The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1987) [pdf]
gandalf.fee.urv.cat208 points by bookofjoe 5 days ago
208 points by bookofjoe 5 days ago
General Hammerstein: “I distinguish four types (of soldiers). There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined.
“Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff.
“The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up ninety percent of every army and are suited to routine duties.
“Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions.
“One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.”
> he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.
In observing the current dark political period, we see clearly that the energetic but stupid person can be entrusted to cause damage. He is a type of zealot or fanatic.
If you can marshal groups of such people, especially at arm's length from your own reputation and assets, such groups of energetic but stupid people can do significant damage.
I think I would re-order the Laws as stated:
THE THIRD (AND GOLDEN) BASIC 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. Human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. (The four categories are H, I, B, S.)
combines with
THE SECOND BASIC LAW _ The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
leads to
THE FOURTH BASIC LAW _ Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
leads to
THE FIRST BASIC LAW _ Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
leads to
THE FIFTH BASIC LAW _ A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. The corollary of the Law is that: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
You can call Trump a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them.
> Human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. (The four categories are H, I, B, S.)
According to the source article, he would clearly be a Bandit ... in combination with the other categories.
I'm sure he would say he isn't stupid, but that's part of the problem. No one is intelligent in all domains (contrary to the article, I'm afraid); Trump's intelligence lies in speaking convincingly to a portion of the population, which at least in November 2016 and November 2024 constituted a majority of voters who actually voted. But when it comes to economics (consider: tariffs, but also inflation and the need for scientific research to sustain our economy), science (especially medicine, in view of his choice of Lysenko Jr), world politics (doing things which push former allies away, sometimes even in the direction of China), negotiating (he's like an amateur chess player who sees a chance to take his opponent's pawn without noticing that this allows the opponent to take his rook), psychology (complete befuddlement when dealing with people like Putin, Xi and the Dear Leader), law (seeing solid cases against his personal enemies where there is no evidence, much less a real case), and...
I could go on. My point is that Trump is really only smart in one area, which he thinks makes him smart in all areas. He isn't: he's dumb in those other domains.
I often tell people without irony that laziness is my super power. Laziness motivates me to put my efforts into finding ways of getting things done with less effort, to the endless annoyance of those around me who work a lot harder than I do.
> One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking
Oh, so true.
Larry Wall: 3 great virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.
Which is both a joke (turning virtue on its head) and kinda true, in that laziness makes you automate things, impatience spurs you to make things faster, and hubris spurs you to make sure that they work.
I’ve always seen the hubris as an essential component of doing things “you didn’t know you couldn’t do.” A lot of great ideas are discounted as impossible and it takes hubris to fly in the face of that perceived impossibility. I reckon most of the time it doesn’t work out and the pessimism was warranted—but those times it does work out make up for it.
I would have expanded on the hubris part. When your laziness and impatience cause you to create something to save you time and effort, your creation will not work the first time (ironclad rule). But hubris makes you think that a little easy tweaking will fix your creation. And hubris fails you every single time, because the "little easy tweaking" eventually turns into a lot of hard work, not to mention hair pulling.
(I'm working right now on a problem my hubris caused me; a variable stored in a database seems to have different values depending on what part of my code it is queried from. Days I've spent trying to understand what's going on...)
Laziness leads us to conserve resources, and impatience to "save time" (which is a resource, but of a unique nature).
Pride also leads us to make our work more robust, so that it "always works well."
Thus, two fundamental principles are respected: optimization and robustness.
Is your problem related to various parts of the code being in distinct transactions? Can you try a version having all parts commiting then immediately synchronizing with each other, then SELECT'ing?
I found a fix to the problem, although I never quite pinned down why it was necessary. It wasn't a commit problem, but rather had to do with two objects pointing to the same third object as its "parent", whereas the third object only pointed to one of those other two objects as its "daughter". When queried from either object about the third object's daughter, it gave an answer pointing to that object, despite the parent pointing to just one of the two objects. The fix was to make the non-owned object point to a different owner. But I still am not clear why that was necessary.
“HLADE’S LAW:
If you have a difficult task give it to a lazy man — he will find an easier way to do it.”
― Arthur Bloch
That amount of wisdom can only come with boatloads of experience. Those are words to live by.
Full issue of the Whole Earth Review in which this appeared: https://wholeearth.info/p/whole-earth-review-spring-1987?for...
Highly recommend spending some time in the Whole Earth publication archives if you haven't had the chance.
Is there a modern day equivalent to The Whole Earth catalog? Maybe a collection of blogs and online media or otherwise
No equivalent as far as I know but would love to see one. The function it served has been scattered across Youtube, X, Substack, Hacker News, etc. but scale makes it hard to curate exclusively for such a specific audience with such a specific aesthetic.
Kevin Kelly is still writing through The Technium [0], which might scratch some of the itch but is more an island than a colony like Whole Earth was.
Time for a hippie futurist revival?
Revival, yes!
I mailed off for so much weird stuff from WEC ... stuff I'd never known about before ... from all over the hemisphere. Unusual teas and bakeries, kinnikinnick, oddish books, even some chair-caning materials (used on one VERY old chair). Sometimes forgotten about because of "Please allow 3 to 6 weeks for delivery."
Well, I had short hair during the 60s and 70s. I have had a ponytail since I hit double nickels (if you don't understand that phrase, get off my lawn). So yeah, hippy!
> 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.
This is a characteristic of spite. Maybe spitefulness is stupid. But true spitefulness is a whole other level to watch out for.
Spite implies intent.
As an outside observer spitefulness and stupidity may appear the same, but the stupid person may have had good intentions and no ill-will towards those they harm.
There's a saying about that. Wait a minute, it will come to me...oh, yeah. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
> This is a characteristic of spite.
I don't think so. The motivation behind spiteful actions is to purposely cause losses to others, and the gain derived from this action is rejoicing on other people's losses. This implies having and displaying power over others, and exercising this power to establish themselves even with so little gain.
Very different than deriving no gain.
Consider the Ultimatum game. Alice and Bob are part of a millionaire madman's experiment, and so Alice and Bob are told the following: they have won a sum of $10,000 and Alice will be given the authority to decide how to divide their winnings. If Bob accepts Alice's offer, then both of them get the money as decided in the offer. If Bob rejects Alice's offer, then both of them get nothing. In addition, they have no ability to communicate or negotiate the offer; it's a one and done thing. So let's say Alice offers 100 dollars to Bob, and she will keep 9900.
Now, most people would say that Bob is acting out of spite if he rejects Alice's offer, because he's causing Alice losses and he gains nothing, and the benefit he receives is that Alice is made sad by this. Is that a fair interpretation, though? He believes that he's acting out of a moral obligation to screw over someone who themself is (in his mind) acting unjustly. He's valuing punishing someone that he feels is breaking a social contract greater than the 100 dollars that he would otherwise have. What do you call what he is doing in this situation if not spite? And if he is acting out of a principled objection to an unfair situation, does it become something other than spite? And if it's actually principled, why does the principle seem to melt away when the offer is $7000 to $3000?
I feel like spite is a huge motivator behind a lot of cultural issues nowadays but it can only come from people who feel as if they are coming from a place of weakness or victimization. There is always a moral indignation. The gratification is in seeing their vision of justice meted out. It isn't always a psychopathic, sadistic behavior but it can be in those cases where a vision of justice is distorted and psychopathic. Consider this: isn't imprisoning people often a form, ultimately, of societal spite? In isolation it may be cheaper to just give petty criminals whatever they want rather than paying the cost for them being jailed. Amortized cost, it's probably a lot cheaper to pay a drunkard's taxi home from the bar every single time he goes drinking than to lock him in jail for 3 months for a second DUI. Is spite the reason that we don't just give him that? Again, the justice thing.
“… it can only come from people who feel as if they are coming from a place of weakness or victimization.”
That’s a good thought experiment. Let me add the terminology of Francis Fukuyama’s “demand for dignity”—-seems to go even closer to the nerve.
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2019/02/11/ep209-1-fukuyam...
The mathematically correct way to distribute the winnings is 50-50. In a situation where value is created only if 2 entities come together, the only fair way to distribute the winnings is 50-50. If Alice provided $1m dollars of startup capital, but can only achieve her goal having Bob on the team. Mathematically, Bob should be entitled to half the profits. In your game Bob is clearly being disadvantaged. Real life doesn't typically have the constraint "In addition, they have no ability to communicate or negotiate the offer; it's a one and done thing". Without this constraint, Bob can act rationally by threatening and following through with spitefulness in order to negotiate better terms. If Alice is not willing to negotiate until the fairness mark is reached, they are just as liable for the net loss in value.
But the stupid usually have what they think are good intentions.
Omnis enim ex infirmitate feritas est
--Seneca
The modern nuance on "infirm" makes that seem more relevant. aside from the unintentional cruelty..
I saw that movie, and I don't recall seneca ever talking about infirm ferrets. I know for a fact that eminem wasn't in it.
I think the whole sentence is a bad take. The described behavior can be perfectly rational (and thus commonly considered not "stupid") in the case when cost function of the acting person has a negative weight assigned to the counterpart group/person. In other words, when someone considers the other an "enemy", it makes sense to hurt the other even such act results in some direct losses.
Now, we can argue that playing negative-sum games is "stupid". And in most contexts of the modern human society such heuristic would be correct, but I would be really careful with a sweeping generalization, otherwise instead of a proper understanding of the underlying behavioral motivations you are likely to devolve into primitive explanations of someone being "stupid" or even "evil".
Hurting the enemy is intentional and thus has an implicit "gain" built into it, even if it's just psychological. The physical losses can be deemed acceptable because of it, if the satisfaction derived from hurting the enemy balances them out. The OP is describing stupidity where the result is a true loss or zero gain, because the intent wasn't to hurt in the first place.
I suspect there's a strong correlation between people who are motivated by harming others, especially organised hatred of specific groups, and people who self-harm through poor modelling of consequences.
Harming others correlates with personality disorders. Personality disorders - especially Cluster B - correlate with poor impulse control, an emotional rather than a rational orientation, addictions, unreliability and dishonesty, and general inconsistency.
Disordered people with high IQ and EQ tend to get away with disordered relationships for longer. But it's rare to live one of these lives with zero consequences. So these types are at least as likely to go through catastrophic collapse as to get away with their chaos and dysfunction.
This article is a good starting point for researching stupidity. Nowadays stupidity is big on the rise to power, so I appreciate anything going into researching it. The article calls the stupid unpredictable, but I think most of them are very rational emotion maximisers.
Motivation for stupid people is often an imaginary gain. They think they do something for society or themselves, but the payment is only in emotions. From the outside this looks stupid, but for the stupid the gains are often very measurable feelings.
In the end the psychology of stupidity isn't that different from normal rational psychology. Adding emotions to capitalistic thinking can also be used to explain "Stupidity in large groups". The stupid get good vibes from others around while just causing a total loss for everyone. Maybe this is a starting point for counter measures...
I think the most dangerous people out there are the good helping stupids that just want to help - and just make everything worse. They get a lot of gain from the emotions that they did something good.
I like this quote:
With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.Misses the mark. The motive for stupidity is corruption, hence the exercise of power. An anonymous unidentifiable third party gains from it and you are to pay for it with obstruction (active attacks are rare). By definition you don't know if it's corruption or stupidity, and that's why stupidity must exist, as unmotivated corruption, meaning it's just a part of the person or organization, for example ideology. Stupidity then tends to equate to incompetence. But to the observer victim there is no difference.
That actually sounds like what the more intelligent animals will do to you (monkey, cat, etc) not the least intelligent ones (bug, snake, bird).
I think we're well served by distinct language:
* "intelligent" is the intellectual capacity one is born with
* "stupid" is the failure to use that intellectual capacity
> I know plenty of very intelligent people who have been quite stupid at times. I know that while I may have adequate intelligence I've certainly been stupid more than once (or maybe even twice).
I call those people skilled instead of intelligent.
That is not the "stupid" used in this context.
Sure, the "stupid" is effectively "unintelligent" in that context (unless I'm being stupid here ;-)
My point is that even intelligent people can be incredibly stupid and Dunning-Kruger can still apply (because they know they are intelligent and are too arrogant to question their positions)
the 0th law of human stupidity: the urge to categorize human stupidity numbs the intellectual ability for self-reflection. Thus the categorizer is by definition not stupid, and their assignment of categories and observations obviously correct.
-- Kurt Gödel
"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."
Yeah, this lines up with my personal description of stupid: incapable of achieving one's own goals because of stubbornness, mean-spiritedness, pride, persistent misunderstanding, inability or unwillingness to learn. A danger to themself and others. Usually and unfortunately coupled with overconfidence.
This is stark contrast to being merely ignorant (lacking knowledge, naive or sheltered) and dumb (incapable of learning or grasping complex subjects).
Ignorance is generally fixable and with some capacity, dumbness too. But stupidity is a special kind of bad.
But, ummm, if nature abhors a vacuum? And all these things provide "opportunity" for improvement? Maybe the special bad is by design.
The number of responses here lends statistical support to the first basic law.
Reading this made me think of "Ferengi Rules of Acquisition" quite a lot. Maybe it was inspired by this...
"Every once in a while, declare peace. It confuses the hell out of your enemies."
Darkly real.
Ever notice how you’ll meet lots of people who think everyone else is stupid, but you almost never meet someone who believes they’re stupid? Here’s another law of stupidity: Stupidity is unable to recognize itself.
IMO, Stupidity is like entropy and this randomness in our society seems to be increasing too. If we assume society is an ordered system (IF :-D ). So yes, stupidity seems to be on the rise. And the new fuel? unverified information on the internet.
Maybe I’m too stupid to understand this sentence: “ A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.”
How is being born stupid and act of providence? How can parents willingly have the foresight to spawn a stupid person? Isn’t it rather the lack of providence by the parents?
Sn act of Providence means an act of God expressed in this way so as not to disturb those who don't like to talk about God
The word "Providence" means "an influence that is not human in origin and is thought to control people's lives", or "God conceived as the power sustaining and guiding human destiny", or something like that. It does not mean "prudence" or "provision of care", usually.
In this context, I believe the author uses 'providence' to mean an act of God. Translated to a non-religious context, it might be "A stupid man is born a stupid man by pure chance".
I generally liked this PDF but disagreed with this part. I’ve seen intelligent people become stupid depending on the context and vice-versa.
In this context, "Providence" likely refers to a deity, which is indicated by the capitalization of the word.
In this copy, the letter sigma appears to have been replaced by å, presumably due to an encoding error...
Traducción al español de The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1987)
> The bandits who fall in area B1 are those individuals whose actions yield to them profits which are larger than the losses they cause to other people.
Are there real life example of this? Or does anyone that scams people richer than them qualifies maybe?
Maybe Robin Hood... and rare cases when a competent leader invests tax payer money into something really good. Maybe this was a thing back in ancient history.. Having a solid reserve of overproduction is a good thing for society. Seizing overproduction could also be B1.
Ha, I have independently arrived at this theory, with far less structure and elegance.
Flaize = flail + lose. You're flailing and you're losing (and taking other people down with you).
"The world is full of flaizers, non-stop flaizing," encompasses laws 1 and 3.
Crabs in a bucket
Crabs in a bucket is probably the bandit left triangle, people competing by dragging others down.
Flaizers are the lower left quadrant, what original author refers to as "stupid" — causing harm to themselves and others with no benefit for any parties.
Yeah I know stop trying to make fetch a thing
America is powered by influx of immigrants of all sorts.
Yet, shows the weakness the greatest while wielding its strength: thru its American people.
Needs a section on Performance Stupidity. “The January 6 people where tourists taking a guided tour”
Performative stupidity is much more widespread than many people realize.
This article has many examples: https://afterdarkconfessions.com/acting-dumb-on-purpose/
And as the Jan 6 example suggests, it's been weaponized in the US lately. It encourages tribalism and discourages intellectual engagement.
Is that article AI generated, if you happen to know? It was pretty interesting in any case
(the reader cries in despair)
> One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group.
But we also have self-awareness. Stupid can be de-stupefied through learning. Whereas you can't really change your race or blood type.
Don't you feel yourself getting stupider with age ? Try and correct that by learning. Now imagine that some people are actually born that way
Looks like game theory interaction strategies presented with a bit of color:
Stupid = Spite (lose / lose); Helpless = Altruism (lose / win); Bandit = Selfishness (win / lose); Intelligent = Cooperation (win / win)
The OP "Laws":
Everyone underestimates the number of spiteful individuals in circulation.
The probability that a certain person be spiteful is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
... and so on through ...
A spiteful person is more dangerous than a selfish person.
So in this metaphor, is
-trump a B2 (aims to enrich himself, while overall a net negative to society)
-his voters are helpless (by voting for him, they don't actually gain anything)
-and intelligent people, including myself, are mostly sitting on the sidelines, save attending a no kings protest.
A few are valiantly fighting (filing court cases to check trumps power grabs, newsom pushing prop 50, journalists / media folks calling out the emperor has no clothes)
The only way this country gets saved from Trump is either the intelligent get off their duff and start fighting, or the helpless wake up and turn on Trump
I am sorry to say that according to the metaphor of the PDF, your resistance probably falls into either "helpless" or "stupid," since it doesn't really do anything to check Trump's power (ICE agents still freely roam and abduct people at gunpoint, SNAP will run out and judgement induced distribution is blocked by Trump) and at best do nothing to him or anyone else or help him by giving him ammunition to justify further domestic action. Or if you're just sitting on the sidelines, then under the model, you're not defined as intelligent, but helpless, whereas his supporters are stupid.
According to the model I would class legal efforts and some media efforts as intelligent or banditry (media is self serving; in the end it loves Trump for the headlines), and a protest as maybe intelligent but maybe also helpless.
Inarguably intelligent might be something like following ICE movements and warning neighborhoods when they're coming, or establishing mutual aid food systems for people whose SNAP is about to run out. Or wasting ICE time somehow through civil disobedience to reduce their effectiveness.
> your resistance probably falls into either "helpless" or "stupid," since it doesn't really do anything to check Trump's power
Some combination of "helpless", "lazy", and "stupid", like the narrator in Niemöller's poem "First They Came." [1]
It is to do nothing except to fret (and to post on social media), despite knowing that eventually no one will be spared by energetically unethical monsters.
"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."
Reminds me of people supporting the senseless bombings and genocide in the middle east.
> Reminds me of people supporting the senseless bombings and genocide in the middle east.
The genocidal arguments frame them as solutions to long-standing problems, including labelling them as a "final solution". This is clearly an attempt to frame it as something where they derive a gain.
There are four kinds of people, those that put things into categories, and those that like matrices.
There's at least two meanings for stupid. One is someone who is not intelligent, and it's just kind of an intrinsic thing. The other is someone who does something stupid, irrespective of their intelligence. This is a conditional attribute that depends on available information / motivation / laziness.
Point being a 2x2 matrix is just an oversimplification of real life and also wtf are the axes here???
> There are four kinds of people, those that put things into categories, and those that like matrices.
I must be missing the joke here - those are not exclusive categories, and there are only two of them.
> wtf are the axes here???
It's explained in the text just below the drawing....
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I stopped reading when the author classified people in binary categories. Absolute proof of their own stupidity.
To be fair they aren’t binaries, they are a spectrum.
I think it’s fine to classify things like this. It doesn’t preclude the existence of other dimensions. It limits the analysis and makes it easier to understand because the point gets lost when you classify things on an n-dimensional spectrum.
My personal system is simpler:
A stupid person is a person who thinks other people are stupid.
Wow. Was it written by a 15-year-old high-schooler who had recently found a thesaurus? That is just so clunky to read.
A great way to detect stupidity is by finding the people who use the biggest words they can, all the time.
If you had read all the way to the end, you would have seen this:
(There is genius at work in this thesis. It came round about by way of reader Sam Keen, who sent us a thin gray monograph printed in Bologna, Italy. The trail eventually led to Carlo M. Cipolla, the author, who is currently Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley - Kevin Kell)