What Makes Humans Stupid

13 hours ago

Stupidity is not the absence of intelligence but a sophisticated, active process that uses intelligence to make easy problems harder, often through elaborate theories or systems.
Intelligence and stupidity scale together; more intelligent systems can achieve greater feats of stupidity, as seen in human institutions, technology, and ideology.
Stupidity involves elaborating and defending errors, turning them into foundations for further action, which paradoxically requires prior intelligence.
Examples include misapplying theories like quantum mechanics to consciousness or cybernetics to economies, worsening problems instead of solving them.
Novelists and philosophers, such as Musil, Swift, and Pynchon, have explored intelligent stupidity, where intellect serves error, leading to collective or institutional failure.
Stupidity persists due to environmental changes or overextension of heuristics, as seen in moths drawn to artificial light or specialized systems hacked by external agents.
AI poses a risk of super-stupidity, where errors become undetectable as humans outsource cognitive capacities, potentially creating sophisticated stupidity indistinguishable from intelligence.
A science of stupidity is proposed to study its mechanisms, evolutionary dynamics, and design principles to prevent tools from replacing rather than enhancing cognition.

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