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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

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 it's hard to tell. We tend to call someone stupid when the quality of the predictions is worse than some population median, and the self-harm seems both unsurprising and trivially avoidable. Stupidity is only loosely related to IQ. Low IQ people don't have the horsepower to make good models, so they're often blindsided by challenges. But high IQ people can have bad beliefs and poor models. Without self-correction and a reality-testing loop they're just as likely to believe wrong and dangerous things. One of the most toxic things that happens in politics is re-framing a problem away from rational competence towards emotive and narrative non-logic. If you can succeed in this, you can make people stupid. Emotion and narrative, especially ego-gratifying and tribal narratives, are reliably unrealistic models that lead to poor predictions.

crispyambulance 5y ago
> One of the most toxic things that happens in politics is re-framing a problem away from rational competence towards emotive and narrative non-logic. In politics emotional and even irrational narratives are a centerpiece of how effective leaders lead. In virtually all sufficiently complicated human affairs there is NEVER enough facts and visibility at hand to make objective decisions. Moreover, now more than ever, influencers and thought leaders can easily cherry-pick whatever facts rhyme with their narrative and sound completely rational and "facts-based" to those who lack (or have been conditioned to lack) critical thinking skills and experience. All effective leaders, regardless of whether they're good or evil, democratic or autocratic make decisions and motivate people by appealing to emotion, history, cultural background. "Logic and rationality" of course is necessary for success but it's only one component. The finest leaders are fully in touch with their subjectivity _and_ can also draw from deep knowledge and rational thought.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Which is kind of why democracy got popular - it got rid of leaders, it confined appeals to emotion to the election circus, and replaced energetic leadership with boredom of mind-numbing parliamentary meetings - and in the process removed one of the biggest threat to ongoing peace and prosperity, namely leaders "appealing to emotion, history, cultural background" to get their subjects to do something stupid. I mean, what you say is true - effective political leaders were/are like you describe. But I question whether we need that kind of leadership, and I'm convinced we should not glorify it. Being effective at manipulating and abusing people at scale is not a trait of a good person.
  - philwelch 5y ago
    Democracy provides an inherent advantage to an "energetic leader" who can manipulate people at scale, because that's how you win elections.
mcshicks 5y ago
You might like Philip Tetlock's "Expert Political Judgement: How Good is it? How can we know?". He quantitatively studied political predictions for I think it was 20 years and how different cognitive styles affect effectiveness. Specifically he used the analogy of "foxes vs hedgehogs" from Isiah Berlin's famous essay as different cognitive styles and compared predictions over along period. https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp/0691128715 https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox
nradov 5y ago
Case in point: former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He was obviously quite intelligent, in the sense that he was well educated and would have scored highly on any standard IQ test. Yet he consistently made stupid decisions with drastic consequences for the entire world.
- bzbarsky 5y ago
  Famous Chekhov quote: "Университет развивает все способности, в том числе — глупость". Or in English: "a university education develops all one's abilities, including stupidity".
- cbnotfromthere 5y ago
  "Yet he consistently made stupid decisions with drastic consequences for the entire world" I'm sure you can easily mention 2/two such decisions.
ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
That is an amazing definition. It is so simple, but gives insight into so much. Also love how you applied that to the current big problem of politics. Now it's got me thinking about certain people who don't have the horsepower to generate good models, who are successful in life, despite their stupidity, because they still avoid bad decisions. And how certain behaviors and beliefs can mitigate stupidity quite well.
mcguire 5y ago
"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 this disinterested observer, nothing really worked well enough. 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 > < from large scale mutinies. Oh, and Britain finally paid off its WWI loans in like 2015.)
- cpleppert 5y ago
  >>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 > < from large scale mutinies. Oh, and Britain finally paid off its WWI loans in like 2015.) 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.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    Germany still occupied part of France and most of Belgium at the time of the armistice. Much of the allied offensives in mid- to late-1918 were recovering ground taken by the German spring offensives of 1918. Whether or not Germany could have militarily defended its borders is kind of irrelevant because the government collapsed (https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/governments_parliaments_and_parties_germany https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/government..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%80%931919 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%8...).
jffhn 5y ago
>But high IQ people can have bad beliefs and poor models. Without self-correction and a reality-testing loop they're just as likely to believe wrong and dangerous things. As likely, or even more likely. Experts on a subject can be those that get it wrong the most, especially (as you point out) in fields where there is no proper measurement apparatus to conduct reality checks (like psychology before neurosciences), because they are those that dig the most in possibly wrong directions. Reminds me of a quote: "The eminently false mind is the one who never feels that he is going astray." (Joseph Joubert) (original: "L'esprit éminemment faux est celui qui ne sent jamais qu'il s'égare.")

crispyambulance 5y ago

> One of the most toxic things that happens in politics is re-framing a problem away from rational competence towards emotive and narrative non-logic. In politics emotional and even irrational narratives are a centerpiece of how effective leaders lead. In virtually all sufficiently complicated human affairs there is NEVER enough facts and visibility at hand to make objective decisions. Moreover, now more than ever, influencers and thought leaders can easily cherry-pick whatever facts rhyme with their narrative and sound completely rational and "facts-based" to those who lack (or have been conditioned to lack) critical thinking skills and experience. All effective leaders, regardless of whether they're good or evil, democratic or autocratic make decisions and motivate people by appealing to emotion, history, cultural background. "Logic and rationality" of course is necessary for success but it's only one component. The finest leaders are fully in touch with their subjectivity _and_ can also draw from deep knowledge and rational thought.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Which is kind of why democracy got popular - it got rid of leaders, it confined appeals to emotion to the election circus, and replaced energetic leadership with boredom of mind-numbing parliamentary meetings - and in the process removed one of the biggest threat to ongoing peace and prosperity, namely leaders "appealing to emotion, history, cultural background" to get their subjects to do something stupid. I mean, what you say is true - effective political leaders were/are like you describe. But I question whether we need that kind of leadership, and I'm convinced we should not glorify it. Being effective at manipulating and abusing people at scale is not a trait of a good person.
- philwelch 5y ago
  Democracy provides an inherent advantage to an "energetic leader" who can manipulate people at scale, because that's how you win elections.

mcshicks 5y ago

You might like Philip Tetlock's "Expert Political Judgement: How Good is it? How can we know?". He quantitatively studied political predictions for I think it was 20 years and how different cognitive styles affect effectiveness. Specifically he used the analogy of "foxes vs hedgehogs" from Isiah Berlin's famous essay as different cognitive styles and compared predictions over along period. https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp/0691128715 https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox

nradov 5y ago

Case in point: former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He was obviously quite intelligent, in the sense that he was well educated and would have scored highly on any standard IQ test. Yet he consistently made stupid decisions with drastic consequences for the entire world.

bzbarsky 5y ago
Famous Chekhov quote: "Университет развивает все способности, в том числе — глупость". Or in English: "a university education develops all one's abilities, including stupidity".
cbnotfromthere 5y ago
"Yet he consistently made stupid decisions with drastic consequences for the entire world" I'm sure you can easily mention 2/two such decisions.

ghostbrainalpha 5y ago

That is an amazing definition. It is so simple, but gives insight into so much. Also love how you applied that to the current big problem of politics. Now it's got me thinking about certain people who don't have the horsepower to generate good models, who are successful in life, despite their stupidity, because they still avoid bad decisions. And how certain behaviors and beliefs can mitigate stupidity quite well.

mcguire 5y ago

"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 this disinterested observer, nothing really worked well enough. 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 > < from large scale mutinies. Oh, and Britain finally paid off its WWI loans in like 2015.)

cpleppert 5y ago
>>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 > < from large scale mutinies. Oh, and Britain finally paid off its WWI loans in like 2015.) 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.
- mcguire 5y ago
  Germany still occupied part of France and most of Belgium at the time of the armistice. Much of the allied offensives in mid- to late-1918 were recovering ground taken by the German spring offensives of 1918. Whether or not Germany could have militarily defended its borders is kind of irrelevant because the government collapsed (https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/governments_parliaments_and_parties_germany https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/government..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%80%931919 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%8...).

jffhn 5y ago

>But high IQ people can have bad beliefs and poor models. Without self-correction and a reality-testing loop they're just as likely to believe wrong and dangerous things. As likely, or even more likely. Experts on a subject can be those that get it wrong the most, especially (as you point out) in fields where there is no proper measurement apparatus to conduct reality checks (like psychology before neurosciences), because they are those that dig the most in possibly wrong directions. Reminds me of a quote: "The eminently false mind is the one who never feels that he is going astray." (Joseph Joubert) (original: "L'esprit éminemment faux est celui qui ne sent jamais qu'il s'égare.")