I'm not so sure I buy this one. A few years ago Amazon decided to silently delete 1984 from people's Kindle devices. One common refrain was that this is 'only the kind of stupid decision a collective can make', because no individual lacks the common sense to come up with that idea.
It's the kind of bureaucratic stupidity that you get out of mechanic, group momentum. I don't think individual stupidity is like that at all, there is a qualitative difference. Individual foolishness is maybe sentimental or stubborn or attached, whereas collective foolishness is sort of autonomous.
Kind of like a cult. Not only are blind spots harder to spot in homogenous groups, they even can conjure delusions up that nobody would ever even come up with on their own, because it takes the force of a 100 people to convince you that something is real that doesn't even exist.
Really? Maybe he knows and choose some other (stupid) option. Because I really feel like Tom sometimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupidity
James F. Welles, Understanding Stupidity
"The term may be used to designate a mentality which is considered to be informed, deliberate and maladaptive." Welles distinguishes stupidity from ignorance; where stupidity means one must know they are acting in their own worst interest in that it must be a choice, not a forced act or accident. Lastly, it requires the activity to be maladaptive, in that it is in the worst interest of the actor, and specifically done to prevent adaption to new data or existing circumstances."
= = =
Otto Fenichel, "The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946)"
"Every intellect begins to show weakness when affective motives are working against it". He suggests that "people become stupid ad hoc, that is, when they do not want to understand, where understanding would cause anxiety or guilt feeling, or would endanger an existing neurotic equilibrium."
The problem with this definition is taking a very narrow meaning of "knowing" which most of the time means "propositional knowing".
A basketball player knows propositionally that they need to put the ball through the hoop, but they will miss in a likelihood in proportion to their lack of procedural knowledge. This doesn't they are being stupid, they actually didn't fully know how.
To apply it recursively; we might know the definition of stupid but that helps so little to save us out of doing stupid things throughout our lives.
I think there's a lot of people who have a higher bar than that (or lower bar depending on your perspective), but there is good traditional agreement;
You can't fix stupid.
That's one of its defining features.
Regardless, it's sometimes necessary to work year-round on maintenance & repair.
And everyone knows the effort involved polishing a turd and putting lipstick on a pig takes up all the time in between emergency restoration sessions.
This is something you need to get rid of whole-hog.
What if this is one of the ways we’re being stupid?
One of the other properties of stupid is that we don’t know when we are being stupid, because if we did we could have gotten ourselves out of it.
You haven't mentioned which terminology you're talking about but assuming it is one of combinatorial explosion, compression, framing or heuristics; these are not computer science exclusive jargon, these are information processing terms, something both humans and computers do, and as such used in cognitive science contexts pretty extensively and correctly.
> This occurs too often on HN and often conceals gross misunderstanding behind a veneer of technical jargon.
Unless you're ready to point out what the gross misunderstanding was, your point is moot.
I had no idea there was such a thing. Care to link to some relevant resources?
Buddhist interpretation of ignorance overlaps more with Socratic interpretation than our current use of the word. It is not a mere lack of knowledge in “propositions”. It is an existential state. If you think about it framing problems are also ignorance problems; ignoring relevant information/perspectives/action in our problem formulations.
> 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.
Close but no cigar. Human computation requires forcing of phenomena into crude, somewhat distorting pigeonholes to do any symbolic processing on it. Reality is simply too combinatorially explosive to not use any compression.
The foolishness arises when the distortions are systematically wrong; when you're stuck in a blind spot and keep focusing on the wrong subset of the data. It is a framing error that is specifically anti-adaptive.
Besides, you can have the entire array of conceptual tools, and still be foolish; picking the right tool cannot be reduced to an algorithm or a tool itself. It is a recursive problem of finding relevance.
> Historically, philosophers have worried a great deal about the irrationality of not taking the available means to my goals: Tom wants to get fit, yet his running shoes are quietly gathering dust. The stock solution to Tom’s quandary is simple willpower. Stupidity is very different from this. It is rather a lack of the necessary means, a lack of the necessary intellectual equipment. Combatting it will typically require not brute willpower but the construction of a new way of seeing our self and our world.
This is a false dichotomy. Avoiding getting into the metaphysics of will and whether or how it exists, Tom also doesn't know how to construct a way of seeing his self and the world to get into running. He still doesn't know what is good for him because if he did, he would have done it (or done something else good for him). His problem is ignorance just like the other guy, not willpower.
> First, unlike character flaws, stupidity 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.
Collective intelligence and individual intelligence are similar machinery and both subject to blind spots and foolishness. In fact, the collective intelligence usually performs better on certain failure modes; it is easier for two people to find each other's blind spots than one person inferring their own. That's what for example therapy is (although unidirectional). It's just when it fails, it also fails spectacularly.
> We can now explain why stupidity is so domain-specific, why someone can be so smart in one area, and such an idiot in another: the relevant concepts are often domain-specific.
There is evidence against this; general intelligence predicts picking your meta-heuristics better for cross-domain problems; this is definitional after all.
> So stupidity is tough to fix.
Entire history of wisdom traditions and practices are dedicated to the suffering that comes with foolishness. They do not pass on conceptual tools though, because this is not an algorithmic problem. They pass on practices you participate in, which aim to train you to increase your likelihood of picking the relevant tools and finding out when you're stuck in a foolish framing.
[1] Sacha Golob, who turns out to have a paper this article was based on, at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/110433270/Golob_A_New...