The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity 2.0

In 1976, historian Carlo Cipolla published a short text that became a classic: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. It is a very attractive text and in short, it proposes the following five principles:

(1)   Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

(2)  The probability that a certain person (will) be 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. 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.

(5)  A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

I read it a long time ago and I loved it at the time, but on rereading it today, I fundamentally disagree with master Cipolla, so here I will explain why and, leaving humility aside, I will propose my own alternative for the way we should approach stupidity.

Before doing so, two things: first, Cipolla saw his essay half seriously and half-jokingly; and although he considered it "a pamphlet" himself, it is more subtle and useful than what I am going to explore here. In fact, my criticism goes rather against how it is popularly understood.
And secondly: I beg my reader to reread the five postulates a little more carefully and see if she can find fault with them.

Ready?

Let us begin.

The definition

Out of the five principles, number 3 (the "Golden Rule") is not really a principle, but the definition of stupidity he uses. Its criterion is economic and measurable: a parameter that takes into account Profit and Loss, and which is graphically exemplified by putting definitions of people in four quadrants:

Thus, we have the Smart, the Bandits, the Naive and the Stupid, depending on whether they cause profit or loss to themselves and to others. It is a very simple and useful model for modeling actions in macro environments, and especially in economics. The definition in itself is not problematic, because the concept of "Profit/Loss" can easily be extrapolated outside the economic, to ethical, environmental, and a myriad other issues.

The objection

The problem I see is that we are dealing with definitions of people, rather than the definition of actions. In other words, what I disagree with in the model is the definition of strict categories. In the text, Cipolla says that "You are stupid in the same way that you are a redhead, or of a certain blood group."

What this generates, of course, is division and disdain: a separation of Stupid vs. Non-stupid. Of course, no one would classify himself as the former; and if you think you are one of the latter, it is just something that gives you a license to feel better than others.

The solution

In my text Summa Contra Stupiditas, I propose a more general and, one could say, more empathetic definition of stupidity:

Stupidity is Ignorance + Stubbornness. This is to say that, when given the opportunity to get out of a particular kind of ignorance, refusing it and continuing to act in the same way. Thus, stupidity is not something we are but something we commit. Being an act, it follows that even if we are in constant peril of falling prey to it, we can strive to avoid it.

Thus, the definition becomes one about stupid actions, and not one about stupid people.

Translated to the Cipolla graph, it means that our actions constantly move from one quadrant to another, depending on each person's inner and outer situations. In this figure I show a more or less ideal situation:

That is, that most of the time we take intelligent actions, sometimes we behave as bandits, other times we are naive, and on occasion we do stupid things.

Momentous events, emotional imbalances, financial stress, and generally critical situations nudge our actions to fall more or less frequently in each quadrant. So let's start by accepting that we are not intelligent or stupid or bandits by definition, but rather that we actually try to make our actions intelligent for the most part. Still, falling out of that quadrant from time to time is inevitable due to both inner and outer stress.

New model: Stupidity 2.0

These are the new proposed principles:

(1)  Stupidity is a mixture of ignorance and stubbornness.

(2)  A person performs actions, which fall on the Intelligent-Stupid Continuum.

(3)  The amount of stupidities committed remains constant (in individuals and in societies) as long as circumstances do not change.

The first two I have already explained above; the third is worth a closer look.
What would the graphic representation of the actions we saw above look like in this new model? They would be like this:

There is a spectrum from totally stupid actions to brilliant and beneficial actions, and in ideal circumstances we would like our actions to always fall above a line that generally separates the beneficial from the harmful.

The more ignorant and stubborn a person or a society is at a point in time, we would see the concentration of red dots (actions) go down and get closer to that "critical line" that causes constant misfortunes from bad decisions.

But it is not only ignorance and stubbornness that may haunt us: under stress, an individual or a society will lower its average and we will see the concentration fall below the critical line. To summarize:

The three perils

We can see that the Three Perils, that is, the things that nudge us towards stupid behavior, are Ignorance, Stubbornness and Stress.

The first peril, Ignorance, is the easiest to overcome. Education, both formal and informal, is there to do just that.

The second one, Stubbornness, is much more difficult, since it implies the capacity for self-criticism and an open mind to accept that we are constantly misinformed or wrong about one thing or other.

The third one, Stress, is the most dangerous: sadness, alarm, grief or panic make us lose the presence of mind that we normally possess. As individuals it can lead us to aberrant and reckless decisions; as a society, to follow dangerous paths with catastrophic, far-reaching consequences.

I submit this small proposal to evaluate ourselves, not as geniuses or idiots by definition, but as works in progress.

Sincerely,
One who has committed all kinds of stupidities.