11 days 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.