Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

I love how there is no article attached. It's just linking me to a definition of psyche.

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 pigeonholes.

Close but no cigar. Human computation requires forcing of phenomena into crude, somewhat distorting pigeonholes to do any symbolic processing on it. Reality is simply too combinatorially explosive to not use any compression.

The foolishness arises when the distortions are systematically wrong; when you're stuck in a blind spot and keep focusing on the wrong subset of the data. It is a framing error that is specifically anti-adaptive.

Besides, you can have the entire array of conceptual tools, and still be foolish; picking the right tool cannot be reduced to an algorithm or a tool itself. It is a recursive problem of finding relevance.

> Historically, philosophers have worried a great deal about the irrationality of not taking the available means to my goals: Tom wants to get fit, yet his running shoes are quietly gathering dust. The stock solution to Tom’s quandary is simple willpower. Stupidity is very different from this. It is rather a lack of the necessary means, a lack of the necessary intellectual equipment. Combatting it will typically require not brute willpower but the construction of a new way of seeing our self and our world.

This is a false dichotomy. Avoiding getting into the metaphysics of will and whether or how it exists, Tom also doesn't know how to construct a way of seeing his self and the world to get into running. He still doesn't know what is good for him because if he did, he would have done it (or done something else good for him). His problem is ignorance just like the other guy, not willpower.

> First, unlike character flaws, stupidity is primarily a property of groups or traditions, not individuals: after all, we get most of our concepts, our mental tools, from the society we are raised in.

Collective intelligence and individual intelligence are similar machinery and both subject to blind spots and foolishness. In fact, the collective intelligence usually performs better on certain failure modes; it is easier for two people to find each other's blind spots than one person inferring their own. That's what for example therapy is (although unidirectional). It's just when it fails, it also fails spectacularly.

> We can now explain why stupidity is so domain-specific, why someone can be so smart in one area, and such an idiot in another: the relevant concepts are often domain-specific.

There is evidence against this; general intelligence predicts picking your meta-heuristics better for cross-domain problems; this is definitional after all.

> So stupidity is tough to fix.

Entire history of wisdom traditions and practices are dedicated to the suffering that comes with foolishness. They do not pass on conceptual tools though, because this is not an algorithmic problem. They pass on practices you participate in, which aim to train you to increase your likelihood of picking the relevant tools and finding out when you're stuck in a foolish framing.

[1] Sacha Golob, who turns out to have a paper this article was based on, at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/110433270/Golob_A_New...

> He still doesn't know what is good for him because if he did, he would have done it (or done something else good for him).

Really? Maybe he knows and choose some other (stupid) option. Because I really feel like Tom sometimes.

Calling trench warfare stupid because of conceptual obsolescence seems suspect. It was a new problem with no obvious solution. Trench warfare in the US Civil War didn't end in such a stalemate so there wasn't much precedence, There were newer automatic weapons and a vast scale of the armies covering an entire front that hadn't been seen before.

A stalemate might have been the best available outcome at the time where other alternatives would allow enemy advances. I believe the only "solution" was the tank which had yet to be invented and it's invention was a direct consequence of the stalemate. It doesn't seem right to call someone stupid for experiencing a problem that led to an invention.

I would only call the pre-tank strategies "stupid" if the decisions discarded available information and solutions.