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Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

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Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#41

Post by oblio »

duncanawoods wrote: post #20
Joker_vD wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the actual solutions were the shock troops, you know? The tanks and the anti-tank defence kinda reached parity by the middle of the WW2, so tanks became rather ineffective at breaking through the field defences. Solution? Specifically trained infantry groups that would infiltrate and destroy the fortifications, Germans used it since the early WW2. And here's a particularly interesting document from the Soviet sid…

Given the Ludendorff offensive failed I don't think you can call stormtroopers alone a solution. High casualties, outrunning supply and obtaining territory that is hard to defend which weakens your overall position. I don't agree that tanks had reached some ineffective impasse. Quoting wikipedia: > By 1918, tank capabilities and tactics improved, their numbers increased and, combined with French tanks, finally helped…

You're kind of talking past each other :-)

He's saying that tanks became less effective during WW2, at first offense was overpowering defense thanks to tanks, airplanes and improved logistics. During WW2 defense started getting closer to offense, at least on land (air power improved greatly and it was the thing which facilitated all major offensives).

For example during the Battle of Kursk German tanks couldn't break through the Soviet defense because they didn't have air superiority. The Soviets (and almost everyone else) had learned by that point how to organize an effective anti-tank defense.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#42

Post by himinlomax »

Contemporary historians of WW1 such as Michael Neiberg object to calling actors of that war stupid. See this interview where he mentions "the stupid box": http://rorotoko.com/interview/20110822_michael_neiberg_on_da...

A lot of the seemingly obvious explanations for that war is just wrong, and tainted by the official narrative that came later. One example among many: French revanchisme about Alsace-Lorraine did not factor in starting the war, or at least not significantly and very indirectly. It was a hot topic in the 1890s, but that had been almost entirely absent from the political debate for 20 years by the start of the war. The reason you might think otherwise is simply that it was used during the war as a motivation to conjure up patriotic morale.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#43

Post by denton-scratch »

stareatgoats wrote: post #7
acituan wrote: post #4

I wish the author[1] read a bit more about the science of wisdom and foolishness before ruining their good intuition with a stubbornly limited perspective. > Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pi…

> the science of wisdom and foolishness I had no idea there was such a thing. Care to link to some relevant resources?

The OP seems to be coming from a Buddhist perspective. If that's correct, then I think he's got the wrong end of the stick; the mental impairment he is contrasting with "wisdom" is usually referred to in Buddhist literature as "ignorance", which means a propensity to ignore things, to deliberately refuse to know.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#44

Post by tokai »

jdkfglkjh34 wrote: post #34
Animats wrote: post #18

The author may be onto something. Or they may have had one good idea and are now trying to make it fit too many problems. WWI did have moments of extreme stupidity. But the real problem was that, for the first time since castles vs. troops without cannon, defense was stronger than offense. Machine guns, barbed wire, and trenches could resist most attacks. When that wasn't enough, both sides had plenty of railroad cap…

Guerilla warfare is a consequence of modern ethical standards, not technology. One side can "force a decision" by executing non-combatants. Such policies were par for the course in the first half of the 20th century.

Guerilla warfare is older than conventional warfare.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#45

Post by jdkfglkjh34 »

tokai wrote: post #44
jdkfglkjh34 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guerilla warfare is a consequence of modern ethical standards, not technology. One side can "force a decision" by executing non-combatants. Such policies were par for the course in the first half of the 20th century.

Guerilla warfare is older than conventional warfare.

I used the present tense.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#46

Post by eric4smith »

Stupidity is one of humanity's greatest virtues.

Because it allows entrepreneurs to come up with solutions for the "stupid" that simplifies problems.

An even greater virtue is "laziness".

Trillions of dollars are made off the laziness of people not wanting to do one thing or another. Isn't humanity great?

I'm only saying, see it as an opportunity and not a problem. Because it is what is it, and we can never change it. Best to live in a world of what "is" than what we would like it to be.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#47

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

My working definition of stupidity is making poor predictions that lead to self-harm. The more stupid the predictions, the more extreme the self-harm.

I'm not sure trying to improvise a way through a novel kind of conflict counts as stupid so much as untrained. Maybe there was someone in WWI saying "This is obviously wrong and won't work - we should do this other thing instead."

Maybe there wasn't. At this distance it's hard to tell.

We tend to call someone stupid when the quality of the predictions is worse than some population median, and the self-harm seems both unsurprising and trivially avoidable.

Stupidity is only loosely related to IQ. Low IQ people don't have the horsepower to make good models, so they're often blindsided by challenges. But high IQ people can have bad beliefs and poor models. Without self-correction and a reality-testing loop they're just as likely to believe wrong and dangerous things.

One of the most toxic things that happens in politics is re-framing a problem away from rational competence towards emotive and narrative non-logic. If you can succeed in this, you can make people stupid. Emotion and narrative, especially ego-gratifying and tribal narratives, are reliably unrealistic models that lead to poor predictions.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#49

Post by sokoloff »

oblio wrote: post #39
thaumasiotes wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for the first time since castles vs. troops without cannon, defense was stronger than offense. Huh? Castles couldn't beat troops without cannon. If you got besieged, your options were to be relieved by an external army, surrender, or lose.

They could force a drawn-out engagement, though, which in many cases the attackers couldn't support. You needed a lot fewer people to defend a castle than to assault it.

It seems much easier for the attackers to supply themselves (even in a foreign land) such that encircle-and-wait would virtually ensure an attacker victory if no one came to the defender’s aid.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#50

Post by Guthur »

Shmebulock wrote: post #26
Animats wrote: post #18

The author may be onto something. Or they may have had one good idea and are now trying to make it fit too many problems. WWI did have moments of extreme stupidity. But the real problem was that, for the first time since castles vs. troops without cannon, defense was stronger than offense. Machine guns, barbed wire, and trenches could resist most attacks. When that wasn't enough, both sides had plenty of railroad cap…

>for the first time since castles vs. troops without cannon, defense was stronger than offense In the seminal book "On War" which was published in 1832 and is still required reading in many military academies, Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz explicitly says that defense is stronger than offense. Maybe this intensified in WWI

Potentially what actually happened and von Clausewitz mention something about this, is that the armies had no ability to "think" fast enough to deal with any breakthrough. As mentioned the ability to plan and undertaken the first action was always there; the assault, the counter attack. But the subsequent actions were impossible to plan for and impossible to execute on the fly. These were old school armies; communication was antiquated and initiative was practically non existed.
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