
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity - vimes656
http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/
======
lionhearted
I come across this maybe once a year while browsing the internet, and I'm
always impressed. The author's ability to get _just_ the right mix of resigned
dry wit so he doesn't come across as cocky or a jerk or a defeatist... it's
rather incredible.

There's gems in there, too -

> 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.

Indeed. You can deal with a person who wants to gain, and is comfortable
gaining at your expense. They're somewhat predictable, so you can deal with
them if you're careful. But the person who is a whirlwind of calamity - making
his own life worse and others around - you can't deal with that guy.

The author continues:

> A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

And then, and I love this -

> A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Indeed! Bandits are unpleasant, but usually easily understandable. With
appropriate cautions, you might even be able to transact with a bandit for a
short time if it's necessary. But like the author says, the man who does
stupid things is much more dangerous.

With a bandit, it's possible to assess what you have and where you're at that
they might want to take from you, and to take precautions. With the man who
randomly breaks things for no reason, no such precaution can be taken because
even the most basic, unevaluated, routine action could be bungled leading to
bad results for all inclined.

Gosh, I always enjoy reading this piece, even though I've seen it a bunch. I
should send it to some people who might have not have read it.

~~~
warmfuzzykitten
Of course you enjoy it. It makes you feel smart.

~~~
lionhearted
> Of course you enjoy it. It makes you feel smart.

You know what's funny? I think this is exactly what the author would call a
"stupid" remark - it's meant to say something nasty about the person you're
replying to, _and you don't even gain from it!_

You see, the irony here is that the author isn't actually talking about
stupidity and intelligence. He's actually talking about people who engage in
lose/win, win/win, lose/lose, or win/lose behavior.

He calls those "helpless", "intelligent", "stupid", and "bandit" - but normal
definitions of stupidity and intelligence don't really apply, as he notes that
Nobel laureates often engage in stupid (lose/lose) behavior, despite being
intelligent under normal definitions.

Your comment here? It's a pretty good example of lose/lose behavior - it's
designed to be a bit of a jerk towards me and makes you look snarky in the
process. Lose/lose. So yeah dude, stop doing that ;)

~~~
mcantor
Maybe I'm just an optimist, but it didn't actually seem to me like he was
trying to say anything nasty about you. I thought he was just
joking/reflecting on the universal appeal of the article--it's well-written
and accessible, so it would make most readers feel smart, and everyone likes
feeling smart.

~~~
arctangent
If we could see how many votes each of the comments got we'd know who had done
better out of the exchange :-)

~~~
whimsy
Winning an appeal to the populous does not imply correctness.

------
sgentle
This is trash of the worst kind: fatuous nonsense wrapped in pseudoscience.
Please tell me this is a parody and it's gone over my head.

Just in case, I will critique in the spirit of the original article:

The first immutable law of madeupistan is that this article makes no sense. If
one quantifies by Q the amount of sense this article doesn't make, and divides
it by L, which is how badly the sense it doesn't make is, one can plot the
result on a graph, with axes and everything like in science.

As you can see by even a cursory examination of the diagram, anything can be
positioned from "scotsman" to "no scotsman" on the Y axis, and "sense" to "no
sense" on the X axis. This explains the fundamental nature of mankind.

The second immutable law of madeupistan is that your position on the
scotsmanian axis is irreversibly determined at birth. You may be confused
initially by the observation that even someone with a high degree of
scotsmanity will sometimes act like a non-scotsman and vice-versa. Never fear,
that is explained by the graph.

The fourth immutable law (and, by extension, the third) is that anything can
be proven by decomposition into a punnett square.

The fifth immutable law is that once someone has been determined to be a
scotsman, they will take actions without any basis in rationality whatsoever
(I will heretoafter call these actions "Just So" actions). Note, though, that
as per the second law, sometimes they will not.

The danger of these Just So actions is inexplicably large, and it behooves any
non-scotsmen among us to immediately seek out and prevent Just So actions by
dangerous scotsmen. If we do not do this, society will collapse.[1]

[1] Myself, 2011, Journal of Just So Information

~~~
grovulent
Well - I think it's part parody.

I mean - obviously the author hasn't done the sort of empirical work
discovering the amount of stupid people in each kind of social class. It was
at this point in the text that people like me laughed and people like you
required a laugh-track.

It's interesting though. I meet dudes like you that respond to something that
for some reason irks them with:

"It's not formulated to the highest standards of intellectual rigour - and so
is worst kind of crap"

I have to wonder what really is provoking the hyperbole. Because it hardly
seems warranted to me.

Just a suggestion - but maybe you might profit from stepping back from this a
little. Plenty of contributions to a discourse can still possess insight
without all the trappings of intellectual rigour.

~~~
sgentle
The reason I say it's the worst kind of trash is (ironically) the same reason
the author says stupid people are the most dangerous - it has about as much
merit as, say, a Daily Mail article, but because it's presented in a way that
mimics science, it more easily slips past peoples' defences.

I suspect that you are falling victim to hyperbole yourself with "highest
standards of intellectual rigour". I don't expect a double-blind randomised
trial or publication in Nature, but surely when someone says to us "this is
the truth", we must ask "why?"

If the author had said "I think that people are born stupid or clever, and
stupid people are very dangerous, so we should watch out for them." I would
disagree, but not loudly - it is, after all, a matter of opinion unless
someone has facts to bring to the table.

But when someone dresses up their conjecture in make-believe laws and pseudo-
scientific formulae, they are being deceptive. Perhaps a more acceptable thing
to do would be dispassionately describe the flaws in his argument, but the
deception made me angry and I don't see anger as necessarily wrong. I don't
believe I wrote anything inaccurate, or anything I wouldn't say if the article
was brought up among my friends.

Frankly, I'm surprised I was the only one. Perhaps it's just the wrong crowd.

~~~
grovulent
To a certain degree I emphasise - in spoken contexts I often fail to pick up
sarcasm. But I have far less problems in navigating through subtle shifts in
tone in a piece of text.

While you seem to see it as a wolf in sheep's clothing and are terrified that
the sheep are about to be devoured, I'm seeing the wolf, dressed in sheep's
clothing, comically delivering a lecture to said sheep about avoiding wolves -
and actually dispensing some pretty good advice. Surely you can see the
wonderfully playful irony here.

What's more, the sheep are sitting around (i.e. hacker news readers) having a
good ol laugh at the wolf. And you're amongst them shouting loudly - WATCH OUT
THE WOLF WILL DEVOUR YOU! And when they look at you strangely your response to
this is to conclude that you're just in the wrong crowd.

Just a shame is all - you're obviously quite a smart chap. It's like meeting
Beethoven and finding out that really he hates listening to Mozart. It would
boggle the mind!

~~~
stcredzero
_It's like meeting Beethoven and finding out that really he hates listening to
Mozart._

Apparently, Ludwig was rather taken with Wolfgang's music:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_Beethoven>

~~~
grovulent
Indeed - so that's why it would be quite boggling to learn otherwise! ;)

------
ableal
_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._

We could always start with 100% and see how it goes. I suspect this upper
bound method was applied by more than one writer.

Never mind the quibbles, it's good to see this one back. As the footnote says,
there's genius in it.

~~~
dexen
I believe the point here goes along the lines: ``instinctively, one perceives
the fraction as (N-1 / N)'' -- where N is size of the group in question and
the -1 is oneself... Which curiously renders oneself as a not-very-smart one.
Which suggests one underestimated the fraction ;-)

Especially as the two supporting points (a: unpleasant letdowns; b: frequent
bothering ``at the wrong moment'') are quite subjective.

To quote the venerable fortune(6):

    
    
      Renning's Maxim:
            Man is the highest animal.  Man does the classifying.

------
grovulent
I just look at the first picture and completely lose it laughing. "Hmm -
something wrong... what could it be?"

Aside from that - if I may add a serious comment - I think the most important
insight of this article is to recognise that stupidity has a kind of power. It
reminds me very much of the writings of Castaneda whose Don Juan character
always advised to disrupt ones routines in order to prevent others from taking
advantage of them.

I think what the article misses, however, is that intelligent people can in
fact take advantage of this very same power. If your reasons are thought out
ahead of time - to a degree beyond what most people are capable, then your
individual actions may well appear random to those with short attention spans.
It is just too much for them to place them within a greater whole.

------
drblast
The article is very funny, but I do find the definition of stupidity as the
tendency to perform actions that benefit nobody as particularly insightful.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
I agree that it is an important insight.

intelligence is less confusing when regarded as an optimization process.

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/tx/optimization/>

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

This is assuredly true, on the basis of replicated research, with regard to
IQ. There is essentially no correlation between IQ and rationality.

[http://www.project-
syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/Engli...](http://www.project-
syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/English)

High-IQ people can be every bit as irrational ("stupid" in the language of the
submitted article) as low-IQ people, and worse still, not notice that they are
being stupid. There are whole books on the subject.

[http://www.amazon.com/Why-Smart-People-Can-
Stupid/dp/0300101...](http://www.amazon.com/Why-Smart-People-Can-
Stupid/dp/0300101708)

[http://www.amazon.com/Blunder-Smart-People-Make-
Decisions/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Blunder-Smart-People-Make-
Decisions/dp/1596916435/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Make-Mistakes-
Without/dp/076792...](http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Make-Mistakes-
Without/dp/0767928067/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Sway-Irresistible-Pull-Irrational-
Beha...](http://www.amazon.com/Sway-Irresistible-Pull-Irrational-
Behavior/dp/0385530609/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-
Expande...](http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-
Decisions/dp/0061353248/)

All we can do about that here on HN is take other people's comments seriously
and try to see ourselves as others see us as we ponder our decisions.

------
vimes656
Sometimes stupidity is indistinguishable from pure evilness. That's why I
believe it's more practical to focus on removing inefficiency instead of
corruption.

~~~
arethuza
I suspect that humanities worst moments come from a combination of evil _and_
stupidity, even if that stupidity is just a failure to predict what your
actions will actually mean for others.

~~~
stcredzero
_I suspect that humanities [sic] worst moments come from a combination of evil
and stupidity_

Witness:

    
    
        - Failure of military leaders to recognize the implications 
          of advancing firearms technology starting in the Civil War
        - Failure of national governments to recognize the geopolitical instability
          embodied by the competing systems of alliances prior to WWI
        - Failure of national governments to recognize the economic and political
          instability caused by treaties prior to WWII
        - Disconnect of German leadership from reality through advocacy of 
          economic and biological pseudoscientific theories 
        - Disconnect of Soviet leadership from social and economic reality 
    

It seems that the caveman-mob level of broken thinking we exhibit as national
groups caused all sorts of technology-amplified havoc in the 19th and 20th
centuries.

I wonder if it's any better in the 21st century?

    
    
        - Burgeoning US debt, and the political impediments to solving it
        - Calamitous global environmental changes, also accompanied by political
          impediments to solution
    

What are the odds of solving our current problems without bloodshed? Probably
very near zero. The best we can hope for is to limit the scope of bloodshed to
militants, small regional conflicts, and assassinations. After all, we are
still mostly just mobs of tribal cavemen.

------
stretchwithme
A lot of truth here, but one statement seems incorrect:

"If all members of a society were perfect bandits the society would remain
stagnant but there would be no major disaster."

There would be no incentive to actually work, as everything presumably would
be stolen. So I don't think stagnation would be the result. A steady decline
back to hunter gatherer seems more likely.

~~~
ostso
No, because robbing someone of their incentive to work is a net loss to
society, so the bandits would no longer be perfect (unless they in turn gain a
corresponding incentive to work, or some other equivalent gain).

There are no perfect bandits, let along a society full of them. Scenarios like
"If all members of a society were perfect bandits" are hypothetical and don't
really translate to any actual human society that you could imagine. Even so,
they're useful for illustrating concepts.

------
smackay
As a basis for a World View and model for conducting one's affairs this is
pretty hard to beat. The Second Basic Law and σ in particular also gives
plenty of material for more comtemplative moments.

------
scotty79
Hey! I came up with 4-th law independently. All I needed was 5 years of
business experience as freelancer and striving entrepreneur.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=842922>

------
sunsu
reminds me of the Wizards First rule: "People are stupid...given proper
motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything."

~~~
stcredzero
That's just a paraphrase of Herman Goering:

<http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.asp>

------
zyfo
Some very apt descriptions there, good read. Interesting and pithy lens to
view the world through.

One dimension that struck me as missing: What about indifference? Surely
there's a difference in quality between say helplessness and indifference,
even if it isn't captured in the win/loss-for-me/you framework.

Many behaviours can be explained by indifference, as it's not obviously right
or even rational to think of the Total Humanity Utility as a goal-in-itself.
There seems to be an assumption of utilitarism hidden there.

Despite this problem the view described here seems to me to shine light on
many phenomena of human existance.

------
napierzaza
Definitely has the slant that everyone in the world is stupid. I don't like
that kind of world view, but still somewhat interesting. Can't stop estimating
that most of the people in the world are stupid. Pretty antisocial.

