I'm With Stupid
thenewinquiry.com
I'm With Stupid
looking stupid takes courage, and sometimes it’s easier to just let things slide. It is striking how many situations I am in where I start asking basic questions, feel guilty for slowing the group down, and it turns out that nobody understood what was going on to begin with
Nabeel Qureshi • How To Understand Things
Stupidity is the cost of intelligence operating in a complex environment.
I defined stupidity as overlooking or dismissing conspicuously crucial information.
Two domains engineer stupidity:
One is benign: magic. The magician misdirects your attention. The whole goal of the magician is to make you stupid, to not notice something you should have. The o... See more
I defined stupidity as overlooking or dismissing conspicuously crucial information.
Two domains engineer stupidity:
One is benign: magic. The magician misdirects your attention. The whole goal of the magician is to make you stupid, to not notice something you should have. The o... See more
Shane Parrish • How Not to Be Stupid
Marcel Mairhofer added
«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».
Carlo M. Cipolla • The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Il Mulino)
This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. One might even call it the trump card of the stupid, since (and this is surely one of the tragedies of human existence) it is the one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response.
David Graeber • The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
sari added
I just couldn’t relent. In my younger days, I had a horrible habit—back to those habits—of needing to explain to stupid people just how stupid they were. I’ve since learned that the best way to deal with stupid people is not to have them anywhere near your company and, if possible, not even in your life!
Jason Calacanis • Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000
In sum, to really try to be informed and liter-ate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.
David Foster Wallace • Deciderization 2007—a Special Report
Joseph added
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.