Five Laws of Human Stupidity (1976)

http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/

by Budaa • 4 years ago

121 93 4 years ago

openfuture• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

It 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.)

mcguire3• 4 years ago

The 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?

sushisource• 4 years ago

This 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

narag• 4 years ago

This is so horrible on so many levels

Could you ellaborate? Do you find it cruel, wrong... stupid?

Just FYI: this is old, from the seventies I think.

phkahler2• 4 years ago

> This is so horrible on so many levels

That's just reality bumping into your egalitarian nature ;-)

rob74• 4 years ago

I 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_S3• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

Not trusting others' turn signals seems more like defensive driving than bad driving.

titzer2• 4 years ago

These 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• 4 years 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.

phkahler2• 4 years 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.

enraged_camel2• 4 years ago

This 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• 4 years ago

Stupid is often a product of dumb plus narcissism, a stubborn unwillingness to learn.

bsenftner• 4 years ago

As 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.

psi752• 4 years ago

The 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• 4 years ago

Having 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!

psi752• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

(1976)

ncmncm• 4 years ago

I 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.

adamc2• 4 years ago

He needed to put it in the public domain or something similar if he really cared.

carapace4• 4 years 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.

jacquesm2• 4 years ago

I think the heirs should read the article ;)

wildmanx5• 4 years ago

This 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.

elihu5• 4 years ago

The 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.

brazzy3• 4 years ago

The definition is not precise at all, because "harm" and "benefit" cannot be precisely defined and can in fact be very subjective.

spicymaki• 4 years ago

someone who causes harm to other people without any benefit or causing harm to themselves. Everyone is guilty of doing this from time to time. Collectively we are doing plenty of harm to the environment and we lack the will or the wherewithal to stop. It is a pretty universal behavioral pattern.

wildmanx5• 4 years ago

The article defines stupidity in a very precise way

No, it doesn't. The part that you mention is "law" 3 of 5. I stopped reading mid-way into the first "law" up to which the article already used the term "stupidity" multiple times as if it's obvious what that is and was so unbelievably presumptuous regarding people that are somehow less worth than the author that it became unbearable.

jjoonathan3• 4 years ago

2nd law: stupidity is independent

3rd law: stupidity causes harm (definition)

There is a contradiction here. By this definition, if you select for attainment of any kind that would be sabotaged by the harm, you had better start seeing less stupidity. If you don't, it's a hint that your model of stupidity is wrong. Indeed, his model is wrong, but instead of taking the hint the author simply chalks the pile of contradictory evidence up to chance and sticks with his bad model: "Nature seems indeed to have outdone herself." No, dude -- the problem is not with nature, it's with your model.

coldtea• 4 years ago

The 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's only precise in the abstract. When it comes to concrete information, it's a BS non-definition. In real life scenarios of any real importance (that is, non trivial examples of Dumb and Dumber style behavior), it quickly gets difficult to define if harm was caused, who caused it, whether they've benefited from it (especially as benefits are not just monetary or advancing one's position on some job or some such), and so on...

Calavar• 4 years ago

I feel like we must have read two entirely different articles.

The author has a very precise definition of stupidity. He very explicitly states that level of knowledge/education is completely orthogonal to being stupid. (As prevalent among Nobel laureates as it is among blue collar workers.) Stupidity, in his definition, appears to be an attitude more than anything else.

mcguire3• 4 years ago

The third law: "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."

Are you a stupid person if you do this once? Twice? Frequently? (Does anyone do it frequently?) Are any of us not stupid? And what does this have to do with the normal meaning of "stupid"?

andrejandre• 4 years ago

If we assume something like Einstein's popular idea of a "frame of reference"... well, then I think this entire article can be valid. Emphasis on the word can.

If I assume my frame of reference to be one where attitudes toward meat-eating is desired, then I am going to assume people who are vegan are stupid. Vegans will detract from my meat-eating ways, and the meat-eating ways of my friends and tribe.

If we can apply a frame of reference, then these laws of stupidity can be (comically) useful in the sense that "stupid" people will detract from your quality of life. "Stupid" people, per this article, seem to misalign with the views and desires of the "superior" (per your comment) person and thus cause friction in the life of the "superior".

In a weird way, I see this article as a funny way to remind us to be cautious with our time & energy. To be conscious about who we spend our time with, who to expose our ideas to, and who to ask for help. It might be an extremely satirical reference guide to make sure you catch yourself before you go too deep into relying on the wrong person for your job or favor, for example.

I wouldn't take it too seriously, because, well, that might be stupid.

r_hoods_ghost• 4 years ago

From TFA the definition of a stupid person is "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."

goatcode• 4 years ago

I would refer you to the first basic law, dear sir or madam.

swatcoder• 4 years ago

I completely agree with you when reading this at face value as a contemporary, serious essay.

But it’s not quite that. It’s a long form semi-comic screed from a time when it wasn’t especially controversial to put plain words to one’s frustrations.

I don’t share these particular frustrations. I don’t resonate with what’s being said. I think it comes from a pretty alienated experience where you’re convinced that there’s a lot of bad in the world and that it can be attributed to a few conceptual scapegoats that are simple and identifiable and that things would be so much better if not for this one (or two or ten) darn things.

But a lot of people do feel that way, and I’m not ready to hold my different experience over theirs. It would probably be stupid of me to do so.

wildmanx5• 4 years ago

Well said, thank you.

jjoonathan3• 4 years ago

His observations resonate with me but his model sucks. In particular, his 3rd law / definition

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.

contradicts his 2nd law

The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

because if you select for accomplishment (or serial accomplishment) the definition implies that you had better start seeing fewer stupid people, but his 2nd law says you shouldn't. This isn't a nit, it strikes at the very core of why his model doesn't fit reality.

Here's a model that better fits reality: our assumptions about what "everybody knows" tend to be bad, both in an absolute sense and when conditioned on some particular level of education / accomplishment. Knowledge silos run deep, their shapes are strange, and people are really good at accommodating gaps in their knowledge. Clever people even moreso. So it's easy to underestimate the gaps, watch otherwise respectable people stumble over them, and think "how in the hell did that happen?"

If you attribute these gaps to an innate quality like stupidity, you will be unable to help people fill the gaps. Not because the people cannot be taught, but because your misunderstanding precludes you from being a good teacher. This makes his model damaging in addition to being incorrect and uncharitable.

Those may sound like harsh words, but they are not nearly as harsh as the mistake that eventually shook me out of a similar set of beliefs. Someone went from "stupidest person I know" to "smartest person I know," and that was a big hint that my model was wrong. We are a decade distant from that event, I've had the chance to run a lot of evidence past these two models, and "weird knowledge gaps" so thoroughly whips "innate stupidity" that I am slightly embarrassed I ever considered it true. Live and learn.

throwyawayyyy• 4 years ago

"b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments."

After reading this profoundly ungenerous article, I am inclined to be ungenerous here and assume that the "activities" the author refers to would be, by most of us, considered anti-social. "I'm just playing my music, why is everyone on my case? I'm a better driver when driving fast..."

ggm• 4 years ago

C/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.

brazzy3• 4 years ago

I'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• 4 years ago

This is one of the most pretentious things I've read all year.

just_boost_it• 4 years ago

My 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."

dieselgate3• 4 years ago

Didn’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”.

mcguire3• 4 years ago

As 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-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?

dieselgate3• 4 years ago

Haha 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

notakio• 4 years ago

Not Bill Burr, rather George Carlin. But that theme is present in both comedians' work, to be sure.

dieselgate3• 4 years ago

Ah gotcha yeah i wasn’t sure if it was Carlin or Burr!

simonh4• 4 years ago

No 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• 4 years ago

It's a satirical piece, you are allowed to not like it but you don't have to peer review it.

simonh4• 4 years ago

Why 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.

laserlight• 4 years ago

No definition of stupidity is given

From the article:

“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.”

simonh4• 4 years ago

What kind of losses? Loss of what? If a majority of people incurred more losses than gains in their lives, we'd all have starved to death tens of thousands of years ago.

OK, fair enough its a sort of definition or has the superficial form of one, but it's not actually saying anything.

paulpauper• 4 years ago

This article is bad. It's like a rant that went on 1000 words too long. Time to try the 'flag' feature.

jacquesm2• 4 years ago

If 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.

carapace4• 4 years ago

I'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• 4 years ago

Click on TOC entry:

"The requested document at '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.

GrinningFool2• 4 years ago

Wait.

"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• 4 years ago

I think that's the implication

GrinningFool2• 4 years ago

Nothing about the post seemed to suggest that was intentional though.

eternityforest• 4 years ago

A 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?

tpoacher3• 4 years ago

And 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>

elihu5• 4 years ago

That 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.

tpoacher3• 4 years ago

It 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.

dredmorbius• 4 years ago

See 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/>

carapace4• 4 years ago

This 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• 4 years ago

I 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.

Five Laws of Human Stupidity (1976)

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