General Hammerstein: “I distinguish four types (of soldiers). There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined.
“Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff.
“The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up ninety percent of every army and are suited to routine duties.
“Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions.
“One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.”
Full issue of the Whole Earth Review in which this appeared: https://wholeearth.info/p/whole-earth-review-spring-1987?for...
Highly recommend spending some time in the Whole Earth publication archives if you haven't had the chance.
Is there a modern day equivalent to The Whole Earth catalog? Maybe a collection of blogs and online media or otherwise
> A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
This is a characteristic of spite. Maybe spitefulness is stupid. But true spitefulness is a whole other level to watch out for.
Spite implies intent.
As an outside observer spitefulness and stupidity may appear the same, but the stupid person may have had good intentions and no ill-will towards those they harm.
> This is a characteristic of spite.
I don't think so. The motivation behind spiteful actions is to purposely cause losses to others, and the gain derived from this action is rejoicing on other people's losses. This implies having and displaying power over others, and exercising this power to establish themselves even with so little gain.
Very different than deriving no gain.
Consider the Ultimatum game. Alice and Bob are part of a millionaire madman's experiment, and so Alice and Bob are told the following: they have won a sum of $10,000 and Alice will be given the authority to decide how to divide their winnings. If Bob accepts Alice's offer, then both of them get the money as decided in the offer. If Bob rejects Alice's offer, then both of them get nothing. In addition, they have no ability to communicate or negotiate the offer; it's a one and done thing. So let's say Alice offers 100 dollars to Bob, and she will keep 9900.
Now, most people would say that Bob is acting out of spite if he rejects Alice's offer, because he's causing Alice losses and he gains nothing, and the benefit he receives is that Alice is made sad by this. Is that a fair interpretation, though? He believes that he's acting out of a moral obligation to screw over someone who themself is (in his mind) acting unjustly. He's valuing punishing someone that he feels is breaking a social contract greater than the 100 dollars that he would otherwise have. What do you call what he is doing in this situation if not spite? And if he is acting out of a principled objection to an unfair situation, does it become something other than spite? And if it's actually principled, why does the principle seem to melt away when the offer is $7000 to $3000?
I feel like spite is a huge motivator behind a lot of cultural issues nowadays but it can only come from people who feel as if they are coming from a place of weakness or victimization. There is always a moral indignation. The gratification is in seeing their vision of justice meted out. It isn't always a psychopathic, sadistic behavior but it can be in those cases where a vision of justice is distorted and psychopathic. Consider this: isn't imprisoning people often a form, ultimately, of societal spite? In isolation it may be cheaper to just give petty criminals whatever they want rather than paying the cost for them being jailed. Amortized cost, it's probably a lot cheaper to pay a drunkard's taxi home from the bar every single time he goes drinking than to lock him in jail for 3 months for a second DUI. Is spite the reason that we don't just give him that? Again, the justice thing.
“… it can only come from people who feel as if they are coming from a place of weakness or victimization.”
That’s a good thought experiment. Let me add the terminology of Francis Fukuyama’s “demand for dignity”—-seems to go even closer to the nerve.
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2019/02/11/ep209-1-fukuyam...
But the stupid usually have what they think are good intentions.
Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from enemy action.
Omnis enim ex infirmitate feritas est
--Seneca
The modern nuance on "infirm" makes that seem more relevant. aside from the unintentional cruelty..
I saw that movie, and I don't recall seneca ever talking about infirm ferrets. I know for a fact that eminem wasn't in it.
I think the whole sentence is a bad take. The described behavior can be perfectly rational (and thus commonly considered not "stupid") in the case when cost function of the acting person has a negative weight assigned to the counterpart group/person. In other words, when someone considers the other an "enemy", it makes sense to hurt the other even such act results in some direct losses.
Now, we can argue that playing negative-sum games is "stupid". And in most contexts of the modern human society such heuristic would be correct, but I would be really careful with a sweeping generalization, otherwise instead of a proper understanding of the underlying behavioral motivations you are likely to devolve into primitive explanations of someone being "stupid" or even "evil".
Hurting the enemy is intentional and thus has an implicit "gain" built into it, even if it's just psychological. The physical losses can be deemed acceptable because of it, if the satisfaction derived from hurting the enemy balances them out. The OP is describing stupidity where the result is a true loss or zero gain, because the intent wasn't to hurt in the first place.
spite is just willed stupidity
This article is a good starting point for researching stupidity. Nowadays stupidity is big on the rise to power, so I appreciate anything going into researching it. The article calls the stupid unpredictable, but I think most of them are very rational emotion maximisers.
Motivation for stupid people is often an imaginary gain. They think they do something for society or themselves, but the payment is only in emotions. From the outside this looks stupid, but for the stupid the gains are often very measurable feelings.
In the end the psychology of stupidity isn't that different from normal rational psychology. Adding emotions to capitalistic thinking can also be used to explain "Stupidity in large groups". The stupid get good vibes from others around while just causing a total loss for everyone. Maybe this is a starting point for counter measures...
I think the most dangerous people out there are the good helping stupids that just want to help - and just make everything worse. They get a lot of gain from the emotions that they did something good.
I like this quote:
With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.That actually sounds like what the more intelligent animals will do to you (monkey, cat, etc) not the least intelligent ones (bug, snake, bird).
kinky.
> The bandits who fall in area B1 are those individuals whose actions yield to them profits which are larger than the losses they cause to other people.
Are there real life example of this? Or does anyone that scams people richer than them qualifies maybe?
Maybe Robin Hood... and rare cases when a competent leader invests tax payer money into something really good. Maybe this was a thing back in ancient history.. Having a solid reserve of overproduction is a good thing for society. Seizing overproduction could also be B1.
America is powered by influx of immigrants of all sorts.
Yet, shows the weakness the greatest while wielding its strength: thru its American people.
The number of responses here lends statistical support to the first basic law.
Ha, I have independently arrived at this theory, with far less structure and elegance.
Flaize = flail + lose. You're flailing and you're losing (and taking other people down with you).
"The world is full of flaizers, non-stop flaizing," encompasses laws 1 and 3.
Crabs in a bucket
"A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
Yeah, this lines up with my personal description of stupid: incapable of achieving one's own goals because of stubbornness, mean-spiritedness, pride, persistent misunderstanding, inability or unwillingness to learn. A danger to themself and others. Usually and unfortunately coupled with overconfidence.
This is stark contrast to being merely ignorant (lacking knowledge, naive or sheltered) and dumb (incapable of learning or grasping complex subjects).
Ignorance is generally fixable and with some capacity, dumbness too. But stupidity is a special kind of bad.
But, ummm, if nature abhors a vacuum? And all these things provide "opportunity" for improvement? Maybe the special bad is by design.
the 0th law of human stupidity: the urge to categorize human stupidity numbs the intellectual ability for self-reflection. Thus the categorizer is by definition not stupid, and their assignment of categories and observations obviously correct.
-- Kurt Gödel
In this copy, the letter sigma appears to have been replaced by å, presumably due to an encoding error...
I stopped reading when the author classified people in binary categories. Absolute proof of their own stupidity.
Ever notice how you’ll meet lots of people who think everyone else is stupid, but you almost never meet someone who believes they’re stupid? Here’s another law of stupidity: Stupidity is unable to recognize itself.
There are four kinds of people, those that put things into categories, and those that like matrices.
There's at least two meanings for stupid. One is someone who is not intelligent, and it's just kind of an intrinsic thing. The other is someone who does something stupid, irrespective of their intelligence. This is a conditional attribute that depends on available information / motivation / laziness.
Point being a 2x2 matrix is just an oversimplification of real life and also wtf are the axes here???
> There are four kinds of people, those that put things into categories, and those that like matrices.
I must be missing the joke here - those are not exclusive categories, and there are only two of them.
> wtf are the axes here???
It's explained in the text just below the drawing....
I think we're well served by distinct language:
* "intelligent" is the intellectual capacity one is born with
* "stupid" is the failure to use that intellectual capacity
> I know plenty of very intelligent people who have been quite stupid at times. I know that while I may have adequate intelligence I've certainly been stupid more than once (or maybe even twice).
I call those people skilled instead of intelligent.
That is not the "stupid" used in this context.
> One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group.
But we also have self-awareness. Stupid can be de-stupefied through learning. Whereas you can't really change your race or blood type.
Don't you feel yourself getting stupider with age ? Try and correct that by learning. Now imagine that some people are actually born that way
That's not a word. I think the phrase you were thinking of was "dumberer"
(the reader cries in despair)
"A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
Reminds me of people supporting the senseless bombings and genocide in the middle east.
> Reminds me of people supporting the senseless bombings and genocide in the middle east.
The genocidal arguments frame them as solutions to long-standing problems, including labelling them as a "final solution". This is clearly an attempt to frame it as something where they derive a gain.
Reminds me of Trump supporters.
So in this metaphor, is
-trump a B2 (aims to enrich himself, while overall a net negative to society)
-his voters are helpless (by voting for him, they don't actually gain anything)
-and intelligent people, including myself, are mostly sitting on the sidelines, save attending a no kings protest.
A few are valiantly fighting (filing court cases to check trumps power grabs, newsom pushing prop 50, journalists / media folks calling out the emperor has no clothes)
The only way this country gets saved from Trump is either the intelligent get off their duff and start fighting, or the helpless wake up and turn on Trump
I am sorry to say that according to the metaphor of the PDF, your resistance probably falls into either "helpless" or "stupid," since it doesn't really do anything to check Trump's power (ICE agents still freely roam and abduct people at gunpoint, SNAP will run out and judgement induced distribution is blocked by Trump) and at best do nothing to him or anyone else or help him by giving him ammunition to justify further domestic action. Or if you're just sitting on the sidelines, then under the model, you're not defined as intelligent, but helpless, whereas his supporters are stupid.
According to the model I would class legal efforts and some media efforts as intelligent or banditry (media is self serving; in the end it loves Trump for the headlines), and a protest as maybe intelligent but maybe also helpless.
Inarguably intelligent might be something like following ICE movements and warning neighborhoods when they're coming, or establishing mutual aid food systems for people whose SNAP is about to run out. Or wasting ICE time somehow through civil disobedience to reduce their effectiveness.