The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1987) [pdf]
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The 'Basic Laws of Human Stupidity' essay by Carlo Cipolla is shared and discussed on HN, sparking reflections on the nature of stupidity and its impact on society.
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Yeah, this lines up with my personal description of stupid: incapable of achieving one's own goals because of stubbornness, mean-spiritedness, pride, persistent misunderstanding, inability or unwillingness to learn. A danger to themself and others. Usually and unfortunately coupled with overconfidence.
This is stark contrast to being merely ignorant (lacking knowledge, naive or sheltered) and dumb (incapable of learning or grasping complex subjects).
Ignorance is generally fixable and with some capacity, dumbness too. But stupidity is a special kind of bad.
My point is that even intelligent people can be incredibly stupid and Dunning-Kruger can still apply (because they know they are intelligent and are too arrogant to question their positions)
I call those people skilled instead of intelligent.
But we also have self-awareness. Stupid can be de-stupefied through learning. Whereas you can't really change your race or blood type.
This is a characteristic of spite. Maybe spitefulness is stupid. But true spitefulness is a whole other level to watch out for.
--Seneca
The modern nuance on "infirm" makes that seem more relevant. aside from the unintentional cruelty..
As an outside observer spitefulness and stupidity may appear the same, but the stupid person may have had good intentions and no ill-will towards those they harm.
I don't think so. The motivation behind spiteful actions is to purposely cause losses to others, and the gain derived from this action is rejoicing on other people's losses. This implies having and displaying power over others, and exercising this power to establish themselves even with so little gain.
Very different than deriving no gain.
Now, most people would say that Bob is acting out of spite if he rejects Alice's offer, because he's causing Alice losses and he gains nothing, and the benefit he receives is that Alice is made sad by this. Is that a fair interpretation, though? He believes that he's acting out of a moral obligation to screw over someone who themself is (in his mind) acting unjustly. He's valuing punishing someone that he feels is breaking a social contract greater than the 100 dollars that he would otherwise have. What do you call what he is doing in this situation if not spite? And if he is acting out of a principled objection to an unfair situation, does it become something other than spite? And if it's actually principled, why does the principle seem to melt away when the offer is $7000 to $3000?
I feel like spite is a huge motivator behind a lot of cultural issues nowadays but it can only come from people who feel as if they are coming from a place of weakness or victimization. There is always a moral indignation. The gratification is in seeing their vision of justice meted out. It isn't always a psychopathic, sadistic behavior but it can be in those cases where a vision of justice is distorted and psychopathic. Consider this: isn't imprisoning people often a form, ultimately, of societal spite? In isolation it may be cheaper to just give petty criminals whatever they want rather than paying the cost for them being jailed. Amortized cost, it's probably a lot cheaper to pay a drunkard's taxi home from the bar every single time he goes drinking than to lock him in jail for 3 months for a second DUI. Is spite the reason that we don't just give him that? Again, the justice thing.
That’s a good thought experiment. Let me add the terminology of Francis Fukuyama’s “demand for dignity”—-seems to go even closer to the nerve.
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2019/02/11/ep209-1-fukuyam...
Now, we can argue that playing negative-sum games is "stupid". And in most contexts of the modern human society such heuristic would be correct, but I would be really careful with a sweeping generalization, otherwise instead of a proper understanding of the underlying behavioral motivations you are likely to devolve into primitive explanations of someone being "stupid" or even "evil".
Harming others correlates with personality disorders. Personality disorders - especially Cluster B - correlate with poor impulse control, an emotional rather than a rational orientation, addictions, unreliability and dishonesty, and general inconsistency.
Disordered people with high IQ and EQ tend to get away with disordered relationships for longer. But it's rare to live one of these lives with zero consequences. So these types are at least as likely to go through catastrophic collapse as to get away with their chaos and dysfunction.
-trump a B2 (aims to enrich himself, while overall a net negative to society)
-his voters are helpless (by voting for him, they don't actually gain anything)
-and intelligent people, including myself, are mostly sitting on the sidelines, save attending a no kings protest.
A few are valiantly fighting (filing court cases to check trumps power grabs, newsom pushing prop 50, journalists / media folks calling out the emperor has no clothes)
The only way this country gets saved from Trump is either the intelligent get off their duff and start fighting, or the helpless wake up and turn on Trump
According to the model I would class legal efforts and some media efforts as intelligent or banditry (media is self serving; in the end it loves Trump for the headlines), and a protest as maybe intelligent but maybe also helpless.
Inarguably intelligent might be something like following ICE movements and warning neighborhoods when they're coming, or establishing mutual aid food systems for people whose SNAP is about to run out. Or wasting ICE time somehow through civil disobedience to reduce their effectiveness.
Some combination of "helpless", "lazy", and "stupid", like the narrator in Niemöller's poem "First They Came." [1]
It is to do nothing except to fret (and to post on social media), despite knowing that eventually no one will be spared by energetically unethical monsters.
[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
There's at least two meanings for stupid. One is someone who is not intelligent, and it's just kind of an intrinsic thing. The other is someone who does something stupid, irrespective of their intelligence. This is a conditional attribute that depends on available information / motivation / laziness.
Point being a 2x2 matrix is just an oversimplification of real life and also wtf are the axes here???
I must be missing the joke here - those are not exclusive categories, and there are only two of them.
> wtf are the axes here???
It's explained in the text just below the drawing....
Highly recommend spending some time in the Whole Earth publication archives if you haven't had the chance.
Kevin Kelly is still writing through The Technium [0], which might scratch some of the itch but is more an island than a colony like Whole Earth was.
Time for a hippie futurist revival?
[0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/
I mailed off for so much weird stuff from WEC ... stuff I'd never known about before ... from all over the hemisphere. Unusual teas and bakeries, kinnikinnick, oddish books, even some chair-caning materials (used on one VERY old chair). Sometimes forgotten about because of "Please allow 3 to 6 weeks for delivery."
Reminds me of people supporting the senseless bombings and genocide in the middle east.
The genocidal arguments frame them as solutions to long-standing problems, including labelling them as a "final solution". This is clearly an attempt to frame it as something where they derive a gain.
Flaize = flail + lose. You're flailing and you're losing (and taking other people down with you).
"The world is full of flaizers, non-stop flaizing," encompasses laws 1 and 3.
Flaizers are the lower left quadrant, what original author refers to as "stupid" — causing harm to themselves and others with no benefit for any parties.
Yeah I know stop trying to make fetch a thing
Are there real life example of this? Or does anyone that scams people richer than them qualifies maybe?
I think it’s fine to classify things like this. It doesn’t preclude the existence of other dimensions. It limits the analysis and makes it easier to understand because the point gets lost when you classify things on an n-dimensional spectrum.
“Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff.
“The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up ninety percent of every army and are suited to routine duties.
“Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions.
“One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.”
> One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking
Oh, so true.
Which is both a joke (turning virtue on its head) and kinda true, in that laziness makes you automate things, impatience spurs you to make things faster, and hubris spurs you to make sure that they work.
(I'm working right now on a problem my hubris caused me; a variable stored in a database seems to have different values depending on what part of my code it is queried from. Days I've spent trying to understand what's going on...)
Pride also leads us to make our work more robust, so that it "always works well."
Thus, two fundamental principles are respected: optimization and robustness.
Is your problem related to various parts of the code being in distinct transactions? Can you try a version having all parts commiting then immediately synchronizing with each other, then SELECT'ing?
If you have a difficult task give it to a lazy man — he will find an easier way to do it.”
― Arthur Bloch
In observing the current dark political period, we see clearly that the energetic but stupid person can be entrusted to cause damage. He is a type of zealot or fanatic.
If you can marshal groups of such people, especially at arm's length from your own reputation and assets, such groups of energetic but stupid people can do significant damage.
I think I would re-order the Laws as stated:
THE THIRD (AND GOLDEN) BASIC LAW _ 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. Human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. (The four categories are H, I, B, S.)
combines with
THE SECOND BASIC LAW _ The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
leads to
THE FOURTH BASIC LAW _ Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
leads to
THE FIRST BASIC LAW _ Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
leads to
THE FIFTH BASIC LAW _ A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. The corollary of the Law is that: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
According to the source article, he would clearly be a Bandit ... in combination with the other categories.
I could go on. My point is that Trump is really only smart in one area, which he thinks makes him smart in all areas. He isn't: he's dumb in those other domains.
This article has many examples: https://afterdarkconfessions.com/acting-dumb-on-purpose/
And as the Jan 6 example suggests, it's been weaponized in the US lately. It encourages tribalism and discourages intellectual engagement.
Darkly real.
How is being born stupid and act of providence? How can parents willingly have the foresight to spawn a stupid person? Isn’t it rather the lack of providence by the parents?
A great way to detect stupidity is by finding the people who use the biggest words they can, all the time.
(There is genius at work in this thesis. It came round about by way of reader Sam Keen, who sent us a thin gray monograph printed in Bologna, Italy. The trail eventually led to Carlo M. Cipolla, the author, who is currently Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley - Kevin Kell)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_M._Cipolla
Motivation for stupid people is often an imaginary gain. They think they do something for society or themselves, but the payment is only in emotions. From the outside this looks stupid, but for the stupid the gains are often very measurable feelings.
In the end the psychology of stupidity isn't that different from normal rational psychology. Adding emotions to capitalistic thinking can also be used to explain "Stupidity in large groups". The stupid get good vibes from others around while just causing a total loss for everyone. Maybe this is a starting point for counter measures...
I think the most dangerous people out there are the good helping stupids that just want to help - and just make everything worse. They get a lot of gain from the emotions that they did something good.
Yet, shows the weakness the greatest while wielding its strength: thru its American people.
-- Kurt Gödel
https://las-leyes-basicas-de-la-estupidez-humana.pages.dev/
Stupid = Spite (lose / lose); Helpless = Altruism (lose / win); Bandit = Selfishness (win / lose); Intelligent = Cooperation (win / win)
The OP "Laws":
Everyone underestimates the number of spiteful individuals in circulation.
The probability that a certain person be spiteful is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
... and so on through ...
A spiteful person is more dangerous than a selfish person.
A stupid person is a person who thinks other people are stupid.