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Comment by TrevorJ | Hacker News Reader

"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."

-That's the definition I'm using. Lack of competence or knowledge can both be causes of stupidity, but that's not really the point I'm making.

My point is that whatever the cause, stupidity is not a constant. It is situational and also varies over time. Smart people act stupidly from time to time as well. Additionally, when you take an action that is a gamble, sometimes you lose out even if the odds where in your favor. That's not stupidity, even though by this strict definition of the term it could be defined as such since loss has occurred with no benefit.

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One cannot be purely stupid or purely intelligent all the time. There are times when someone is simply standing around in the restroom brushing his teeth, for instance. This doesn't change anything about the accuracy of the core thesis as applied to life in general.

Mostly, what I've seen of "stupid" behavior (in Cipolla's use of the term "stupid") is the result of such motivations as spite. Spite appears to be one of the strongest motivators in human nature, and is purely destructive. It is, at its best, designed to not do the spiteful party any harm -- but no thought is put into doing oneself any good. It is often veiled in justifications related to evening some imaginary scales between a "bandit" and a "helpless" victim, but all too often it is simply spite beneath the surface -- in short, it is a special case of stupidity (and my own least favorite form of stupidity, because of its petty malevolence).

This has little or nothing to do with IQ and other conventional definitions of "intelligence" and "stupidity". It is, as I've said above, about patterns of behavior (and, to an extent, the motivations that produce those patterns).

"One cannot be purely stupid or purely intelligent all the time."

That pretty much sums up what I was saying :) That's why I take issue with labeling people as 'stupid people' because like anything, it is rarely as cut-and-dried as that.

At the risk of being recursive, I'm going to invoke Heinlen's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

In that context, "stupidity" also means ignorance, which should avoid actual recursion.

That is, I don't think most stupid behavior is caused by spite (malice) but rather obliviousness (ignorance).

I think indifference factors in a lot as well. A lot of times people aren't actively wishing harm on others, but by the same token they won't change there own behavior to mediate harm that may be done to others because of their actions.

Yes, that's a word I was looking for but couldn't come up with.

Actually, it's Hanlon's Razor:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Quite right. Naked malevolence and self-destructiveness seem to me to be the two sides of Mr. Cipolla's stupidity coin. There are a host of bad emotional states that are characterized by naked malevolence and self-destruction.

To the extent that emotional forces are the primary mediators (as opposed to purely rational ones), I think that Cipolla's stupidity correlates well with the notion of "emotional intelligence" that people talk about nowadays.

I mostly refer to spite by its biblical handle "bitterness". I agree with you, that it's one of the most common and powerful emotional handicaps.

Of course not, no one COULD be completely stupid or completely helpless all the time or they'd be DEAD. And similarly I doubt, but it isn't as obviously impossible, that no one is bandit or intelligent all the time.

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