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That's a bad argument but there is a better argument. An evil person will hurt other people for his own benefit, but a stupid person will hurt other people even

That's a bad argument but there is a better argument. An evil person will hurt other people for his own benefit, but a stupid person will hurt other people even at his own detriment, which makes stupidity even more pointlessly destructive. I'm cribbing from Carlo Cipolla's "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" here, and for him this is a definitional feature of stupidity: "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."

jstarfish 3y ago
> An evil person will hurt other people for his own benefit, but a stupid person will hurt other people even at his own detriment, which makes stupidity even more pointlessly destructive This could probably be refined a bit; you're on the right track but the logic doesn't work. I think we can all agree school shooters are Evil. They almost always commit suicide to avoid arrest. Damage to others is extensive, damage to self is mortal, and yet they go through with both planning and execution. Mitigating all risk of collateral damage in the commission of an evil act is not a requisite for Evil. If anything, acceptance of harm to self makes it more evil. > "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. Your boy Carlo has clearly never been through an acrimonious divorce.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  "I think we can all agree school shooters are Evil." There is a question where evil ends and insanity begins. Totally self-destructive actions such as this strike me as insane. It would be a different story if the school shooter wanted to establish his own gang rule by sheer terror (say, in a country where law enforcement is weak or absent, e.g. Haiti). That would be textbook evil.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    > There is a question where evil ends and insanity begins. Totally self-destructive actions such as this strike me as insane. That gets nebulous though. Even a murderous schizophrenic isn't evil. Failed military offensives that end in your execution aren't the product of insanity. Firefighters aren't insane for running into burning buildings. Self-destructive actions can be rationalized. Whether you agree with the rationale is not the point. Like terrorism, school shootings are intentional and initiated to do as much damage to others as possible, usually in response to some personal grievance. There's always a shitty "reason" for it. Insanity--real insanity--would be more like sending a pipe bomb to a random daycare center for absolutely no reason whatsoever. There is zero predictability. Nobody did anything to "deserve" it. I've seen some kids try to play at "insanity" by doing shit to people for no apparent reason (and being all "tee-hee I'm so insane lmao #murder"), but when you dig into forensics you find they researched the eventual victim and only engaged once they say or do something objectionable (the new face of "hate crime," perpetrated by the types most likely to call others out for the same). This is not insanity, it's very-calculated evil.
  - hurrdurr56 3y ago
    Well, it ultimately depends on how you want to define insanity. Most of the school shooters aren't schizophrenic. They usually aren't complaining about hearing voices or hallucinating. When the media claims they had a "history of mental illness" it usually means mild to moderate depression, anxiety, ADHD, things of that nature. Some of them will claim to have a political or ideological cause but most of the time their manifesto (if they bother to write one) consists of something like "Everything is meaningless bullshit and I am going to prove it by killing a bunch of random people for no reason".
  - mcv 3y ago
    I'm not sure evil ends there. The 9/11 terrorists also died intentionally from their own actions, but mere insanity doesn't explain such a coordinated attack. It's just that they see their own death as a necessary sacrifice in a larger struggle. The same may be true for some mass shooters, especially the ones clearly motivated by racism or other bigotry: sacrifice your own life to take out more of the enemy. In their mind, it's probably no different than a soldier risking his life to defend his country. (Well, maybe that counts as delusion and is still insanity, but also evil.)
    - philwelch 3y ago
      Yeah the 9/11 hijackers valued the mission over their own lives, which is usually considered a valorous attitude, except in this instance their mission was evil. And this illustrates another point: if you’re evil but not stupid, you’re going to be more capable which means you can do a lot more damage if you want to. We should prefer the evil to be stupid so as to undermine their effectiveness. That being said, stupidity is still far more common than evil, so the damage done by the stupid-but-not-evil probably outweighs whatever damage mitigation we experience from the stupidity of evil people. (And it’s worth noting that many if not most evil people are quite stupid, at least in terms of common criminals.)
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
> "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." I think this comes down to motivation. Are they causing losses to other people just because they didn't think, or miscalculated? That's being stupid. Or are they causing losses to other people because of spite? That is, they may not gain in any material way, but they may gain in satisfaction. That's being evil.
- philwelch 3y ago
  I think it’s relative to your own value system. If a man dies rescuing his family from a house fire, that’s a loss for him in some sense but in that man’s own value system, it’s a win because he values his family’s lives over his own. The word “spite” implies a certain pettiness that usually indicates that you don’t actually value satisfying the grudge more than what you’re losing so you’re just being stupid. My mom always used to say, “don’t cut off your nose to spite your face”. But if you brood and premeditate on a resentment until you wholeheartedly accept it and are still willing to make personal sacrifices to satisfy it, that’s less “spite” and more “revenge”, and it becomes evil.

jstarfish 3y ago

> An evil person will hurt other people for his own benefit, but a stupid person will hurt other people even at his own detriment, which makes stupidity even more pointlessly destructive This could probably be refined a bit; you're on the right track but the logic doesn't work. I think we can all agree school shooters are Evil. They almost always commit suicide to avoid arrest. Damage to others is extensive, damage to self is mortal, and yet they go through with both planning and execution. Mitigating all risk of collateral damage in the commission of an evil act is not a requisite for Evil. If anything, acceptance of harm to self makes it more evil. > "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. Your boy Carlo has clearly never been through an acrimonious divorce.

inglor_cz 3y ago
"I think we can all agree school shooters are Evil." There is a question where evil ends and insanity begins. Totally self-destructive actions such as this strike me as insane. It would be a different story if the school shooter wanted to establish his own gang rule by sheer terror (say, in a country where law enforcement is weak or absent, e.g. Haiti). That would be textbook evil.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > There is a question where evil ends and insanity begins. Totally self-destructive actions such as this strike me as insane. That gets nebulous though. Even a murderous schizophrenic isn't evil. Failed military offensives that end in your execution aren't the product of insanity. Firefighters aren't insane for running into burning buildings. Self-destructive actions can be rationalized. Whether you agree with the rationale is not the point. Like terrorism, school shootings are intentional and initiated to do as much damage to others as possible, usually in response to some personal grievance. There's always a shitty "reason" for it. Insanity--real insanity--would be more like sending a pipe bomb to a random daycare center for absolutely no reason whatsoever. There is zero predictability. Nobody did anything to "deserve" it. I've seen some kids try to play at "insanity" by doing shit to people for no apparent reason (and being all "tee-hee I'm so insane lmao #murder"), but when you dig into forensics you find they researched the eventual victim and only engaged once they say or do something objectionable (the new face of "hate crime," perpetrated by the types most likely to call others out for the same). This is not insanity, it's very-calculated evil.
- hurrdurr56 3y ago
  Well, it ultimately depends on how you want to define insanity. Most of the school shooters aren't schizophrenic. They usually aren't complaining about hearing voices or hallucinating. When the media claims they had a "history of mental illness" it usually means mild to moderate depression, anxiety, ADHD, things of that nature. Some of them will claim to have a political or ideological cause but most of the time their manifesto (if they bother to write one) consists of something like "Everything is meaningless bullshit and I am going to prove it by killing a bunch of random people for no reason".
- mcv 3y ago
  I'm not sure evil ends there. The 9/11 terrorists also died intentionally from their own actions, but mere insanity doesn't explain such a coordinated attack. It's just that they see their own death as a necessary sacrifice in a larger struggle. The same may be true for some mass shooters, especially the ones clearly motivated by racism or other bigotry: sacrifice your own life to take out more of the enemy. In their mind, it's probably no different than a soldier risking his life to defend his country. (Well, maybe that counts as delusion and is still insanity, but also evil.)
  - philwelch 3y ago
    Yeah the 9/11 hijackers valued the mission over their own lives, which is usually considered a valorous attitude, except in this instance their mission was evil. And this illustrates another point: if you’re evil but not stupid, you’re going to be more capable which means you can do a lot more damage if you want to. We should prefer the evil to be stupid so as to undermine their effectiveness. That being said, stupidity is still far more common than evil, so the damage done by the stupid-but-not-evil probably outweighs whatever damage mitigation we experience from the stupidity of evil people. (And it’s worth noting that many if not most evil people are quite stupid, at least in terms of common criminals.)

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

> "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." I think this comes down to motivation. Are they causing losses to other people just because they didn't think, or miscalculated? That's being stupid. Or are they causing losses to other people because of spite? That is, they may not gain in any material way, but they may gain in satisfaction. That's being evil.

philwelch 3y ago
I think it’s relative to your own value system. If a man dies rescuing his family from a house fire, that’s a loss for him in some sense but in that man’s own value system, it’s a win because he values his family’s lives over his own. The word “spite” implies a certain pettiness that usually indicates that you don’t actually value satisfying the grudge more than what you’re losing so you’re just being stupid. My mom always used to say, “don’t cut off your nose to spite your face”. But if you brood and premeditate on a resentment until you wholeheartedly accept it and are still willing to make personal sacrifices to satisfy it, that’s less “spite” and more “revenge”, and it becomes evil.