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Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

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Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#131

Post by alexashka »

acituan wrote: post #78
alexashka wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish the author[1] read a bit more about the science of wisdom and foolishness There is no such science.

You’re one google search away from liberation: “Wisdom cognitive science”

You're one google search away from joining the church of Scientology - it has the word science in it.

Having the word science in something does not make it a science.

Science is a well defined term - cognitive science is not science, sorry.

Here is a polite explanation of what science is for people who don't know.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-social-...

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#132

Post by Talanes »

ghusbands wrote: post #55
jdkfglkjh34 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used the present tense.

You also said "modern". If guerilla warfare predates modern times, it can't be caused by something in them.

"Cause" doesn't necessarily mean originate. They could have meant it in the same way that one could say "leaving food out will cause you to get ants."

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#133

Post by hanniabu »

lmilcin wrote: post #130

I think "stupidity" as a specific set of traits that people can express either occasionally or continuously. I don't think stupidity is the same as lack of intelligence or wisdom. Highly intelligent people can behave stupidly, too. I spent a lot of time thinking about this. I arrived that stupidity is lack of intelligence/wisdom AND/OR inability to make use of intelligence/wisdom. For example, one way you can be inte…

I've been told by 3 different people at different times that I'm both the smartest and the dumbest person they've ever met.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#135

Post by foobiekr »

wayoutthere wrote: post #69
Fnoord wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I support your assertion that viral warfare is a terrible idea. But I wonder, if you pre-announced what you were going to do and then did it, Would you not successfully co-opt the primary vehicles of leakage?

I really do suspect that if, for example, some basement biohacker terrorist decided to release an engineered bird flu with high fatality, once having staged their distribution mechanism, they wouldn’t be able to arrange for the other countries to contain it simply by providing input information about what was about to occur.

It’s true that they would be small incidents, but essentially if you can disseminate the knowledge widely enough, and the effects are horrific enough, probably you would have de facto containment.

I have dreaded the scenario since my 20s, and that was a long time ago, and the scenario is many, many times easier than it was at the time.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#136

Post by e40 »

My idea about why smart people are sometimes stupid: mis-prioritization. If you rank solutions in the wrong way, even though you have thought of all the solutions, your actions might appear very stupid.

The most recent cases of this are about the COVID vaccinations. When I hear people say why they are not getting vaccinated, almost always they've elevated something in priority/importance above something else which is more important.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#137

Post by mcguire »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #47

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 i…

"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.""

There were. Some of the ideas were good, and eventually took off, some were good-ish but needed more development (aircraft and tanks, for example), and some just didn't work. But to this disinterested observer, nothing really worked well enough.

But mostly, the war ended when the governments and economies of the nations fighting could no longer withstand the strain and started collapsing. (Russia is the most obvious example; Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were sketchy going in; Germany and France were the military superpowers but Germany finally fell apart with France about this far > < from large scale mutinies. Oh, and Britain finally paid off its WWI loans in like 2015.)

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#138

Post by jffhn »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #47

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 i…

>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.

As likely, or even more likely. Experts on a subject can be those that get it wrong the most, especially (as you point out) in fields where there is no proper measurement apparatus to conduct reality checks (like psychology before neurosciences), because they are those that dig the most in possibly wrong directions.

Reminds me of a quote: "The eminently false mind is the one who never feels that he is going astray." (Joseph Joubert) (original: "L'esprit éminemment faux est celui qui ne sent jamais qu'il s'égare.")

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#139

Post by hervature »

dr-detroit wrote: post #90
mountainb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 slo…

Brits had successfully broken lines using combined arms in 1917 starting at Cambrai. Pershing at Cantigny was much later but the first US example.

Canadian national identity is partially defined by the victory at Vimy Ridge which happened before Cambrai. Obviously, my history textbooks are heavily biased, were the lessons learned at Vimy Ridge applied to Cambrai?

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#140

Post by acituan »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #60
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 Wikipedia article offers some further interesting citations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupidity James F. Welles, Understanding Stupidity "The term may be used to designate a mentality which is considered to be informed, deliberate and maladaptive." Welles distinguishes stupidity from ignorance; where stupidity means one must know they are acting in their own worst interest in that it must be a choice, not a…

> Welles distinguishes stupidity from ignorance; where stupidity means one must know they are acting in their own worst interest in that it must be a choice, not a forced act or accident.

The problem with this definition is taking a very narrow meaning of "knowing" which most of the time means "propositional knowing".

A basketball player knows propositionally that they need to put the ball through the hoop, but they will miss in a likelihood in proportion to their lack of procedural knowledge. This doesn't they are being stupid, they actually didn't fully know how.

To apply it recursively; we might know the definition of stupid but that helps so little to save us out of doing stupid things throughout our lives.

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