Full issue of the Whole Earth Review in which this appeared: https://wholeearth.info/p/whole-earth-review-spring-1987?for...

Highly recommend spending some time in the Whole Earth publication archives if you haven't had the chance.

> 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.

This is a characteristic of spite. Maybe spitefulness is stupid. But true spitefulness is a whole other level to watch out for.

I like this quote:

     With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.

"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."

Reminds me of people supporting the senseless bombings and genocide in the middle east.

The number of responses here lends statistical support to the first basic law.

"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."

Yeah, this lines up with my personal description of stupid: incapable of achieving one's own goals because of stubbornness, mean-spiritedness, pride, persistent misunderstanding, inability or unwillingness to learn. A danger to themself and others. Usually and unfortunately coupled with overconfidence.

This is stark contrast to being merely ignorant (lacking knowledge, naive or sheltered) and dumb (incapable of learning or grasping complex subjects).

Ignorance is generally fixable and with some capacity, dumbness too. But stupidity is a special kind of bad.

the 0th law of human stupidity: the urge to categorize human stupidity numbs the intellectual ability for self-reflection. Thus the categorizer is by definition not stupid, and their assignment of categories and observations obviously correct.

-- Kurt Gödel

https://web.archive.org/web/20110420000627/http://wwwcsif.cs...

There are four kinds of people, those that put things into categories, and those that like matrices.

There's at least two meanings for stupid. One is someone who is not intelligent, and it's just kind of an intrinsic thing. The other is someone who does something stupid, irrespective of their intelligence. This is a conditional attribute that depends on available information / motivation / laziness.

Point being a 2x2 matrix is just an oversimplification of real life and also wtf are the axes here???

> One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group.

But we also have self-awareness. Stupid can be de-stupefied through learning. Whereas you can't really change your race or blood type.

I think we're well served by distinct language:

  * "intelligent" is the intellectual capacity one is born with
  * "stupid" is the failure to use that intellectual capacity

(the reader cries in despair)

So in this metaphor, is

-trump a B2 (aims to enrich himself, while overall a net negative to society)

-his voters are helpless (by voting for him, they don't actually gain anything)

-and intelligent people, including myself, are mostly sitting on the sidelines, save attending a no kings protest.

A few are valiantly fighting (filing court cases to check trumps power grabs, newsom pushing prop 50, journalists / media folks calling out the emperor has no clothes)

The only way this country gets saved from Trump is either the intelligent get off their duff and start fighting, or the helpless wake up and turn on Trump