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Comment by openrisk | Hacker News Reader

People can pretend to be stupid if it suits them.

People can seem to be stupid if their reasons for action are not known.

People can't help but be stupid if deprived of factual information or if presented with false or confusing information.

Finally, all people are not trained to avail of the mental tools that civilization has honed over millennia to fight stupidity.

In the end "stupidity" is a social phenomenon, deeply connected to the nature of information exchange between individuals in society.

Transparency about the state of the world and the internal mental states of people and education (information processing capacity) can reduce what we commonly call stupidity.

But its a relative game. Full transparency and infinite processing capacity is not possible for human brains.

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A very humane post, thank you.

I'd argue that the universal quantifier "all people are not trained" should be changed. Surely we can say that some people are trained in at least some of the tools to fight stupidity we, humanity as a whole, developed over the millennia. So a phrase like "not all people are trained" seems to be more on the mark to me.

Beyond that I have little to say of substance, but I am curious. How do you fit "stupid actions", like putting your cat into a microwave oven, racing downhill on a gravel road in a shopping cart, or not running away from a blazing fire, into this framework? Is this a failure of reasoning, and therefore lack of training? (Training understood as guided or unguided learning) Is all stupidity avoidance empirical or are there stupidities (as an ontological object, LOL) that could be avoided on first principles?

Recklessness seems like a good case study of misunderstood "stupidity".

The fact that younger people tend to be more prone to it is already an important clue. On the one hand their need to stand out in a competitive society creates an internal state that outsiders may not be able to appreciate. On the other hand their ability to assess the actual risk (take a calculated risk) may not be fully developed. E.g. unless trained formally (mock circumstances, games, history lessons, whatever), people will "train" simply through their own lived experience which in most cases is woefully inadequate for the range of situations they might face.

This is better, thank you "not all people are trained" - agree, it is a generalization , we are trained to an extent - I guess a curriculum on stupidity would raise the bar of awareness.

Ha - stupid actions were in the dumb and dumber category which I avoided, but would be fun on a course in Stupidity

Logically, the universal quantifier and a negated existential quantifier are equivalent.

True, hence we did not transform, but replace the quantifier. The original statement "all people are not trained" was false and we wanted to make a true statement. There are people who are trained, thus we say "there exist people who are not trained", which allows us to say "there exist people who are trained". Of course, this is not an equivalent statement to the original statement.

> People can pretend to be stupid if it suits them.

> People can seem to be stupid if their reasons for action are not known.

> People can't help but be stupid if deprived of factual information or if presented with false or confusing information.

I put this in my fortune file and in the current signature. It explains so succinctly why we are so often frustrated in the workspace.

Very well said - "all people are not trained to avail of the mental tools that civilization has honed over millennia to fight stupidity."

Sorry, I do not get one expression: what do you mean with «all people are not trained to avail of the mental tools»? Because some (many) people do train themselves and are trained on the mental tools etc. The expression as I read it seems to counter that.

"All people are not trained" can either mean "no people are trained" or, less commonly, "it's not true that all people are trained." Using it the second way can be confusing because it doesn't really mean what the plain reading says, but I think that's what they're doing.

The second way is the antiquated british english meaning of the phrase.

It's got a kind of "all but" deal going on: two ways to interpret it.

Really annoying how the English language can't get quantifying phrases right.

In addition, everyone is stupid sometimes, especially me.

Everyone is stupid sometimes. I am not stupid sometimes.

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