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Five Laws of Human Stupidity (1976)
- sushisource 4y agoThis is so horrible on so many levels But at the same time oh man do I so totally identify with this And now I feel a bit guilty
- openfuture 4y ago"stupidity" I'd rather think of this as "wasted potential" the reason you reach for this pejorative label is due to frustration. A wise man once said that there is nothing more common than wasted potential, in that sense I agree with some of this article.
- jerf 4y agoIt is vital when reading this to understand that it is descriptive, not proscriptive. It defines a particular definition of stupidity, a very utilitarian one, and then proceeds to classify various portions of the world based on that definition. It does not spell that out right at the beginning, or even necessarily at all. But it is not discussing all possible uses of the word "stupid". "Wasted potential" definitely doesn't work for discussions about active harm being done (at some points). (As such, another common critique I see is trying to decide if it's "right" or "wrong", but that's the wrong question. As it proposes a definition, one that I think undeniably does have the ability to be applied to the world, the question is rather if it is useful. I have found it so, but that's debatable. But that's at least the correct debate.)
- mcguire 4y agoThe article also discusses stupidity as an attribute of people, not actions. I assume anyone who has had any experience with the world at all has "cause[d] losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain." Are there any non-stupid people?
- rob74 4y agoI would propose a more measured approach to this subject. To (mis)quote Jesus, "let he who has never done anything stupid in his life cast the first (metaphorical) stone". There certainly are people who do stupid things all the time, but there also are people who do stupid things relatively rarely, and those things can still have costly consequences. For instance, I once totaled a car because I trusted that another stupid person who was signaling a right turn would actually turn right (fortunately nobody was hurt, but my car was wrecked). I felt really stupid for months after that...
- Paul_S 4y agoI find the car signalling problem interesting. Where I was born people trust the turn signalling and drive early. When I moved to the UK I (luckily) quickly realised you cannot do this here. Everyone waits until the car actually starts turning before driving. Even if it's signalling, no one trusts that, possibly creating less pressure for correct signalling. It makes traffic slightly slower but avoids the possibility of (this type of) accidents. Counter-intuitively, worse drivers leads to fewer accidents.
- thfuran 4y agoNot trusting others' turn signals seems more like defensive driving than bad driving.
- Paul_S 4y agoPeople don't trust signals, because the drivers are bad, not the other way around. I drove in most European countries, I drove in America, I even drove in China and I live in the UK. By far the worst drivers. Also the most polite, will always let you in, give way, dip lights, wave etc..
- n4r9 4y agoI live in the UK and have driven on various European countries and all down the US West coast. LA had easily the worst and most aggressive drivers of all. It was terrifying; one moment you're trying to squeeze onto the highway between two cars that absolutely won't budge an inch, the next moment you're being overtaken on both sides simultaneously by cars going over the speed limit. I also passed two fresh car-totalling crashes in two days, which I've never experienced elsewhere.
- titzer 4y agoThese are great. I've always used a rule of thumb. Dumb = ignorant, seems to get better with more knowledge Stupid = confidently wrong to the point of net negative for everyone, seems to get worse with more knowledge
- eikenberry 4y agoSounds like this goes against the old saying "I may be stupid but I'm not dumb", i.e. I'm not book smart but I have common sense.
- phkahler 4y ago>> Sounds like this goes against the old saying "I may be stupid but I'm not dumb", i.e. I'm not book smart but I have common sense. There is another saying "You can't fix stupid" so giving them more knowledge doesn't help, it just expands their sphere of influence.
- RajT88 4y agoThere's an old Chinese/Japanese proverb about this even. "Baka ni tsukeru kusuri nashi" The medicine which can be applied to stupidity, does not exist.
- enraged_camel 4y agoThis is the distinction Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition rules made between the Intelligence stat and the Wisdom stat. Intelligence was book smartness and wisdom was common sense and general understanding of the world and people. Wizards were intelligent but not necessarily wise, and clerics/druids were the opposite.
- api 4y agoStupid is often a product of dumb plus narcissism, a stubborn unwillingness to learn.
- bsenftner 4y agoAs the other threads dog pile on critism, one would probably do well following the implied advice of avoiding what oneself considers a stupid person, rather than granting them the benefit of doubt. Their poor decision making will side effect you.
- psi75 4y agoThe thing about this stupidity is that it's the thrill of being the cause and, as the essay observes, it is not just low-IQ or low "class" people who indulge. Some people like to steal stop signs, and some people like to ruin their co-workers' reputations. It has little to do with actual low intelligence, but it is irrational and unpredictable. The most dangerous people, though, are bandits who figure out how to use stupid people for their own purposes. They can turn uncorrelated human stupidity, moderated by the central limit theorem, into correlated human stupidity and use it as a weapon. They come with armies; they become the bosses.
- polotics 4y agoHaving seen the posted articles quite a few times in past years, this is the first case of a comment contributing a new idea to the riff. Thumbs up!
- psi75 4y agoI was one of the best posters on Hacker News until my real name account got banned. Now I'm 30 of the best posters on Hacker News.
- Sniffnoy 4y ago(1976)
- ncmncm 4y agoI used to host this article. Somebody in Italy claimed to own the copyright ("literary heirs" of Carlos), and demanded I take it down, despite that Carlos clearly wanted it distributed far and wide. He's dead now, so he gets no say anymore.
- adamc 4y agoHe needed to put it in the public domain or something similar if he really cared.
- carapace 4y ago> STATED by the Author in its 1986 version as intended for the public domain (and yes, stated again in 1992, despite having re-published this text in 1988, slightly modified, in his "Allegro ma non troppo" copyrighted collection). Small print at the bottom of the page.
- jacquesm 4y agoI think the heirs should read the article ;)
- wildmanx 4y agoThis is a terrible view of humankind, society and the people around you. What is "stupidity" other than a concept vague enough that you can just throw it at anybody to, in part, immediately raise yourself to some level of superiority, and essentially defame without actually having to argue anything? Obviously they are stupid, and since you realize that, you are obviously not, so what's there to argue, right? Human intelligence, if that's what "stupidity" is supposed to be about, is many-dimensional. Even within a single dimension, most actions, opinions or expressions of such are not clear-cut more or less intelligent. Often you just happen to agree with one or see problems with another one. But it doesn't immediately mean somebody is "stupid". And it also ignores the "why". Maybe somebody is lacking education in a certain field, perhaps because of a lack of funds or opportunity because they grew up in a disadvantaged neighborhood. Or because of a medical condition. Or maybe they are just tired. Who knows. Oh right, they are "stupid", that's what they are. And finally, even if somebody does something "stupid" .. don't put yourself on such a high horse. You likely also do "stupid" things. All the time. You don't realize it though, you'd otherwise stop doing that thing. So, if the conclusion is that we are all "stupid" in some way, they yeah, we can claim that there are "stupid" people all around us, but that's not a particularly meaningful statement. Honestly, this was a very sad read.
- goatcode 4y agoI would refer you to the first basic law, dear sir or madam.
- elihu 4y agoThe article defines stupidity in a very precise way: for the purposes of this essay, it's someone who causes harm to other people without any benefit or causing harm to themselves. It has nothing to do with cognitive ability, knowledge, or education -- it's a behavioral pattern. Maybe "stupid" as a label is not great because it already has an established meaning different than the one being used here, but I find the basic observations contained in the essay to be useful.
- brazzy 4y agoThe definition is not precise at all, because "harm" and "benefit" cannot be precisely defined and can in fact be very subjective.
- ggm 4y agoC/F MIT "clue theory" -fixed amount of clue in the universe, so teaching people is like entropy: you just reduce clue levels to a lower minima.
- brazzy 4y agoI'm not sure I agree with this: "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." Because gains/losses can be hard to quantify. Punishing people who violate rules of fairness is a useful strategy proven by game theory ("Tit for tat"), and there are indications it is a deeply ingrained human behaviour. You might argue that even when it incurs losses to the punishers, its overall gains outweigh that, but those are future, hypothetical gains. What about other cases where such future, hypothetical gains are less well-founded, but still expected by the "stupid person"? What about emotional gains? It's not as easy to draw lines here as it may seem.
- dangus 4y agoThis is one of the most pretentious things I've read all year.
- just_boost_it 4y agoMy new basic law of charts of personality types: "if you make an xy chart of any human traits, and look at it long enough, you can name enough parts of the chart to write a blog post or maybe even a book."
- dieselgate 4y agoDidn’t read the whole thing because it’s super dense and I don’t like the “breaking people into four basic categories” thing - but the cartoons are good. Just makes me think of a Bill Burr(?) (edit: joke) line equating to something like “Think about how dumb the average American is and realize half of them are more stupid that that”. (Edit: always wondered if he assumed a normal distribution heh) Suppose this is why we have “specializations” - most people don’t seek out medical advice from an electrician (or vice versa) but that doesn’t mean the respective individual lacks “knowledge”.
- notakio 4y agoNot Bill Burr, rather George Carlin. But that theme is present in both comedians' work, to be sure.
- dieselgate 4y agoAh gotcha yeah i wasn’t sure if it was Carlin or Burr!
- mcguire 4y agoAs an aside, averages don't work that way. The average (mean) can vary greatly from the median, which is the central value, due to outliers. For example, "Median individual income in the United States was $44,225. Average individual income in 2021 in the United States was $63,214.03." (https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-percentiles/)[1] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce... [1] Not sure that I buy the actual numbers; the median has been around $30K for a number of years, up to 2019 at least. A $10K jump in 2 years?
- dieselgate 4y agoHaha yeah that’s a fair point and I understand what you mean - you’re right. It’s just supposed to be a joke but maybe that’s not clear
- simonh 4y agoNo definition of stupidity is given, no criteria for identifying stupid behaviour, no evidence for any of these ramblings. I checked out a few other article. More flat statements with little or no reasoned or evidentiary support, and what references are given if you actually read them, in the cases I found are being mis-interpreted. They often don't actually support the position taken. The whole thing is stupid. Having said that, I think we do sometimes overestimate how clever we are, as a species. If you think about it, we literally just right now, in evolutionary terms, put together a technological society. The last 10k years of advances since agriculture and cities are 3% of the last 300k years since our last common ancestor. That means we only just barely have enough intelligence to develop a civilization, the bare minimum required. Otherwise we'd have done it sooner. We're jumped up plains apes. Still, this article contains no such discussion, no analysis, no examination of evidence or reasons why any of what is asserted might be true or if it is true. It doesn't even properly explain what it's talking about. Nothing you could even hang a discussion on. Pure rubbish.
- lobstrosity420 4y agoIt's a satirical piece, you are allowed to not like it but you don't have to peer review it.
- simonh 4y agoWhy do you think it's satirical? Read the other articles on the blog, they're all like that. Dull, plodding blobs of boorishness. Check out the screed on gay marriage.
- Jtsummers 4y agoThis wasn't written by the same author as the rest of the site. It was written by Carlo M. Cipolla [0]. Though, to your point, it doesn't seem like it was intended as satirical. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_M._Cipolla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_M._Cipolla
- elihu 4y ago
- paulpauper 4y agoThis article is bad. It's like a rant that went on 1000 words too long. Time to try the 'flag' feature.
- jacquesm 4y agoIf you read this and think it is serious I suggest you read it thinking about it as an elaborate joke, which is how it comes across to me.
- carapace 4y agoI'm astonished that so many people took it at face value as some sort of serious scholarly article, even despite the cartoons! Maybe read it in Patton Oswalt's voice?
- kazinator 4y agoClick on TOC entry: > "The requested document at 'http://harmful.cat-v.org:80/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/1 http://harmful.cat-v.org:80/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupi...' doesn't exist" Law 0 of human stupidity is that those preparing a site about stupidity will code in plain HTTP links with :80, and not bother testing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- GrinningFool 4y agoWait. "The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate." If that held true for any estimate, the only correct answer is one hundred percent of the total population is stupid.
- EnderShadow8 4y agoI think that's the implication
- GrinningFool 4y agoNothing about the post seemed to suggest that was intentional though.
- eternityforest 4y agoA true "Stupid idiot" in my book would be like someone who keeps going to jail for petty vandalism that they post on their tiktok with only 100 subscribers. Sure, there is plenty of them, but they are not the most dangerous person out there. The drunk driver who is highly capable has never been in an accident before. He does all kinds of stupid stuff because he is so capable. His reaction time carries him through. His instincts tell him just how far he can push things. Till he goes one step too far and mows down a family. I don't blame stupid, I blame confident. A programmer is very clever. His code is perfect. The project is in the toilet because it's unmaintainable. But hey, not his fault nobody else can understand his genius code. The few who dig through it have to admit, wow, that's impressive. The hacker steals the little old ladys life savings with a 0day he found himself. Where's the stupid? He won. He was untracable. He's somewhere on the beach in the Carribean, which is apparently a place people want to be. The company makes an unsafe drug. The chemist was smart enough to do chemistry. The exec can manage a company. They didn't test well enough. People die. No stupid needed. The math genius turned philosopher(Ahem... Kaczynski) sees the world through a very objective lens. By a system of principles, he determines tech is the enemy. He kills in the name of this ideology. There aren't many flaws in the reasoning, the only problem is he is forcing his values(Like people having survival goals instead of surrogate goals) on us. Stupid people can use processes to decouple the results from their own skill and action. A confident person will not, and as such any imperfections they have show. And we all have imperfections. Would you rather fly with a below average pilot who woul5 call the cops on anyone who doesn't follow the checklist, or the worlds best pilot in terms of basic talent, who doesn't think he needs a checklist and does a few show off dives in the flight just for fun?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tpoacher 4y agoAnd if you found yourself nodding along through Steps 1 to 5, you are now fully primed and will have no trouble believing Step 6: The stupid person is a threat to the Aryan race, and must be eliminated. Congratulations. You nodded along right into a Hitler trap. </godwin>
- elihu 4y agoThat would be ignoring the 2nd law: "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person." The stupid person (according to Cipolla's definition) is a threat to the Aryan race in the same way that the stupid person is a threat to all people everywhere, and an Aryan is just as likely to be stupid as anyone else.
- tpoacher 4y agoIt does not contradict it, because you misunderstood my quote. The Nazi movement, and propaganda in general, succeeds via dehumanizing the enemy, portraying the "other" as "less than human". My use of "Aryan" here was meant to shake you out of that hypnosis, which was created by a a series of arguments which sound logical when viewed in isolation, but have been framed in a restricted narrative chain that leads to the malicious conclusion. It was supposed to wake you up to the fact that once you have accepted the first five tenets unquestionably, you've essentially been brainwashed into the same state of believing the 'other' is less human, and thus measures against this group are acceptable --- which was the defining narrative of the Nazi party regarding the civilised Aryans and their duty against the evil caricatures that seeked to destroy civilisation as we know it. To use your own words: if you were to believe that a 'stupid person' is a threat to 'people everywhere', you've been brainwashed by this argument into accepting that 'stupid people' are not 'people' (or somehow less than valid people), in the same way that Aryans were led to accept that jews were somehow less human than Aryans, and their exctinction was for the good of the world at large. And since the term 'stupid person' is extremely vague and malleable towards any political agenda that could stand to benefit from abusing it, this becomes a very dangerous division to make. Not unlike the whole trend of people labelling everyone on the other side as "literally hitler" in modern US political discourse.
- aaron695 4y ago
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- dredmorbius 4y agoSee also Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "On Stupidity": “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. ... <https://americandigest.org/dietrich-bonhoeffer-on-stupidity/ https://americandigest.org/dietrich-bonhoeffer-on-stupidity/>
- carapace 4y agoThis thread has some of the weirdest reactions to this piece that I've ever seen. Several folks take exception the use of the term "stupidity", others project their own hangups on to the piece, still others over-analyze it. > This is a terrible view of humankind, society and the people around you. > I would propose a more measured approach to this subject. > This is so horrible on so many levels > "stupidity" I'd rather think of this as "wasted potential" > This article is bad. > This is one of the most pretentious things I've read all year. > [It's] a Hitler trap. > No definition of stupidity is given (This last one is particularly rich because a definition is, of course, given in the "third (and golden) basic law" in bold text outlined in it's own box!) I don't really have anything to add to the discussion. To me TFA seems like a dry but funny satire. There's an element of truth to what it's saying, sure, but as far as any deeper meaning goes... "Be careful."?
- pschuegr 4y agoI lost time to reading this article and question whether the author benefited from writing it, so I hope some of y'all got something out of it.