Post #3786340

2026-07-13 13:54 UTC

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison in 1943, suggests that stupidity is not a cognitive defect but an imposed sociological structure. People under the spell of power tend to surrender their capacity for independent judgment and become “stupid” instruments. And Carlo Cipolla, an Italian economic historian, in the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity published in 1976, defined a stupid person as someone who causes losses to others while deriving no gain, or even harm, for themselves. Cipolla was daring enough to propose that the proportion of stupid people is constant across all populations, from professors, plumbers, generals, and janitors. I would suggest, in line with the speculations of Swift and Musil, that it only gets worse with complication. If stupidity is costly to its practitioners why does natural or perhaps even cultural selection not eliminate it from populations of organisms? One obvious possibility is a change in the environment that renders a previous

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@anna_lillith@mas.to 2026-07-13 13:55

behavior obsolete. For millions of years, maintaining a fixed angle to a distant celestial light source, the moon and the stars, proved to be a vital navigational heuristic across the animal world. It is efficient, reliable, and requires minimal neural hardware. Once humans invented artificial illumination, a strategy that had worked for eons became suicidal. A moth spiraling into a candle flame is not failing to navigate, it is using a time-tested rule-of-thumb rendered catastrophically wrong by a change in context. Intelligence and stupidity turn out to be chronometrical. A brilliant heuristic and a fatal one can be the same heuristic, separated by an unexpected shift in the world. Sea turtles have followed moonlight to the ocean for 100 million years and now they orient toward the artificial illumination of mushrooming beachfront condos. Albatross have evolved to scoop fish from the ocean surface and now unknowingly collect floating plastic and feed it to their chicks.

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