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."
ikrima · 23h ago
I love this insanely insightful crystalization for me. I see you got a degree in IR and you used the word axiom so I'd refract back to you: reformulate stupidity as ignorance and assume a continuous conserved action exists between < stupidity-ignorance-malice | danger > so that your observable is a danger measure-metric.
Basically the reason ignorance is so danger is that it aliases between harmless stupidity and extreme evil, but it fails to trigger our collective species evil detection pattern coding which results in an unbelievable cascade evil failure mode.
In a sense, religion is a meta-epistemic solution to the binding problem of our collective subconscious.
I think if you apply the epistemic quantum mechanics to different logic modalities, you get some interesting insights!
Survived · 17h ago
I think Bonhoeffer was referring to an acquired or affected stupidity; a position adopted defensively to fit into a social or political situation.
If the truth becomes dangerous or unpopular, a decent defense is adopting stupidity. I think that is subtly different from ignorance, which implies never knowing, as opposed to a rejection of truth.
Like much cognitive dissonance, it can be easiest to live with if you just change your beliefs rather than trying to rail against it.
The danger is, once truth is denied, reality becomes disconnected and atrocity much more abstract.
Maybe there is a better name yet for the phenomenon.
jrvarela56 · 21h ago
> Basically the reason ignorance is so danger is that it aliases between harmless stupidity and extreme evil, but it fails to trigger our collective species evil detection pattern coding which results in an unbelievable cascade evil failure mode.
Great summary. The problem with ignorance is that you are more likely to forgive the perpetrator whereas a malicious actor would have been cutoff once detected. You then stick with the ignorant for way longer and suffer loses beyond what a malicious actor would've likely caused. This is my impression from relationships at work.
m_herrlich · 18h ago
Well said. But 'fear of God' only works until religion itself is hijacked.
programjames · 1d ago
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.
SoftTalker · 1d ago
Does this hold true for most multiplayer online games? I don't play, but my kids could often be heard yelling "why would you do that?!?" when they had a game going.
ironman1478 · 1d ago
This is really common in fighting games. Many okay players will get beat by really bad players who are really random. Better players in these games play in such a way as to mitigate effects of the randomness of their opponent.
programjames · 11h ago
That isn't a fair ranking. Some people are more idealist than you, and a priori want to believe others will play well. If you stick them in a lobby full of smashy noobs, they may not live long enough to update on those beliefs (within the single game). Of course, the same happens in reverse: if you go into a game assuming everyone is a smashy noob, and they're actually good at the game, you're going to end up in the losing position. The rate of mistakes changes the trembling-hand equilibria. The best players will, of course, figure out reputations for the other players as the game progresses, but calling some just 'okay' and others 'better' because they initialize the reputations to different values is not fair.
Think about this: you've probably driven a car to get from Point A to Point B before. If you existed in a society where people were constantly making mistakes, in the sense of crashing their cars several orders of magnitude more often, driving a car to get from Point A to Point B is no longer a good strategy. But it usually is a good, if not the best, move you can make right now, because people aren't making mistakes that frequently.
Here's another example: marriage (long-term relationships). Perhaps not all extra-marital affairs are mistakes, but a significant proportion of them are. If too many people are making these mistakes, leading to messy divorces, it's no longer worth it to even consider dating in the first place.
anal_reactor · 1d ago
> 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.
I had a period of my life where I read a lot of "you're not special" on reddit, but then I finally understood that the ability to think logically on the most basic level already makes me very special. After spending some time with people from lower social classes and genuinely trying to bond with them I became elitist. These people just don't fucking think.
elzbardico · 20h ago
The years made me realize that too, but there's also plenty of stupid people in upper-classes. And usually, contrary to the first ones, I can't escape having to deal with those.
anal_reactor · 17h ago
That's true.
rukuu001 · 1d ago
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
m_herrlich · 18h ago
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'.
webprofusion · 1d ago
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.
M95D · 23h ago
Did you actually read the article? It gives a clear unambiguous definition of what "stupid" is.
calrain · 1d ago
> 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.
"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.
smitty1e · 1d ago
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].
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."
Basically the reason ignorance is so danger is that it aliases between harmless stupidity and extreme evil, but it fails to trigger our collective species evil detection pattern coding which results in an unbelievable cascade evil failure mode.
In a sense, religion is a meta-epistemic solution to the binding problem of our collective subconscious.
I think if you apply the epistemic quantum mechanics to different logic modalities, you get some interesting insights!
If the truth becomes dangerous or unpopular, a decent defense is adopting stupidity. I think that is subtly different from ignorance, which implies never knowing, as opposed to a rejection of truth.
Like much cognitive dissonance, it can be easiest to live with if you just change your beliefs rather than trying to rail against it.
The danger is, once truth is denied, reality becomes disconnected and atrocity much more abstract.
Maybe there is a better name yet for the phenomenon.
Great summary. The problem with ignorance is that you are more likely to forgive the perpetrator whereas a malicious actor would have been cutoff once detected. You then stick with the ignorant for way longer and suffer loses beyond what a malicious actor would've likely caused. This is my impression from relationships at work.
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.
Think about this: you've probably driven a car to get from Point A to Point B before. If you existed in a society where people were constantly making mistakes, in the sense of crashing their cars several orders of magnitude more often, driving a car to get from Point A to Point B is no longer a good strategy. But it usually is a good, if not the best, move you can make right now, because people aren't making mistakes that frequently.
Here's another example: marriage (long-term relationships). Perhaps not all extra-marital affairs are mistakes, but a significant proportion of them are. If too many people are making these mistakes, leading to messy divorces, it's no longer worth it to even consider dating in the first place.
I had a period of my life where I read a lot of "you're not special" on reddit, but then I finally understood that the ability to think logically on the most basic level already makes me very special. After spending some time with people from lower social classes and genuinely trying to bond with them I became elitist. These people just don't fucking think.
> 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
This is a good definition, one we need to talk about more and not associate it with IQ or other social indicators.
https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Von_der_Dummheit
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...
There are 8.2 billion of them, so I think they scale just fine.
But look how hard it is to wage peace in the Ukraine...