eraser.

Stupidity is fickle and unpredictable. It doesn't have a plan, which sometimes makes it less dangerous than evil, but it also makes it unpredictable can cause a lot of damage because nobody is prepared for it.

I find it hard to discuss stupidity and evil without mentioning Donald Trump, who is well endowed in both. Both his malice and his stupidity have done a lot of damage, but there have also been times when his malice was thwarted by his stupidity.

I mean, if stupidity is what it takes to get the economy back into the state it was in 2019, I’m all for it.

Especially in matters of economics, the most dangerous people seem to be the most educated. They can’t leave it alone and perpetually try to refactor society for some non-economic purpose. When you finally get “an idiot” who removes the boot of the government, unsurprisingly (to everyone except the economists), the result is economic growth.

Briefly. And then the economy crashes. The longest periods of sustained economic growth happened because of regulation and government investment. Deregulation and lack of investment have lead to economic crashes every couple of years. The boom-bust cycle might be fun for investors who see it coming, but not for the people losing their homes.

I think their point is that stupidity is an extremely effective force multiplier for evil, and it’s way more common.

I’m not sure I would buy the argument for the inverse.

Evil is rational. You can negotiate with rational.

Stupid is irrational.

I would say in practice this indeed is often true (and thus a reminder for Hanlon's razor);some people I know are not evil but so stupid that their actions actually seem pure evil. Usually (because I know this mostly from work) they stumble head first into something that makes someone else look bad/fail/get fired, but if they were evil and had to plan out that even upfront, they wouldn't have been able to come up with it, at all.

My observation is similar but differs in a substantial way: it seems to actually take a lot of intelligence to accomplish the more shocking kinds of stupidity. Somehow there is an intelligent process but it gets perverted and turned into evil as a reaction rather than an intentional outcome. Somehow these persons have lost control of their own intelligence and have become victims of the same.

Lots of the effects seem to be summed up as "ego", but that is far from a coherent explanation. It's fear, pride, impatience... Those words seems to guard the gates of hell.

Proof: certain political party in the US.

Replace ‘certain’ with ‘either’ and you are on the right track.

Replace 'party' with 'partisan voters' and you're even closer.

The Uniparty is evil, but the folks who still buy into their schtick are mostly ignorant or naive.

It's dangerous to label people as stupid because you take on the mindset of the manipulator. Either they are manipulated by evil people or manipulated by non evil people like you.

The stupid keep the evil in power.

Right in principle but wrong attribution of agency. The evil use the stupid to stay in power.

The damage from either category pales to comparison to the damage made by smart people - especially smart powerful people with good intentions.

> especially smart powerful people with good intentions.

do they have good intentions? or do they just tell you they have good intentions?

Both cases are very damaging...

I would argue that these people are not as smart as they think they are. They may be smart but in proportion to their ambitions they are stupid.

Hubris basically. That's the typical downfall in Greek mythology. Even being a demi-god won't save you from hubris.

To you what are some concrete examples of smart people with good intentions creating extreme damage?

Eugenics (Galton, and then advocated by almost every "smart" person back in the day in well respected circles).

Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Hitler by giving him what he wants and wasting time.

Robert McNamara setting up the disastrous Vietnam War.

Malthus's population control scare and their influence on policy.

Larry Summers/Alan Greenspan and other luminaries deregulating the financial sector (including mortgages).

All the way to modern day tech moguls and thinkers, with examples ranging from the Californian Ideology and Effective Altruism, to stuff like "let's bomb countries with advanced AI" from Eliezer and co.

Smart people contribute in all sorts of ways. Some great, some not so great.

Stupid people destroy democracies. They are a plague.

The inertia of processes and social systems. Any trajectory change is going to upend lives and be costly, which makes those with something to lost hesitant, and only really appeals to those without anything to lose, or who believe they will lose even more if the status quo continues.

But yes, partisan dynamics can lead to follow-the-leader and simon-says behavior.

Everybody says this, including stupid ones.

and yes: everybody think the stupids are the others.

A better way to look at it is not who is stupid and who is not, but to what degree and in what ways is each given individual stupid. No one is exempt.

Similar to how people are intelligent in different ways, we too may be less-smart-than-the-average in different ways.

This perspective is still looking through a relative lens though, a form of stupidity (no offense intended, all people are a product of the flawed culture they are raised in).

How to make ALL people less stupid on an absolute scale is what humanity should set its sights on. Science was a good attempt, but that ideology too is stuck in a relativist framework.

Right. But the really smart (or perhaps more accurately, the really wise) know the areas in which they are stupid.

Tautologies can be useful, but are not always (say, when used in a reductive, low-dimensional manner) - they're a bit like a double edged sword.

This is maybe the least interesting idea I've come across in bonhoeffer's works? I'm not an expert on him but I was surprised to hear it since, as expressed, it doesn't match how I think of his worldview. I'm definitely curious enough to go read the original though.

I wonder when he wrote this. Later on he was famously involved in an attempted assassination of hitler and I doubt it's because he thought big H was a dumbass.

Then maybe we should decrease stupidity as much as we can? With things like good education for everyone?

I used to think so, but the end result is that both are a threat, so you really don't want either in your bunker during the zombie apocalypse. Evil is at least more predictable than Stupid and can be negotiated with; choosing only one I'd kick the idiots out.

Education doesn't confer Intellect, it confers knowledge. That's like giving an idiot a power tool. Now they can make messier mistakes at higher RPMs.

Education won't improve IQ scores. You would just have stupid people that have memorized more things.

Those two are not mutually exclusive.

Is this even a fair comparison? Cognitive abilities and emotional proclivity seem to be unrelated.

Wow, says someone executed by the evil in the end. RIP

There is a fine line between stupidity and enlightenment. The problem with this theory is determining who is the stupid, who is the enlightened, and who are the evil.

Trump voters think Biden supporters are stupid and being manipulated by evil. Biden voters think the same about Trump supporters! Arguments can be made for both sides and backed by data, both scientific and anecdotal.

Only time and history reveal the truth. It's really hard to determine in real time. Those that felt the earth was round were viewed and stupid and guided by evil at one point in histotry.

I think we’re making a mistake in conflating stupidity with irrationality as it’s the latter that's truly dangerous.

And irrationality doesn’t correlate with stupid in any meaningful way as people can be intelligent up to the point where some dogmatic instinctive belief means that their raw unfiltered emotions suddenly guides their decision process.

And lets be honest most actual genocides are committed by smart(often very moral) people acting on irrational fears or dreams of an utopian future that can only happen after the world is purified of some specific evil.

Selfish bastards aren't nearly as dangerous and fanatical zealots chasing some utopian dream but being fanatical don't mean your ignorant just that at one point your emotions take over from logical reasoning.

> And lets be honest most actual genocides are committed by smart(often very moral) people acting on irrational fears or dreams of an utopian future that can only happen after the world is purified of some specific evil.

People who commit genocide to try to establish a utopia are not moral. They may be "moral" - that is, they may claim adherence to a moral standard, and be able to articulate it and defend it - but they aren't moral. In D&D terms, they're lawful evil. But they think they're lawful good, because they are following their moral code. They never stop to think that, if their moral code calls for killing all these people, maybe they should be questioning their moral code.

But if doing evil(killing) is always the work of evil/amoral people can you actually have "good" soldiers? given that the work of a soldier at war involves killing, especially as modern mechanized armies use weapons that makes it nearly impossible to avoid collateral damage.

Im of cause using moral in the relative term here as following an "code of ethics" and acting in "the interest of the common good" as described in that code rather then simply acting from hedonistic/sadistic impulses.

The problem with absolute morality is that it's of absolutely no use to an rational actor dealing with an real world that don't conform to the idealized/simplified model that such moral codes tend to depend on for logical constituency.

Soldiers in war are rather different than genocide. The Geneva Convention makes this quite clear.

The problem with following a code of ethics rather than simply acting on hedonistic or sadistic impulse is that you can pick a code of ethics that lets you act on those impulses - even encourages or demands that you act on them. Worse, those who most want to be hedonistic or sadistic are most drawn to those kinds of codes of ethics.

I assert that if a code of ethics calls for you to commit genocide, that code of ethics is itself evil.

>They never stop to think that, if their moral code calls for killing all these people, maybe they should be questioning their moral code.

They certainly do think about it. The logic is invariably:

1. These are people who are holding back progress towards a future in which (according to my ideology) everybody is happy / equal / free / (insert vaguely defined ideal state here)

2. Therefore they must not want people to be happy / equal / free / (insert vaguely defined ideal state here)

3. Only an evil person would not want people to be happy / equal / free / (insert vaguely defined ideal state here)

4. Therefore they are evil

5. Therefore I am morally obligated to annihilate them

6. I am a Good Person because I am so devoted to ensuring that everybody becomes happy / equal / free / (insert vaguely defined ideal state here)

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