Theory of Stupidity [pdf]

Fascinating - I just listened to Rufus Fears' lecture on Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison before opening HN.

Personally, I find Bonhoeffer's premises are easily accepted - 1) stupidity is not an intellectual defect and 2) stupidity as a more dangerous adversary than malice. It follows that liberation, not instruction, is necessary to overcome stupidity. "The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity."

What I don't align with is the consequence that "stupidity surpasses malice in its danger." Malice, and only intentional malice, is the evil that was present in his day and remains so. I think there's an inherent snobbishness of modern philosophy readers who have a surface relation to this axiom, thinking that it means that, "oh, everyone is just stupid and unmotivated towards learning, and that's why I'm better than them."

If you've ever played Risk online, this becomes obvious, very quickly. The worst players to have around are not your enemies, but the stupid ones. They'll randomly block your troops from attacking mutual enemies, accidentally bait you into attacking other players ("attack red together?" . "okay sure!" . hits three of their troops, after you hit thirty), not hold bonuses but not let you hold them either, waste all their troops on a useless endeavour, feeding the game to a third player, and so many more blunders. Sometimes, you really want to work with them, because they've tried to be nice to you, much more so than the rest of the players. Often, they fail miserably and drag you down with them. I'll take a smart enemy any day. Usually smart players don't want to be your enemy, unless you've done something to provoke them (oops... it's more fun). Even then, they'll ally with you in a heartbeat if you can take a mutually beneficial action.

Something sobering to keep in mind is that the vast majority of people have the logical and mathematical capabilities of a good ten-year-old. There are ten-year-old chess grandmasters, USAJMO qualifiers, or to be less extreme, ten-year-olds that have a solid understanding of algebra and an intuition for proofs. Most people do not, and rely on heuristics or intuitions for everything. They do not even realize you can prove something, except with "it feels or seems right". It isn't because they're mentally incapable of learning the skill, it's because they never bothered to, or didn't think it was important.

Some interesting points:

> Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

> The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them.

> And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem

> it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere ... infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. ... The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.

> ... one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like

> This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain

> In the 1970s, Carlo Cipolla, a social psychologist, developed FIVE LAWS OF STUPIDITY. The term itself, he said, wasn’t a description of intellectual acuity, but of social responsibility

People don't scale. This is graphically implied in Maslow's Hierarchy[1], shown as a pyramid.

The area of the abstractions occurring up the individual's pyramid is dwarfed by the area of the base needs.

The more people you consider, the more the basic needs for e.g. food and shelter dominate.

Finely nuanced abstractions about rights and aesthetics? Don't waste your breath on more than the substet of the population whose heads linger around the top of the pyramid.

Someone else who understood this non-scalability point was Gustav Le Bon[2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd:_A_Study_of_the_Po...

  The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity

If find this closing remark rather ironic in the context of the rest of the text.

What a great read, it reminds me of "True Believer" by the great Eric Hoffer. "Stupid" as a word is a translation choice, it would be more effective if they had chosen a less derogatory term. 'True believer' would work better than 'stupid person'.

This is mainly using "stupidity" as a catch all term for mass disagreement/apathy (often motivated by bias, mixed with ignorance) in the face of facts, plus the lack of applied reasoning and empathy - simply not thinking, despite having the capacity or simply not caring because it doesn't affect you or align with your bias.

> A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person, or to a group of persons, while deriving no gain for himself, and possibly incurring losses.

This is a good definition, one we need to talk about more and not associate it with IQ or other social indicators.

The Five Laws of Stupidity referenced: https://ia903402.us.archive.org/17/items/01-miscellaneous-mu...

The original text in german can be found at

https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Von_der_Dummheit

From TFA:

    "Because the stupid person's actions do not conform to the rules of rationality, it follows that we are generally caught by surprise by the attack. We cannot mount a rational defense, because the attack itself lacks any rational structure. [...] dealing with or associating with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."

    [...] We think it’s an issue of education or life-experience — that they’re victims of circumstance, and not innately stupid. Thus we help them rise to power, as with Hitler and Stalin, even allowing them to make our regulations and laws, and to enforce them. But in truth, this never accrues to the welfare of a society; instead it leads to its downfall."

Not being able to "read the room" is in some way like not being able to understand compiler errors. Such a person is capable of offering limited logic, but it won't scale.

Stupidity is just a tradeoff in decision making.