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Sometimes stupidity is indistinguishable from pure evilness. That's why I believe it's more practical to focus on removing inefficiency instead of corruption.
I suspect that humanities worst moments come from a combination of evil and stupidity, even if that stupidity is just a failure to predict what your actions will actually mean for others.
Just in case, I will critique in the spirit of the original article:
The first immutable law of madeupistan is that this article makes no sense. If one quantifies by Q the amount of sense this article doesn't make, and divides it by L, which is how badly the sense it doesn't make is, one can plot the result on a graph, with axes and everything like in science.
As you can see by even a cursory examination of the diagram, anything can be positioned from "scotsman" to "no scotsman" on the Y axis, and "sense" to "no sense" on the X axis. This explains the fundamental nature of mankind.
The second immutable law of madeupistan is that your position on the scotsmanian axis is irreversibly determined at birth. You may be confused initially by the observation that even someone with a high degree of scotsmanity will sometimes act like a non-scotsman and vice-versa. Never fear, that is explained by the graph.
The fourth immutable law (and, by extension, the third) is that anything can be proven by decomposition into a punnett square.
The fifth immutable law is that once someone has been determined to be a scotsman, they will take actions without any basis in rationality whatsoever (I will heretoafter call these actions "Just So" actions). Note, though, that as per the second law, sometimes they will not.
The danger of these Just So actions is inexplicably large, and it behooves any non-scotsmen among us to immediately seek out and prevent Just So actions by dangerous scotsmen. If we do not do this, society will collapse.[1]
[1] Myself, 2011, Journal of Just So Information
This is trash of the worst kind: fatuous nonsense wrapped in pseudoscience. Please tell me this is a parody and it's gone over my head. Just in case, I will critique in the spirit of the original article: The first immutable law of madeupistan is that this article makes no sense. If one quantifies by Q the amount of sense this article doesn't make, and divides it by L, which is how badly the sense it doesn't make is,…
I come across this maybe once a year while browsing the internet, and I'm always impressed. The author's ability to get just the right mix of resigned dry wit so he doesn't come across as cocky or a jerk or a defeatist... it's rather incredible. There's gems in there, too - > 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 incur…
but I agree with the conclusion of the article. It is an important measure of a society whether banditry, helplessness, and stupidity are venerated.
This is trash of the worst kind: fatuous nonsense wrapped in pseudoscience. Please tell me this is a parody and it's gone over my head. Just in case, I will critique in the spirit of the original article: The first immutable law of madeupistan is that this article makes no sense. If one quantifies by Q the amount of sense this article doesn't make, and divides it by L, which is how badly the sense it doesn't make is,…
I mean - obviously the author hasn't done the sort of empirical work discovering the amount of stupid people in each kind of social class. It was at this point in the text that people like me laughed and people like you required a laugh-track.
It's interesting though. I meet dudes like you that respond to something that for some reason irks them with:
"It's not formulated to the highest standards of intellectual rigour - and so is worst kind of crap"
I have to wonder what really is provoking the hyperbole. Because it hardly seems warranted to me.
Just a suggestion - but maybe you might profit from stepping back from this a little. Plenty of contributions to a discourse can still possess insight without all the trappings of intellectual rigour.
This is trash of the worst kind: fatuous nonsense wrapped in pseudoscience. Please tell me this is a parody and it's gone over my head. Just in case, I will critique in the spirit of the original article: The first immutable law of madeupistan is that this article makes no sense. If one quantifies by Q the amount of sense this article doesn't make, and divides it by L, which is how badly the sense it doesn't make is,…
The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate. We could always start with 100% and see how it goes. I suspect this upper bound method was applied by more than one writer. Never mind the quibbles, it's good to see this one back. As the footnote says, there's genius in…
Especially as the two supporting points (a: unpleasant letdowns; b: frequent bothering ``at the wrong moment'') are quite subjective.
To quote the venerable fortune(6):
Renning's Maxim:
Man is the highest animal. Man does the classifying.This is trash of the worst kind: fatuous nonsense wrapped in pseudoscience. Please tell me this is a parody and it's gone over my head. Just in case, I will critique in the spirit of the original article: The first immutable law of madeupistan is that this article makes no sense. If one quantifies by Q the amount of sense this article doesn't make, and divides it by L, which is how badly the sense it doesn't make is,…
Well - I think it's part parody. I mean - obviously the author hasn't done the sort of empirical work discovering the amount of stupid people in each kind of social class. It was at this point in the text that people like me laughed and people like you required a laugh-track. It's interesting though. I meet dudes like you that respond to something that for some reason irks them with: "It's not formulated to the highe…
I suspect that you are falling victim to hyperbole yourself with "highest standards of intellectual rigour". I don't expect a double-blind randomised trial or publication in Nature, but surely when someone says to us "this is the truth", we must ask "why?"
If the author had said "I think that people are born stupid or clever, and stupid people are very dangerous, so we should watch out for them." I would disagree, but not loudly - it is, after all, a matter of opinion unless someone has facts to bring to the table.
But when someone dresses up their conjecture in make-believe laws and pseudo-scientific formulae, they are being deceptive. Perhaps a more acceptable thing to do would be dispassionately describe the flaws in his argument, but the deception made me angry and I don't see anger as necessarily wrong. I don't believe I wrote anything inaccurate, or anything I wouldn't say if the article was brought up among my friends.
Frankly, I'm surprised I was the only one. Perhaps it's just the wrong crowd.