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[Philosophy] Are There Limits to Human Stupidity? (iai.tv)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Dee_Imaginarium to c/humanities

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Good read on the attainment of perfection and accepting our flaws.

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[–] bear_delune 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I prefer to not think about it as stupidity, but vulnerability to manipulation and exploitation.

People are “stupid” because they are misinformed be it through intentional malice, accident or general incompetence.

Identifying people as stupid doesn’t help anything. What needs to be identified is why they are stupid; who has misinformed them, to what end and how can it be combatted.

“If you call someone stupid, there you’ve called them a name. You haven’t actually done anything.” - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

[–] Dee_Imaginarium 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think you're conflating ignorance and stupidity, from my perspective on this subject at least. What you're describing (to me) is ignorance, while stupidity is somebody rejecting information and choosing to remain ignorant on the subject.

[–] bear_delune 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t think there’s really a difference.

People outright reject ideas because they are in congruent with what they already believe it isn’t an inability to change their mind just an impasse.

There’s also an element of subjectivity; for example I think that Jordan Peterson is stupid, but there are plenty of people who disagree with me. I believe his stupid because his ideas are in congruent with my established perspective. Jordan Peterson would consider me stupid for being unwilling to adopt his perspective, by your definition.

[–] Dee_Imaginarium 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t think there’s really a difference.

Then we'll never agree on this subject because I believe there is a great deal of difference between stupidity and ignorance.

There’s also an element of subjectivity; for example I think that Jordan Peterson is stupid, but there are plenty of people who disagree with me. I believe his stupid because his ideas are in congruent with my established perspective. Jordan Peterson would consider me stupid for being unwilling to adopt his perspective, by your definition.

Well yeah, just like morals/ethics what is and isn't stupid is going to be entirely subjective to the individual.

[–] bear_delune 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm happy to have my mind changed on the difference

[–] Lycanthrotree 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

IMO ignorance is chiefly a lack of knowledge. If you drop someone who has no knowledge of cars into a mechanics shop and tell them to fix a car, they're going to be really incompetent and look bad compared to the mechanic. But, if they had car manuals to read and learned some mechanical engineering and watched the mechanic work and spent time tinkering with the engine, they could figure it out.

Stupidity is a failure of logic and self-reflection, like continuing to insist that obviously wrong things are true when presented with undeniable facts ("this isn't a car at all, it's a plane, nobody can fix planes, that's why I'm failing!") holding two ideas that are in opposition to each other and not acknowledging the dichotomy ("all car mechanics are really stupid but they make these cars so complicated that no reasonable person could ever figure it out"), flip-flopping back and forth between statements, blaming other people or things ("this is all Big Oil's fault") and generally not thinking things through.

Both might make equally terrible cars at first but ignorance is a lot more fixable and might not be the person's fault (like if they grew up Amish and never saw a car's engine before), while stupidity is more about refusing to learn or self-correct when given the option.

[–] bear_delune 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just feel like that’s too subjective to be useful in anyway.

My uncle is a bishop and has a doctorate in theology for example. Is he stupid? There are numerous contradictions and denial of “facts” when it comes to such a perspective, but is it “stupidity”?

I’d also argue that facts change all the time and there are paradoxes that we haven’t been able to reconcile even now; is that stupidity?

I understand where you’re coming from. I just don’t feel like it’s a term that helps anyone.

It’s just used to deride a perspective that we ourselves don’t hold. It would be stupid to deny gravity, but it it’s also something we don’t really understand. Is it stupid to believe and accept without understanding?

[–] Lycanthrotree 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's nuance to it, for sure. In the case of religion, I think it can be either or neither. If someone makes a bad faith-based choice because they've been raised in a cult, or they're a kid who has been fed a lot of religious doctrine but doesn't have any real world experience, or they live in a super religious community and only know scary lectures about atheists or people of other faiths, that's ignorance. They don't know any better and don't have many avenues to fix that. If it's something like Steve Jobs doing spiritual juice cleanses instead of getting cancer treatment despite having all the best medical resources and doctors in the world available, that's stupidity. If it's somebody who has a religious belief but doesn't let that affect their decision-making detrimentally (they believe in miracles, but they'll still go to the doctor for treatment when they're sick) then they're not stupid or ignorant. They may not be totally right but that's some other fallacy - being too optimistic? Rose colored glasses? - that's less harsh than stupidity or ignorance.

Your question about believing without understanding is a good one. There are a lot of things people believe without total understanding or proof. I believe Canada exists even though I've never been there. I suppose the difference there is the possibility of learning and proving it, as well as common consensus - I could go to Canada, I can talk to Canadians, I can see that Canada competes in the Olympics and is labeled on a globe. There are lots of different ways to verify it, and if all of the maps in the world vanished overnight people would find Canada again. But if I believed in a new undiscovered continent named Lemmy then I'd have to insist on believing it's there despite there being no Lemmy citizens, no flag, no presence on a map, and so on, which makes it a much sketchier thing to 'believe' in than Canada.

[–] bear_delune 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Per your Steve Jobs example the action is stupid, does that mean Jobs is stupid? Is stupid something that a person is wholly or does a single belief structure that is considered stupid mean that person is stupid? Are we all stupid? I know I’ve been stupid, but I don’t think I am stupid.

[–] Lycanthrotree 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hm, I'd say it's individual actions that are stupid, and if a person does a lot of stupid actions, then they get called stupid as a person by association. Same for being smart - you can say one smart thing and not be considered smart in general, but if you do a lot of smart things consistently you get called a smart person. (Or any other trait, really - if you sing a song once in the shower that's just one action, if you sing every day for a living you get called a singer.)

I think that probably all people are smart and stupid in different ways. Steve Jobs was stupid about his health but smart about his business. People can be amazingly intelligent doctors, but horrible at social skills, or incredible artists but terrible at money management. I suppose it depends on how often you act one way or the other and how much impact your actions have. Steve Jobs dying because of his juice cleanse choice makes that action have more weight than if he was wearing an amethyst healing necklace but also getting regular treatment. The consequence of the former was that he died; yhe consequence of the latter would be that he'd look silly but (probably) live.

[–] bear_delune 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So it’s wholly dependent on how you’re being observed and the collective understanding and knowledge of your actions?

I feel that makes the entire concept nothing but something that exists in the mind of the observer; which would imply stupidity doesn’t really exist at all

Are we all’ Schrodinger idiot’ and whether we are or aren’t stupid depends entirely on if we’re known to do stupid things?

[–] Lycanthrotree 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To the same extent that every trait is relative, I suppose. There's not a big physical block of stupid somewhere we can point to, so we have to judge it relative to others. If someone is kinder than most people we say that they're kind, if someone is smarter than most people we say they're smart, if someone is more beautiful than most people we say they're beautiful - it's not something unique to stupidity or to negative traits. It 'doesn't exist' in that it's not something you can pick up and hold in your hand, but it can be measured as an identifying trait when compared to other people and generally agreed upon.

I could say my dog is brown and my friend's dog is white. I can't go touch 'brown,' it exists only in my mind and my brain's perception of wavelengths of light, but the brown dog is still more brown than the white dog. As long as you have 2 objects you can come up with these kinds of differentiated descriptions of them. (I wouldn't say "my dog exists in 3-dimensional space and breathes air" because all dogs exist in 3-dimensional space and breathe air, therefore it isn't usefully descriptive the way "brown" is.)

[–] bear_delune 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes but there are measurable qualities of a dog. It can been seen and confirmed by science. Can stupidity?

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[–] TheTrueLinuxDev 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

[–] Butterbee 3 points 1 year ago

I came here explicitly to upvote whoever had written this. My gut reaction to the title was an emphatic and very certain "NO."

[–] ipkpjersi 2 points 1 year ago

It's still such a wonderful quote and it's absolutely true.

[–] DJDarren 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Looks around at the havoc caused by Brexit

shrugs

[–] Havoc@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago

nods somberly