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Why some of the smartest [and most of the slower] people can be so very stupid:
In at least some cases, intelligence actively abets stupidity by allowing pernicious rationalisation.
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"What exactly is stupidity? How does it relate to morality: can you be morally good and stupid, for example? How does it relate to vice: is stupidity a kind of prejudice, perhaps? And why is it so domain-specific: why are people often stupid in one area and insightful in another?
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Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.
-Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.
In at least some cases, intelligence actively abets stupidity by allowing pernicious rationalisation.
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Stupidity will often arise when an outdated conceptual framework is forced into service, mangling the user’s grip on some new phenomenon. It is important to distinguish this from mere error. We make mistakes for all kinds of reasons. Stupidity is rather one specific and stubborn cause of error."
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Stupidity is also compatible with a kind of misguided innovation such as the [attempted imposition or] overly optimistic importation of conceptual tools from a very different place....
"Stupidity has two features that make it particularly dangerous when compared with other vices. First, unlike character flaws, stupidity [as used by the author] is primarily a property of groups or traditions, not individuals: after all, we get most of our concepts, our mental tools, from the society we are raised in. Once stupidity [such as religion] has taken hold of a group or society, it is thus particularly hard to eradicate – inventing, distributing and normalising new concepts is tough work.-
Dumbness alone is rarely the driving threat: at the head of almost every dumb movement, you will find the stupid in charge.
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Dumbness alone is rarely the driving threat: at the head of almost every dumb movement, you will find the stupid in charge.
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Second, stupidity begets more stupidity due to a profound ambiguity in its nature. If stupidity is a matter of the wrong tools for the job, whether an action is stupid will depend on what the job is; just as a hammer is perfect for some tasks and wrong for others. Take politics, where stupidity is particularly catching: a stupid slogan [MAGA, "Lock Her Up"] chimes with a stupid voter, it mirrors the way they see the world. The result is that stupidity can, ironically, be extremely effective in the right [a favorable] environment: a kind of incapacity is in effect being selected for. It is vital to separate this point from familiar and condescending claims about how dumb or uneducated the ‘other side’ are: stupidity is compatible with high educational achievement, and it is more the property of a political culture than of the individuals in it, needing to be tackled at that level."
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