Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
"A masterly book" —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan "A classic" —Simon Kuper, Financial Times An economist explains five laws that confirm our worst fears: stupid people can and do rule the world Throughout history, a powerful force has hindered the growth of human welfare and happiness. It is more powerful than the Mafia or the military. It has global catastrophic effects and can be found anywhere from the world's most powerful boardrooms to your local bar. It is human stupidity. Carlo M. Cipolla, noted professor of economic history at the UC Berkeley, created this vitally important book in order to detect and neutralize its threat. Both hilarious and dead serious, it will leave you better equipped to confront political realities, unreasonable colleagues, or your next dinner with your in-laws. The Laws: 1. Everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals among us. 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 while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses themselves. 4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. 5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
Stats for nerds
12recommend
35mentions
28people
2011–2026years
37% recommend63% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Reference Cipolla's basic laws of human stupidity. The commenters are genuinely unaware of how they are harming others and themselves.
- In general, the legal peril of contaminated copyrights made closed-source desktop coding less lucrative. Most if not all current desktop applications from major commercial vendors is at least in part server hosted, or online subscription based.
It is simply a shift from shovel-ware to a service model, and does what DRM did for the music businesses.
Personally, I often release under Apache license as both a gift and a curse... Given it is "free" for everyone including the competition, and the net gain for bandits is negative three times the time cost (AI obfuscation would also cost resources.)
The balance I found was not solving corporate "hard" problems for free, and focusing on features that often coincidentally overlap with other community members. Thus, our goals just happen to align, and I am glad if people can make money recycling the work. =3
Why bandits are not as relevant as people assume:
"The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" (Carlo M. Cipolla)
https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi...
- IDK whether you know it, but in case you don't—you articulated Cippola's definition "stupid is one causing harm to others while not deriving any gain, even taking a small personal loss" above. If you are interested further, I encourage you to check his pamphlet "The Basic Laws Of Human Stupidity". (is "book" too big word for it?)
I must say I got a lot out of it and it's followups. It became much easier for me to understand the world around me, what is happening. And even predict what's to happen sometimes.
What you observe with Trump admin: 1) it's stupidity; 2) it's not low IQ or lack of rationality; 3) it's lack of morals, not caring about good/bad, or even considering good what the rest consider bad (and vice versa); 4) it's social more than individual, it's a "mind virus". (ha!-Musk)
Bonhoeffer‘s "Theory of Stupidity" https://youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc (bad morals not low IQ, mind virus social more than individual)
Sabine Hossenfelder "Collective Stupidity -- How Can We Avoid It?" https://youtube.com/watch?v=25kqobiv4ng (more cases, much more analytical, only about the group aspect not individual)
- Probably worth mentioning "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" by Carlo M. Cipolla, which has an interesting and somewhat different definition of stupidity and has been discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2570448
- The OP lost me on a bunch of bad analogies. I’ll keep recommending to my friends The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo Cipolla.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49348225-the-basic-laws-...
- I have a theory and why the internet is the way it is. It's because it's mainstream. It used to be "better" (as some would put it) because it was niche. Only the passionate and the interested were on it. Nowadays everybody and their grandma is on a social network... literally. Stands to reason the space would "devolve". Why? Because of what Carlin once said (paraphrasing): Imagine how stupid the average person is. Now realize half of the world is even dumber than that.
Most of the complaints here were basically about human behavior on the internet. If it were complaints about actual technical problems or engineering problems related to the internet, I'd get it. I mean, you could argue that Facebook being a walled garden is actually a structural problem of the internet, but really, it isn't. The internet hasn't fundamentally technically changed. You can reach content outside of those silos if you want and search for it (i.e. you're actually interested), but guess what? People don't want to leave that walled garden. They want stupid videos, recycled quotes and propaganda. Propaganda is soothing. Searching outside of your silo would run you the risk of finding conflicting opinions, or God forbid, conflicting evidence.
The internet is "worse" today then it was some years ago because more and more dumb, ignorant and uninterested people are on it. Which is to say the internet now more resembles the real world then it did long ago, when it more resembled a (somewhat) private club for more interested and passionate, educated people.
The way I see it, the world has always been full of dumb people who screw it up for everyone. The internet just makes it much easier to see.
So I don't have an aversion. I understand the frustration as well, I just find complaining about it risible. Given that complaining identifies the problem and nudges people towards a solution, how do you cure mediocrity and stupidity?
P.S. When you have a chance, check out "The basic laws of human stupidity" by Carlo M. Cipolla. It's a 15 minute read and well worth it. You'll get a better understanding of where I come from.
Related
The Laws of Human Nature
14 recommend · 18
Bullshit Jobs
159 recommend · 628
Basic economics
88 recommend · 156
Predictably Irrational
83 recommend · 199
Mindstorms
89 recommend · 201
The 48 Laws of Power
85 recommend · 227
In search of stupidity
27 recommend · 63
