Post #3786344

2026-07-13 13:47 UTC

could often have achieved in an afternoon what the cybernetic apparatus was struggling to model in weeks. The intelligence of the cybernetics as a framework for control of simple systems is unquestionable, but its application to the economy inflated the difficulty of the problem it was meant to solve. The Austrian novelist and essayist, Robert Musil, in a 1937 lecture, “On Stupidity,” described what may be the most important distinction in the whole literature of stupidity. He separated “honorable stupidity,” which is a simple cognitive limitation, or the inability to grasp a difficult argument, from “intelligent stupidity,” which he considered far more dangerous. This insight is the central concern of my favorite novel of Musil’s, The Man Without Qualities. Intelligent stupidity marshals all the resources of the intellect in the service of an error. It is not the failure to think; it is thinking flamboyantly and systematically in the wrong direction.

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@anna_lillith@mas.to 2026-07-13 13:49

A student who cannot follow a mathematical proof is not stupid in Musil’s sense. A math professor who builds an elegant theoretical edifice to defend a proposition a child could see is false is intelligently stupid. Musil was not alone in taking stupidity seriously. Novelists have long understood the intelligence-stupidity relationship with a clarity that most scientists choose to ignore. Perhaps because fiction can show the process by which an intelligence can devour itself, a rather unpalatable spectacle to a rationalist. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels describes the Academy of Lagado, whose researchers deploy a variety of elaborate experimental methodologies. One is extracting sunbeams from cucumbers while another softens marble into pillows. A third colleague breeds naked sheep. Swift’s satire is obviously targeted at a variety of forms of misdirected systematic inquiry.

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