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Declining societies have the same percentage of stupid people as successful ones. But they also have high percentages of helpless people and, Cipolla writes, “an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity.”
“Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the [stupid] fraction and makes decline a certainty,” Cipolla concludes. “And the country goes to Hell.”
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MORE IDEAS ON THIS
This law also introduces three other phenotypes that Cipolla says co-exist alongside stupidity.
First there is the intelligent person, whose actions benefit both himself and others.
Then there is the bandit, who benefits himself at others’ expense.
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The non-stupid are a flawed and inconsistent bunch. Sometimes we act intelligently, sometimes we are selfish bandits, sometimes we act helplessly and are taken advantage of by others, and sometimes we’re a bit of both. The stupid, in comparison, are paragons of consistenc...
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Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
No matter how many idiots you suspect yourself surrounded by, Cipolla wrote, you are invariably lowballing the total. This problem is compounded by biased assumptions that certai...
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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.
Cipolla called this one the Golden Law of stupidity. A stupid person, according to the economist, is ...
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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.
W...
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However, consistent stupidity is the only consistent thing about the stupid. This is what makes stupid people so dangerous. Cipolla explains:
Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand u...
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Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
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Stupidity is far more dangerous than evil, for evil takes a break from time to time, stupidity does not.
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The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
Cipolla posits stupidity is a variable that remains constant across all populations. Every category one can imagine—gender, race, nationality, education level, income—...
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Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
And its corollary:
A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
We can do nothing about the stupid. The difference between societies that collapse under the weight of their stupid citizens ...
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They are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born prof...
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Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
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You can foresee a bandit’s actions, his nasty maneuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.
With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by Law # 3. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, with...
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Cipolla imagined the four types along a graph, like this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_M._Cipolla#/media/File%3ACipolla-matrix.svg
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Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.
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CURATED FROM
IDEAS CURATED BY
In 1976, Carlo M. Cipolla, professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity. We (still) grossly underestimate the stupid, and we do so at our own peril.
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Related collections
Other curated ideas on this topic:
Countries moving forward will have a percentage of stupid people but have an unusually high fraction of intelligent people who overcompensate for the stupid people. Declining nations have many non-stupid people whose behaviour strengthens...
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