11–20 of 20 posts
Before you start categorising yourself or other people, you might want to read up on the Dunning-Kruger effect, The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it". The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much high…
Stupid people usually are a burden. But for startups they're an asset. We make complicated things so simple and dangerous things so easy that those morons out there can use them without hurting others and themselves (too much). The process of creating a solution for the non-geeks out there means: "Dumbing down." It's a pain. And the price they pay heals our intellectual wounds. :)
Alcohol consumed, location, whether I'm among friends or not, etc.
Stupid people usually are a burden. But for startups they're an asset. We make complicated things so simple and dangerous things so easy that those morons out there can use them without hurting others and themselves (too much). The process of creating a solution for the non-geeks out there means: "Dumbing down." It's a pain. And the price they pay heals our intellectual wounds. :)
My wife likes to say: the problem with making something idiot-proof is that they will always invent a bigger idiot.
The stuff about 'bandits with overtones of intelligence' brings to mind Coasian analyses -- we really don't want to prohibit such net-positive banditry, just arrange side payments. So it didn't surprise me to find at the end that the piece was written by an economics professor.
His laws are too rigid. I gravitate between the areas on his chart, depending on various factors. Alcohol consumed, location, whether I'm among friends or not, etc.
The stupid people often believe they're pursuing their own gain, but are too ignorant and misguided to do so.
In practice, I think the bandits are more dangerous. In a corrupt and declining society such as ours, they end up running the show.
Stupid people are like the magnetic charges in a block of iron. Because their stupidity is fairly random, they tend to cancel each other out under normal conditions, and therefore are not very dangerous (except to themselves) on a macroscopic level. When those charges become aligned and they now have macroscopic pull (as we see in the modern "religious right" and the Tea Party movement) they become scary, but that can only happen when they've been manipulated by (crafty, and likely intelligent at least in the IQ sense) bandits.
What pointless drivel. The author starts off by being blatantly offensive to the point where I wondered if he was trolling. Then, as if to excuse himself with a "ahhh! got you all!" he drops this gem halfway down the article: > "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." Thanks, if we're going to go aroun…
Jealousy: your wife is beautiful, I'm going to kill you and take her.
Envy: your farm is very prosperous. I know I don't have the skills to run one that well, so I'm just going to destroy your's.
Envy is alive and very healthy, and as a result a whole lot of a whole lot of societies aren't so healthy.
We, as people who can do stuff others can't necessarily even conceive of, are prime targets of envy.