Dumb as a rock

Our of all the technology that has flowed into our lives, I had only read traditional paper-based books until very recently; never have I read a full story on an e-reader. (One of the few technological firsts that my wife beat me to.) I also have not listened to a modern downloadable audiobook. (I had to qualify that as I have listened to science fiction stories on cassette tapes in my teens.) It is not that I am averse to it, I just had no desire to read non-book books. And this is despite the fact that I listen to copious podcasts.

I broke this streak on a recommended app Libby, with which you can borrow e-books and audiobooks, like an e-library, if you will. Everything I wanted to read was out but just like a real library you can put out a hold, but one search brought up a curious short e-book so I thought I would give it a go while I was on the road. The book, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carol M. Cipolla, was the book, and I only chose it because I knew the author who wrote the foreword. And it was a curious thing. 

Its most interesting point is an objective definition of stupidity, which fits into a simple xy set of axes. Imagine an evaluation of someone's actions with the x axis measuring the net benefit to you, and the y axis measuring the net benefit to others. Actions in the top right hand quadrant are defined as intelligent actions because they don't just benefit yourself, but others, too, whereas the bottom left quadrant refers to stupid actions. They are actions where you don't just hurt yourself, net, but also harm others. As the book defines: "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."

From this, you need to know that stupidity and intelligence are not about IQ. The author in fact posits that there is a ration akin to pi which indicates that if you grab any subset of people, that ratio will be stupid, always. It doesn't matter if you are black or white; professors or drop-outs; women, men or undefined. The corollary of this is that people who are well-educated are equally populated by people who make decisions that harm themselves and others, as the uneducated. (And vice-versa.)

Going back to the axes, the top-left quadrant, i.e., benefiting others but not yourself, your action is defined as helpless; and the bottom right-hand quadrant is that of the bandit. The author even refines this further by defining someone who gets lets benefit than the deprive others by as stupid bandits; and those who get more benefit than how much they harm someone as an intelligent bandit. Similar terms are available for the helpless.

It is the kind of earnest yet nerdy dissertation that you could have over a cider. There is a certain logic to it. And also one where you think about exceptions. For example, are all charitable people "helpless" or is their contentment in giving, which must be higher than the pinch of the financial cost, enough to make it an always intelligent thing to do. If we are taking into account contentment, then there are many horrendous things that could be done without being "stupid", such as a revenge on a bandit. 

More critically, it fails to take into account probability and the effect of iterations. Is an action only intelligent if it benefits others and yourself on the occasion you do it, when actually there was a chance that it could harm both. Going 110km an hour routinely on highways is stupid, but on a single occasion might be intelligent because of the benefits of extra time to you and your passengers, and the realistic low chance of a significant accident or a traffic fine on a single journey. 

That aside, it is useful to think about. The author structures it with some principles:

1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
2. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
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.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. And the corollary: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Now let us talk about the American political situation...