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Theory of Stupidity [pdf]

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Re: Theory of Stupidity [pdf]

#11

Post by SoftTalker »

programjames wrote: post #5

If you've ever played Risk online, this becomes obvious, very quickly. The worst players to have around are not your enemies, but the stupid ones. They'll randomly block your troops from attacking mutual enemies, accidentally bait you into attacking other players ("attack red together?" . "okay sure!" . hits three of their troops, after you hit thirty ), not hold bonuses but not let you hold them either, waste all th…

Does this hold true for most multiplayer online games? I don't play, but my kids could often be heard yelling "why would you do that?!?" when they had a game going.

Re: Theory of Stupidity [pdf]

#12

Post by ironman1478 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #11
programjames wrote: post #5

If you've ever played Risk online, this becomes obvious, very quickly. The worst players to have around are not your enemies, but the stupid ones. They'll randomly block your troops from attacking mutual enemies, accidentally bait you into attacking other players ("attack red together?" . "okay sure!" . hits three of their troops, after you hit thirty ), not hold bonuses but not let you hold them either, waste all th…

Does this hold true for most multiplayer online games? I don't play, but my kids could often be heard yelling "why would you do that?!?" when they had a game going.

This is really common in fighting games. Many okay players will get beat by really bad players who are really random. Better players in these games play in such a way as to mitigate effects of the randomness of their opponent.

Re: Theory of Stupidity [pdf]

#13

Post by rukuu001 »

Some interesting points:

> Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

> The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them.

> And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem

> it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere ... infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. ... The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.

> ... one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like

> This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain

> In the 1970s, Carlo Cipolla, a social psychologist, developed FIVE LAWS OF STUPIDITY. The term itself, he said, wasn’t a description of intellectual acuity, but of social responsibility

Re: Theory of Stupidity [pdf]

#14

Post by [deleted] »

programjames wrote: post #5

If you've ever played Risk online, this becomes obvious, very quickly. The worst players to have around are not your enemies, but the stupid ones. They'll randomly block your troops from attacking mutual enemies, accidentally bait you into attacking other players ("attack red together?" . "okay sure!" . hits three of their troops, after you hit thirty ), not hold bonuses but not let you hold them either, waste all th…

[deleted]

Re: Theory of Stupidity [pdf]

#16

Post by calrain »

> A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person, or to a group of persons, while deriving no gain for himself, and possibly incurring losses.

This is a good definition, one we need to talk about more and not associate it with IQ or other social indicators.

Re: Theory of Stupidity [pdf]

#17

Post by anal_reactor »

programjames wrote: post #5

If you've ever played Risk online, this becomes obvious, very quickly. The worst players to have around are not your enemies, but the stupid ones. They'll randomly block your troops from attacking mutual enemies, accidentally bait you into attacking other players ("attack red together?" . "okay sure!" . hits three of their troops, after you hit thirty ), not hold bonuses but not let you hold them either, waste all th…

> Something sobering to keep in mind is that the vast majority of people have the logical and mathematical capabilities of a good ten-year-old.

I had a period of my life where I read a lot of "you're not special" on reddit, but then I finally understood that the ability to think logically on the most basic level already makes me very special. After spending some time with people from lower social classes and genuinely trying to bond with them I became elitist. These people just don't fucking think.

Re: Theory of Stupidity [pdf]

#18

Post by M95D »

webprofusion wrote: post #7

This is mainly using "stupidity" as a catch all term for mass disagreement/apathy (often motivated by bias, mixed with ignorance) in the face of facts, plus the lack of applied reasoning and empathy - simply not thinking, despite having the capacity or simply not caring because it doesn't affect you or align with your bias.

Did you actually read the article? It gives a clear unambiguous definition of what "stupid" is.

Re: Theory of Stupidity [pdf]

#19

Post by ikrima »

andiamo wrote: post #3

Fascinating - I just listened to Rufus Fears' lecture on Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison before opening HN. Personally, I find Bonhoeffer's premises are easily accepted - 1) stupidity is not an intellectual defect and 2) stupidity as a more dangerous adversary than malice. It follows that liberation, not instruction, is necessary to overcome stupidity. "The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the be…

I love this insanely insightful crystalization for me. I see you got a degree in IR and you used the word axiom so I'd refract back to you: reformulate stupidity as ignorance and assume a continuous conserved action exists between so that your observable is a danger measure-metric.

Basically the reason ignorance is so danger is that it aliases between harmless stupidity and extreme evil, but it fails to trigger our collective species evil detection pattern coding which results in an unbelievable cascade evil failure mode.

In a sense, religion is a meta-epistemic solution to the binding problem of our collective subconscious.

I think if you apply the epistemic quantum mechanics to different logic modalities, you get some interesting insights!

Re: Theory of Stupidity [pdf]

#20

Post by smitty1e »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #6
smitty1e wrote: post #2

People don't scale. This is graphically implied in Maslow's Hierarchy[1], shown as a pyramid. The area of the abstractions occurring up the individual's pyramid is dwarfed by the area of the base needs. The more people you consider, the more the basic needs for e.g. food and shelter dominate. Finely nuanced abstractions about rights and aesthetics? Don't waste your breath on more than the substet of the population wh…

> People don't scale There are 8.2 billion of them, so I think they scale just fine.

8.2n individuals, sure.

But look how hard it is to wage peace in the Ukraine...

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