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

81–90 of 174 posts

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#81

Post by Fnoord »

contravariant wrote: post #79
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…

Perhaps surprisingly the main problem with current warfare isn't the lack of options to kill enough people in some general area. Although if you were to go in that direction COVID-19 would be a minor inconvenience when it comes to warfare so I'm not too sure what you're aiming at there. The Spanish "used" diseases that were a heck of a lot more severe.

The point is to strike at the enemy the moment they are weakened. Western societies were severely weakened in March 2020 onward to summer 2020. They were on lockdown, there have been logistics problems, which had impact on things like police and secret service. I very much doubt military are exempt from it. Being in a good condition isn't a guarantee you remain unaffected, and the danger of being affected mildly is that you spread it further.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#83

Post by vagrantJin »

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 get what you are saying but just to clarify to some who may read that literally, the Zulu kingdom is nowhere near extinct. It's monarch and governing structures are still around too.

off-topic

I agree fully that a "modern" military will always win against one that depends on "old" doctrines exclusively. I have interesting tales of both English and Zulu officers on how the war proceeded, how the Zulu court knew their fate and had come to choose death, and the English officers who did not want war to begin with.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#84

Post by danaris »

karatinversion wrote: post #73
wnkrshm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference isn't up to trench warfare, machine guns etc. It's that industrialized agriculture had been developed, and thus you could still feed millions of people who were fighting. That's what created the resiliance to prolonged war. In cultures without industrialized agriculture, losing that many people to war would doom everyone. If you wanted to survive, you'd have to stop for harvest or if you lost too many…

> In cultures without industrialized agriculture, losing that many people to war would doom everyone. The Black Death killed an estimated 40-50% of Europeans between 1347 and 1351, but the survivors were not doomed. In fact, living standards increased as the amount of agricultural land per person increased.

To clarify what dukeyukey said a little further:

The Black Death killed 40-50% of the population indiscriminately. Wars killed able-bodied men in their prime almost exclusively—removing a huge chunk of those best able to bring in the harvest (many able-bodied women can help, of course, but some percentage of those are pregnant or caring for babies for much of the day), without removing a proportional chunk of those who cannot contribute as much but still need to eat.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#85

Post by danaris »

Shmebulock wrote: post #26
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…

>for the first time since castles vs. troops without cannon, defense was stronger than offense In the seminal book "On War" which was published in 1832 and is still required reading in many military academies, Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz explicitly says that defense is stronger than offense. Maybe this intensified in WWI

I mean, to some extent, defense will always be stronger than offense—offense always needs to travel to get there, for instance, while defense happens where you are—but the degree makes a big difference.

If, all else being equal, it takes a force of 1500 attackers to overwhelm 1000 defenders, defense is still stronger than offense, but you can still expect to be able to make progress relatively easily.

If, on the other hand, it takes 5000 attackers to overwhelm 1000 defenders, suddenly you have to make very different kinds of calculations about what is worth the cost, and what is even strategically feasible to take without destroying your army's ability to fight.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#86

Post by bobthechef »

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…

Would you mind avoiding the tortured use of terminology from CS to describe what is not a CS problem? This occurs too often on HN and often conceals gross misunderstanding behind a veneer of technical jargon. You end up reasoning about something other than the thing at hand because you've tried to redefine it in terms of something you're more familiar with (see "Law of Instrument").

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#87

Post by bobthechef »

api wrote: post #70

> 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. Totalitari…

> More IQ seems to often result in a superior capacity to rationalize delusional thinking.

Oh, yes. You can tie yourself up in knots. You can blind yourself to the truth. This is why virtue goes hand in hand with wisdom. Without virtue, you're a fool. Or, if you prefer, stupid. No respect can be extended to foolishness. There is no tragic greatness to be found here, only pathetic degeneracy.

As someone once said, in order to believe the 100 stupidest ideas ever conceived by the human mind, all you need is a PhD.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#88

Post by bobthechef »

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"

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.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#89

Post by totetsu »

karatinversion wrote: post #73
wnkrshm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference isn't up to trench warfare, machine guns etc. It's that industrialized agriculture had been developed, and thus you could still feed millions of people who were fighting. That's what created the resiliance to prolonged war. In cultures without industrialized agriculture, losing that many people to war would doom everyone. If you wanted to survive, you'd have to stop for harvest or if you lost too many…

> In cultures without industrialized agriculture, losing that many people to war would doom everyone. The Black Death killed an estimated 40-50% of Europeans between 1347 and 1351, but the survivors were not doomed. In fact, living standards increased as the amount of agricultural land per person increased.

and it changed the balance of supply and demand of labor, increasing the price, causing rulers to try and implement price controls.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#90

Post by dr-detroit »

mountainb wrote: post #62
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 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.
Post reply on HN