Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing • Hacker News Board

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#141

Post by mcguire » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

Joker_vD wrote: post #103

hef19898 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tactics evolved a lot during WW1, e.g. creeping barrages and shock troops. It was also the first true industrial war. It saw submarines and the first combat use of aircraft, in bombing, close air support, recon and air combat. And it let to the invention of the tank. Haig so, for all his support pf veterans after the war, IMHO never understood what he really did. The Germans wanted a decisive battle, which they didn'…

> Haig wanted to use tanks to brake through German lines, the hole should then be exploited by horse mounted cavalry. That makes a lot of sense actually. For example, Red Army has shrunk its cavalry dramatically during the pre- and early WW2 period, down to 13 divisions (about 80 thousand people) in favour of tank divisions... and then when the Germans came, the Soviets suddenly found themselves lacking highly mobile…

Yes and no. The problem is that in WWI, the fronts were miles deep. There were several connected trench lines backed by guarded supply, artillery, and HQ positions along with the reserves. Those breakthroughs that did happen (which never actually included cavalry, IIRC) tended to bog down, giving the enemy time to bring up reserves and counterattack.

Cavalry and machine guns don't really mix.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#142

Post by MaxBarraclough » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

0x10c0fe11ce wrote: post #14

The OP lost me on a bunch of bad analogies. I’ll keep recommending to my friends The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo Cipolla. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49348225-the-basic-laws-...

Not a good summary. Some more informative links:

• http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidit...

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_M._Cipolla#The_Basic_Law...

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2570448 (as someone else linked)

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#143

Post by AnimalMuppet » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

tstrimple wrote: post #102

bobthechef wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know which planet you're from, but on planet Earth, all Western governments are currently in the middle of aggressively coercing their citizens into getting vaccinated.

You're simply wrong. We've got plenty of conservative politicians celebrating low vaccination rates and pushing anti-vaccine misinformation. https://wset.com/news/local/us-rep-greene-congratulates-crow... https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/71921

Those politicians aren't "the government", though. bobthechef's claim, as stated, is accurate. Your counterclaim, while also accurate, does not refute bob's point.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#144

Post by mcguire » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

jrm4 wrote: post #134

Ugh, I find this whole article fails because the author couldn't find a more precise word than "stupidity," though I think "bureacracy" or "institutional red-tape" or similar completely fits the bill?

Not really, although bureaucratic decision making is (sometimes!) a subset of stupid decision making as described in the article.

Ever dealt with statistics? Take someone who assumes all phenomena can be described by a normal distribution---in those cases where it isn't, they will consistently come up with an incorrect answer from perfectly correct math.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#145

Post by jjeaff » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

antocv wrote: post #129

rmah wrote: post #123

I understand that the author was just using WW1 western front strategy & tactics for illustrative purposes, but I feel that far too many people think that the leadership of the armies involved were simply idiots, stuck in the mud, etc. The reality is quite different. Most military strategists understood before the war broke out how important recent tech developments (e.g. machine guns, improved artillery, etc) were i…

It was still pretty stupid to not see that situation is the situation in 1915 and calling for a cease-fire and peace talks, stop right there, for the benefit of all sides.

Is that stupidity though? All it takes is one side that is evil enough to be willing to sacrifice as many lives as necessary to accomplish their goals.

They may have well known how many lives it would cost and did not care.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#146

Post by cpleppert » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 8:16 PM UTC

rmah wrote: post #123

I understand that the author was just using WW1 western front strategy & tactics for illustrative purposes, but I feel that far too many people think that the leadership of the armies involved were simply idiots, stuck in the mud, etc. The reality is quite different. Most military strategists understood before the war broke out how important recent tech developments (e.g. machine guns, improved artillery, etc) were i…

>> What they did not foresee was 1) how rapidly ad-hoc fortifications (i.e. trench lines) could be extended

From the planning of the former chief of staff of the german army 1905:

[Along the entire line, the corps] will move on the enemy from position to position as in a siege, advancing by day or night, digging in, advancing again, digging in, etc. They will use all the instruments of modern technology to shake the enemy’s confidence behind his lines. The attack must never be permitted to come to a standstill, as in the East Asian war.

come to a standstill = trench warfare; The reason he emphasizes that the attack must come not to a standstill is the dramatically larger armies employed in a future european war make massive fronts of trench lines inevitable. There are multiple commentaries that make exactly this point.

Once the germans failed at the seine the military reported to the political leadership that the war was lost precisely for this reason.

>> The governments want a win. At any cost.

Well, germany believed it had excellent winning odds. But if a compromise treaty was offered to germany by the entente it almost certainly would have been accepted; that was actually the expectation of many german officers. The problem for the entente was that the reason the germans were in favor of a compromise peace was they believed a war would break out again a few years later that they would be in a dramatically stronger position to fight. Russia, for one, was ruined by the summer of 1915. Germany would have benefited a lot more from any temporary peace economically because they would have access to world trade again. Germany's allies would have come out a lot better as well.

Basically, any peace offer by france or britain would have been equivalent to a german victory.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#147

Post by _tom_ » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 8:19 PM UTC

The fundamental flaw in this article is trying to redefine stupidity to be one specific cognitive failing. This leads to the comments being full of people quibbling about the definition. If he’d called out “cognitive tool failure” and defined it clearly, people would be discussing his ideals, not arguing about what “stupid” means.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#148

Post by cpleppert » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 8:34 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #137

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 thi…

>>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 > Huh? Germany lost. It couldn't have defended its territory by the time it surrendered. Britain and France could have easily fielded armies of the same size into 1920 if needed. There was no financial risk for them once America entered the war. The mutinies for germany began once it was clear that the war was hopeless. In comparison, the mutinies the french arm had suffered in the aftermath of the nivelle offensive were long gone by this time.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#149

Post by jeffdn » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 8:46 PM UTC

antocv wrote: post #129

rmah wrote: post #123

I understand that the author was just using WW1 western front strategy & tactics for illustrative purposes, but I feel that far too many people think that the leadership of the armies involved were simply idiots, stuck in the mud, etc. The reality is quite different. Most military strategists understood before the war broke out how important recent tech developments (e.g. machine guns, improved artillery, etc) were i…

It was still pretty stupid to not see that situation is the situation in 1915 and calling for a cease-fire and peace talks, stop right there, for the benefit of all sides.

Germany, the aggressor, had a substantial chunk of France and Belgium in their control at that time, and were, for all intents and purposes, winning the war from defensive positions. They had no incentive to initiate peace talks. Had the French or British initiated peace talks, it would've been essentially a surrender, and involved the loss of territory.

There was no way that either side was going to budge when that was the status quo. When the Hundred Days offensive kicked off, and Germany was being pushed back on the Western Front, and with their home front on the brink of collapse due to blockade-induced starvation, they did indeed initiate peace talks.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#150

Post by plowman » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 8:52 PM UTC

  What we have here is rather someone ‘acting as if they were stupid’. It’s not just that they failed to apply the concept of betrayal, but that they literally didn’t think of it: it was effectively ‘offline’, due to emotional and other pressures. In this kind of case, agents possess the necessary intellectual tools but unwittingly lock them away. This marks an important contrast with dumbness – we can make ourselves stupid, but we don’t make ourselves dumb.

This is a good insight. Lots of stupidity is a lack of imagination rather than a lack of raw intelligence.

This is also an idea that Julia Galef illuminates in great detail in her book "The Scout Mindset." She describes this as the difference between "Scout Mindset", which attempts to figure out what is correct, and "Soldier Mindset", or "stupidity" the way this article describes it, which attempts to fight to confirm what one already believes to be true.