Ian Leslie, on forms of “stupidity”:
4. Rule-based stupidity
We often talk about stupidity as if it is an individual trait – something a person is or isn’t. It is commonplace to talk about smart people and stupid people, even among intellectuals: one of the few scholars to have taken stupidity seriously, at least somewhat, was the Italian economist Carlo Cipolla, who wrote an essay in 1976 called The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity which you can buy as a book. As you can see from this summary of it, Cipolla starts from the premise that the world divides into stupid and non-stupid people and builds his “laws” on top of it (‘Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation’). The essay is wittily written but I suspect the reason it’s still being read is that it is comforting. It is nice to imagine that a person is either clever or stupid – and that since I realise that, I must be one of the clever ones. It is more unsettling to think of stupidity as something that anyone, even you, can be captured by.
Stupidity can be systemic. The Santa Fe Institute complexity theorist David Krakauer observes that the Romans, as intelligent as they were in many ways, made no advances in mathematics. He puts this down to a numeral system that made it virtually impossible to do complex sums. Arabic numbers, imported to Europe in the Middle Ages (not as dumb as their reputation), are easier to manipulate. The new system made our civilisation collectively smarter, or at least less dumb. The tool or platform we’re using can keep us stupid, even when we’re smart. In fact, Krakauer’s view is that stupidity isn’t the absence of intelligence or knowledge; it’s the persistent application of faulty algorithms (itself an Arabic concept, of course). Let’s say someone hands you a Rubik’s Cube.
Consider three possibilities. You might know an algorithm or set of algorithms which enables you to solve it quickly, and look very smart (actually Krakauer would say that is a kind of smartness). Or you might have learnt the wrong algorithms – algorithms which ensure that no matter how many times you try, you’ll never solve the puzzle. Or you might be completely ignorant and just go at it randomly. Krakauer’s point is that the ignorant cuber at least stands a chance of solving it accidentally (theoretically speaking – don’t try this at home) whereas the faulty-algorithm cuber never will. Ignorance is insufficient data to solve a problem efficiently; stupidity is using a rule where adding more data doesn’t improve your chances of getting it right – in fact, it makes it more likely you’ll get it wrong.
Look around and you can see people trapped in flawed algorithms (if there is war, then it must be America’s fault’; ‘if there is a market crash then a recovery is just around the corner’) Rules of thinking inflexibly applied lead to stupid conclusions. You find a lot of stupidity among people who are highly partisan on behalf of a political party or ideology. Those people tend to be cognitively inflexible, regardless of which side they’re on. They are drawn to clear stories or chains of reasoning. The politicians or activists who capture them are skilled at building and disseminating these algorithmic structures of thought.
Very often, stupidity isn’t derived from an absence of mental materials but from a superfluity of them. It is the product of all the stuff we carry around in our minds and absorb from others: powerful algorithms, bad theories, fake facts, seductive stories, leaky metaphors, misplaced intuitions. The stuff that feels like solid knowledge even though it isn’t. As the old saying goes, it’s not what you don’t know that will get you into trouble but what you do know that isn’t so.
Leslie covers six more forms of “stupidity,” all worth reading.