The Five Universal Laws of Human Stupidity
We underestimate the stupid, and we do so at our own peril.


In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.

Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren.

Let’s take a look at Cipolla’s five basic laws of human stupidity:

Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

No matter how many idiots you suspect yourself surrounded by, Cipolla wrote, you are invariably lowballing the total. This problem is compounded by biased assumptions that certain people are intelligent based on superficial factors like their job, education level, or other traits we believe to be exclusive of stupidity. They aren’t. Which takes us to:

Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

Cipolla posits stupidity is a variable that remains constant across all populations. Every category one can imagine—gender, race, nationality, education level, income—possesses a fixed percentage of stupid people. There are stupid college professors. There are stupid people at Davos and at the UN General Assembly. There are stupid people in every nation on earth. How numerous are the stupid amongst us? It’s impossible to say. And any guess would almost certainly violate the first law, anyway.

Law 3. 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.

Cipolla called this one the Golden Law of stupidity. A stupid person, according to the economist, is one who causes problems for others without any clear benefit to himself.

The uncle unable to stop himself from posting fake news articles to Facebook? Stupid. The customer service representative who keeps you on the phone for an hour, hangs up on you twice, and somehow still manages to screw up your account? Stupid.

This law also introduces three other phenotypes that Cipolla says co-exist alongside stupidity. First there is the intelligent person, whose actions benefit both himself and others. Then there is the bandit, who benefits himself at others’ expense. And lastly there is the helpless person, whose actions enrich others at his own expense. Cipolla imagined the four types along a graph, like this:




The non-stupid are a flawed and inconsistent bunch. Sometimes we act intelligently, sometimes we are selfish bandits, sometimes we act helplessly and are taken advantage of by others, and sometimes we’re a bit of both. The stupid, in comparison, are paragons of consistency, acting at all times with unyielding idiocy.

However, consistent stupidity is the only consistent thing about the stupid. This is what makes stupid people so dangerous. Cipolla explains:

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit’s actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit’s actions, his nasty maneuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.

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.

All of which leads us to:

Law 4: 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.

We underestimate the stupid, and we do so at our own peril. This brings us to the fifth and final law:

Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

And its corollary:

A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

We can do nothing about the stupid. The difference between societies that collapse under the weight of their stupid citizens and those who transcend them are the makeup of the non-stupid. Those progressing in spite of their stupid possess a high proportion of people acting intelligently, those who counterbalance the stupid’s losses by bringing about gains for themselves and their fellows.

Declining societies have the same percentage of stupid people as successful ones. But they also have high percentages of helpless people and, Cipolla writes, “an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity.”

“Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the [stupid] fraction and makes decline a certainty,” Cipolla concludes. “And the country goes to Hell.”

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Just because you're educated, doesn't mean you're smart! And then there's the 'over-educated'...

We are notably plagued by all the 'over-educated' educators in particular it seems. They are first and foremost, some of the stupidest people in our society! At the same time, they are some the most dangerous, as many are truly evil, and a cancer on humanity!

quote:

Originally posted by nhracecraft:
We are notably plagued by all the 'over-educated' educators in particular it seems. They are first and foremost, some of the stupidest people in our society! At the same time, they are some the most dangerous, as many are truly evil, and a cancer on humanity!

Some of them fall into the bandit category but instead of committing crimes themselves they motivate the stupid (Lenin called them useful idiots) to carry out the evil deeds.

I agree with most of that except for the assertion that there is no cure for stupidity. Unfortunately that cure is largely nullified by Law 4, which is a form of stupidity itself among the otherwise nonstupid.

quote:

Originally posted by feersum dreadnaught:
Law 4: … 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.

The cure is to refuse to tolerate the ideas and efforts of the stupid as they affect society. But the reason the stupid are tolerated is not only because the rest forget their effects, but because the nonstupid become complacent and go out of their way to blind themselves and ignore those effects. I believe the reason for that is that humans are social animals and are driven by evolutionary pressures to cooperate with others as much as possible.

The larger the band or tribe, the more successful it is likely to be, even if it includes a percentage of the stupid—as long as they can be convinced and conditioned to support the band’s welfare. That’s why tribes and bands of people that become and remain successful usually have strong codes that govern their members’ activities. The codes that consist of rules and taboos are usually unwritten but sometimes appear as things like the bases for the Jewish and Christian bibles that contain warnings such as “the gods will get you if you kill a member of your own tribe or steal his property.” (It’s okay, and even commendable to kill and plunder members of other tribes, but not your own because that causes divisions that are extremely harmful to one’s own tribe.)

Unfortunately, there is a tendency for the nonstupid to become more and more tolerant of the stupid as the group’s overall prosperity and security increase. On the other hand, and as just one of countless examples, I’m currently reading The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson and its account of the German air campaign against the UK in WW II. Once the bombs started falling on places like London in earnest, stupid ideas and behaviors became much less tolerated. “Oh, you’re a British Fascist who supports the ideals and objectives of our enemy? Nope: Not here, you’re not.”

But when the stupid ideas and practices become tolerated and even accepted enough, then they become the norm and short of a massive societal upheaval are about impossible to eradicate even when they become extremely harmful to the society in which they arose.

The active/passive axis is also important. I think this idea, expressed this way, comes from the military?

The active/not-stupid people are great.

The passive/not-stupid people are OK and the passive/stupid people at least don't make a ton of problems because they don't do very much.

The active/stupid people make things worse for everyone because they go out and inflict their stupidity on everything they come into contact with.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
But when the stupid ideas and practices become tolerated and even accepted enough, then they become the norm and short of a massive societal upheaval are about impossible to eradicate even when they become extremely harmful to the society in which they arose.

And it is here that we find ourselves.

Fixing it, assuming that it is fixable, is going to be ugly.

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:
The active/passive axis is also important. I think this idea, expressed this way, comes from the military?

The active/not-stupid people are great.

The passive/not-stupid people are OK and the passive/stupid people at least don't make a ton of problems because they don't do very much.

The active/stupid people make things worse for everyone because they go out and inflict their stupidity on everything they come into contact with.

Prussian Army

Law 3 would also seem to explain something that's always intrigued and infuriated me about stupidity: its seemingly endless creativity. I guess if you're not bounded by rationality and purpose then any kind of stupidity is possible and time, via statistical probability, would therefore make all forms of stupidity inevitable.

quote:

In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley

You lost me at Berkeley...

Here's where natural selection unmanipulated would keep the ratio of stupid to non stupid at a tolerable rate. As society advances though, it tends to protect the stupid from the deadly consequences of being stupid so the ratios get unbalanced. Worse yet is that advanced societies foster arrogant citizens. Arrogance and stupidity are a dangerous combination. Those people are far more destructive to others than themselves. In fact, as in Alec Baldwin's case, they can be absolutely protected from consequence and natural selection so they not only survive, but are increasingly destructive.

The answer, once again, seems as simple as it is illegal.

Fucking laws keeping us smart folks down all the time.