Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

psyche.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 174 posts

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#61

Post by Fnoord »

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…

Makes me wonder whether we could have defeated an organization such as Taliban with say COVID. The very unfortunate side effect (understatement) would be all the civil casualties, but that is also part of guerilla warfare (e.g. happens in Israel/Palestina conflict as well). But nevertheless, something like COVID could've been used as a biochemical weapon, with the side launching it being vaccinated, or knowing how to deal with it beforehand (the 'SARS experience advantage'). Its not even far fetched (though I am not arguing that was the purpose of!) because that's how the Spanish conquered large parts of America (Re: Aztecs).

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#62

Post by mountainb »

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…

Defense wasn't stronger than offense in a physical sense. It's just that the proper doctrine and training for dealing with the new technological reality was not developed until the Ludendorff offensive in the last year of the war.

This dynamic crops up pretty often in historic wars, in which it's less the technology that determines the result but how well the humans are trained. The Civil War in the US was also a slog because of the poor level of training among both enlisted and officers. There was a tendency among poorly trained or untrained volunteers to 'go to ground' to hide from gunfire. Neither infantry nor cavalry really learned how to charge properly because of deficiencies in training, which made the battles go on for a lot longer than they would have otherwise.

It was a similar situation with WWI. It is very, very complicated to coordinate artillery and infantry and to properly plan a successful penetration through fixed defenses. This came to be more or less a solved problem by Germany under Ludendorff's new doctrine.

A lot of the breezy summaries about WWI about it being static also only apply to the western front, because there was lots of successful maneuver warfare in the east. That's why Ludendorff got the job to try to end the war in the west after his success against Russia.

We see this every day with the technology industry: often we have a technology that works well years before we can get people to use it properly or to make it user-friendly enough for everyone to understand readily. Coordinating artillery with infantry movements required lots of work in math/statistics and drilling plus lots of data collection to make the plans and timetables realistic.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#63

Post by jkhdigital »

> Global debates over social justice, for example, are now dominated by a set of ideas and terms taken from the United States, a nation marked by an incredibly specific historical and cultural trajectory.

It’s interesting that the author tucks this line neatly into the middle of an article otherwise focused on a generalized notion of stupidity. The implication is left unsaid, wisely.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#64

Post by jkhdigital »

stareatgoats wrote: post #16

There is no way round that "stupid" is primarily an insult thrown at opponents, not a statement of fact. As a matter of fact we are all incredibly smart. And stupid too. With that said, I have a hard time agreeing with the definition of stupidity put forth in the article, as far as I understand it. To me stupidity is that state of mind that one may find oneself in before the first cup of coffee in the morning, or whe…

> stupidity is that state of mind that one may find oneself in before the first cup of coffee in the morning

This is very different than the condition to which the author is referring. I’d call it something like “false transfer” where one reasons about a complex, novel phenomenon using a (previously mastered) mental framework that is unsuitable or inadequate for the task.

Perhaps we could call it a generalized Dunning-Kruger effect?

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#65

Post by masswerk »

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…

I guess, it didn't help especially that not the trenches were the apparent phenomenon, but the enormous advances in artillery and their impact, to which trenches were a reaction.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#66

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#67

Post by h2odragon »

jonplackett wrote: post #37

> 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 pigeonholes. Most western governments: "Don't worry, COVID is just like the Flu"

"covid is just like the flu" or "covid is just like smallpox" are both stupid; and even more stupid is the notion that those are the only choices

A hallmark of human stupid I've noticed is the "It's what we're supposed to do" factor. We know its dumb but we do it anyway because "its what the job description says", or "its what the boss would want" or so on. Where we abnegate our judgement for that of another is often the root of it; when that other's judgment is unknown to us, it's always stupid.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#68

Post by stareatgoats »

jkhdigital wrote: post #64
stareatgoats wrote: post #16

There is no way round that "stupid" is primarily an insult thrown at opponents, not a statement of fact. As a matter of fact we are all incredibly smart. And stupid too. With that said, I have a hard time agreeing with the definition of stupidity put forth in the article, as far as I understand it. To me stupidity is that state of mind that one may find oneself in before the first cup of coffee in the morning, or whe…

> stupidity is that state of mind that one may find oneself in before the first cup of coffee in the morning This is very different than the condition to which the author is referring. I’d call it something like “false transfer” where one reasons about a complex, novel phenomenon using a (previously mastered) mental framework that is unsuitable or inadequate for the task. Perhaps we could call it a generalized Dunnin…

> I’d call it something like “false transfer”

Ok thanks. But I guess I'll stick to calling it stupidity. If it walks like a duck and all that.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#69

Post by wayoutthere »

Fnoord wrote: post #61
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…

Makes me wonder whether we could have defeated an organization such as Taliban with say COVID. The very unfortunate side effect (understatement) would be all the civil casualties, but that is also part of guerilla warfare (e.g. happens in Israel/Palestina conflict as well). But nevertheless, something like COVID could've been used as a biochemical weapon, with the side launching it being vaccinated, or knowing how to…

Covid isn’t lethal enough to really make much of a dent in their numbers. Even with a collapsed health system, overall mortality from covid is around 1.5%. Significant to be sure, but very far from the 80-90% mortality of European diseases in the native populations of America.

Viral warfare is an absolutely stupid idea. It’s almost assured that the weapon would escape containment and find its way into the population, and as we’ve seen vaccines are of limited benefit if enough people won’t take them.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#70

Post by api »

> In at least some cases, intelligence actively abets stupidity by allowing pernicious rationalisation

This is something I’ve believed very strongly for many years. I’ve met some amazingly stupid geniuses who believe things so absurd it actively hobbles their ability to function. I’ve met many others who advocate almost psychotically destructive (to others) beliefs that they have meticulously rationalized. Totalitarian politics of various stripes is a petty common case.

It’s one of several reasons I am deeply skeptical of the cult of IQ. Even if you accept that intelligence is a single dimensional trait, it is not clear to me that more IQ equals better. More IQ seems to often result in a superior capacity to rationalize delusional thinking.

Thinking is a practice, an art, and how you think matters quite a bit. A person of average intellect who thinks rationally is going to do better than someone with a high IQ who is insane or delusional.

Post reply on HN