These are Cipolla’s five fundamental laws of stupidity:
1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. 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.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places, and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
I must be a reincarnation of this guy, cuz I’m literally working on a micro-book called, “Rationalized Malice: How Faulty Logic Justifies Harm.”
The book won’t be out for a while (I’m in uni and have some high-impact research projects coming up), but it’ll be practical in that 80% of it will be what you can do, as an individual.
Do you have a mailing list? Yours would be a periodic email I’d actually love to see.
No, but I will by April. 👀 Thank you for the idea.
I’ll reply to this post when I set it up. It’s high priority on my to-do list.
Fun fact for anyone who doesn’t speak Italian: his last name literally means onion.
Thanks for sharing, definitely saved his wikipedia article.
I also like the the graph showing the differences of people: stupid, intelligent, helpless, and bandits.
Love the perspective.
I am interested in the relationship between stupid people and narcissistic people. Narcissism hurts both society and that individual, as well.
It feels like many in leadership positions display narcissistic tendencies. I am not sure if we currently have adequate accountability for such people. If they are lucky, they benefit and then externalize those costs on society at large
Accountability? We’ve straight up rewarded them for generations. Sociopathy is practically a required trait for climbing the corporate ladder.
Yes, I hope someday our species adopts systems that weed out such people rather than reward them
