I dunno, maybe there is some wisdom I missed because I didn't finish it.
The doctors were likely not stupid according to the standard definition, but were harmful towards both their patients and themselves, thus stupid according to the new definition.
If the article didn't bother bringing up intelligence at all and instead focused on destructive behaviors, it would have made more sense.
Maybe like Eskimos have many words for snow, we need many words for stupid.
Or idiots should learn to use thesauruses. /s
The distinction is one of a failure of either imagination or effort. We have other words like ignorance, incompetence, impairment, and none of these require a lack of cognitive ability, though the latter implies diminished capacity.
Bombast, however, typically seeks to oversimplify for the sake of provocation.
In my area, we have at least two world-ranked labs. We have Nobel Laureates, driving around.
I encounter "stupid" drivers, all the time. I am one, too. I'm no Nobelate, but I'm smarter than the average bear.
I for example identified completely, and enjoyed the text. You might be thinking now "oh ok, another asshole to go with the first one", but let me try to justify my view. I believe that the stupid people he describes are not "accidentally" stupid, or simply people who don't know better. These are people who are willingly, intentionally stepping on other people's toes as a way of life. Some people are just like that: they don't see it as a fundamental, basic tenet of social life to respect others, solve problems through dialog and --- yes --- have empathy towards them. Some people think that bothering and pushing themselves (and their views) against others is their god-given right; as if manipulating those around you (in all the possible meanings of manipulation) is not only a valid attitude but possibly the only way to achieve anything. I don't feel bad to discriminate against such people. Actually, I think it's unfair and disrespectful to bundle them together with those who are honestly ignorant or dumb, who can't really help but do stupid things because they don't know better. If we can't have honest conversations about this, i.e. about the differentiation between these two groups, all we are doing is validating and reinforcing the behavior of the first group (by not holding them accountable).
Your parent is singling out a group that absolutely are NOT doing their best, not in a unobtrusive way anyway.
Your empathy is cute but does not align with reality and, if anything else, betrays how privileged your life is that you can afford it.
Case in point: I live in 5 minutes walking distance from a major road artery in the capital city I inhabit. I have saved both and my wife's lives by not trusting the green light and looking both directions, twice now, because my life experience has unequivocally proved to me that in fact everyone is not doing their best at all. They are a-holes who want to get back home as quickly as they can after work and it does not even cross their minds that they can forever destroy a family while doing so. I watched interviews after such... specimens (I am being very generous here)... are caught in (or after) the act. Of course they cry and exclaim how their life is over if they get indicted etc. etc., but they never thought about it beforehand. Classic.
These people don't deserve empathy. They deserve a lifetime ban to operate any machine more complex than a coffee maker. They belong on the fields or the mines. We definitely need more labor there and they forfeit their place in civilization by proving that they are unable to be trusted with something trivial, something that you and I can deal with while being sleep-deprived and dead-tired. Honestly, how difficult it is to operate a car and follow the rules? I had a friend driving instructor when I was 17 and he told me he'd give me a license any day after I drove him around the town 4-5 times. I am not bragging; I am actually saying that no, driving a car and following rules is so easy that I am convinced that I can train a macaque to do it well (and there are videos of monkeys driving golf carts pretty well out there, by the way).
Looking after your own arse is a better reaction so I'll disagree with your blanket empathy stance.
We should treasure subjective but honest content like this even if we don’t agree completely with it. Considering that most of what we see published online nowadays is targeted optimized content to make you feel or do something specific, and considering the future we’re heading towards, where much (maybe most?) of the content will be AI-generated , I treasure this very much.
This statement presupposes that there is a reason.
Many people simply act completely irrationally, so the only "reason" for their actions that one can come up with is the overly reductive "well, their neurons fired in such a way that resulted in them doing <whatever>".
I suspect avoiding generalities would assist discourse, so here's a concrete example to analyze: consider a senior (maybe even staff level) software developer, trying to write a loop. He writes a bunch of code, runs it (via tests, or executing the software itself), and finds that it doesn't work. So now he he changes the "<" to "<=". Still doesn't work. Now he changes that to ">". Still doesn't work. Now he changes that to ">=". Still doesn't work. Now he thinks "prime numbers are sometimes important, hm...", so he rounds the end of the range to the nearest prime number. Still doesn't work. Now he increments by two, instead of one. Still doesn't work. On a whim, now he changes the numeric type from an integer to a float, though he (of course) couldn't explain why that would change anything (all other things being equal in this scenario, it wouldn't). It still doesn't work. Etc, etc, etc. This sort of pattern continues for the next couple hours until the code happens to work for the scenarios tested (though is still incorrect and will eventually fail in production).
What is the "reason" for this behavior? Or, more importantly, why would someone regularly engage in such behavior? Why, as opposed to reasoning about the code, instead spend hours being superstitious, cargo culting, guess-and-checking, etc? Why never once consider pre-/post-conditions, loop invariants, sketch out a small informal proof by induction, etc?
Yes, some instances of bad decision making are due to unfortunate circumstances (stress, mental health, etc). But there are times where people simply demonstrate that they are, putting it kindly, not competent. That doesn't make them any less deserving of love and care, but they are still (with no negative sentiment or judgement intended) incompetent.
Even so, I find the author's stance to be off-putting. They write
> The first kind reads about "stupid people" and laughs.
And then go on to suggest that this is the "wrong" reaction, that stupid behavior is an insidious societal ill that should be treated with grave seriousness (obviously I'm exaggerating the author's words a bit). I find that laughing about circumstances which are both 1) outside your control, and 2) annoying is a much better response than stewing in my negative emotions and blaming the world for being incompetent. Better for my personal health, and better for those around me in that I'm not so bitter and unpleasant.
All that said, I love your closing line
> That doesn't make them any less deserving of love and care, but they are still (with no negative sentiment or judgement intended) incompetent.
This aligns very much with my personal perspective.
> "The remainder are simply stupid. This is approximately the composition of the organization writ large. The number of people at this organization who dislike their job, their stakeholders, and their salary but don't leave even though they no longer have the energy to work is astonishing, and that alone is enough to constitute stupidity as per Cipolla's definition."
Because, apparently, a person cannot be burned out and at the same time still need food, a home, or whatever they needs a salary for, not to mention they might be on temporary visas and cannot risk being unemployed or any of the other billions of totally sensible reasons keeping them from leaving their jobs.
So to answer your "maybe"... nope, no empathy, no wisdom.
>Then there is the third kind of person who, upon reading anything like the quote above, immediately insists that the complainant must secretly be the insufferable one, because actually smart people don't experience frustration for reasons unknown. The implication is that they're the smart ones because they live in a world where the ultimate marker of intelligence is not the ability to discern sound action from unsound, but instead a grotesque meta-intelligence which manifests as the inexplicable belief that no action is ever deserving of contempt, and any deviation from this belief is a humility problem. Their judgement usually comes with a vomitous attempt at a cutting remark which, coming from individuals best described as a sentient LinkedIn posts, invariably morphs into the flaccid "you aren't as smart as you think you are" or "you sound insufferable".
>I just wanted to take a moment to tell the third group to go fuck themselves.