Before you start categorising yourself or other people, you might want to read up on the Dunning-Kruger effect,
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in
which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make
unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them
of the metacognitive ability to realize it". The
unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority,
rating their own ability as above average, much higher
than in actuality; by contrast the highly skilled
underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory
inferiority.
Suspending disbelief for a moment, and taking this seriously ...
I take issue with the following statement:
> A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
Sometimes, perhaps. However, a bandit, by his gain, can give himself more resources with which to continue his banditry. A stupid person, on the other hand, will tend to deprive himself of resources.
For example, I decide I want to be nasty. I'll drive around town and siphon gasoline out of people's cars. As a bandit, I might put this gas in my tank, thus enabling me to drive on to the next victim. I'm not a perfect bandit, since it cost me some gas to get to my victim, and so the total amount of available gasoline in the world is reduced by my actions, but I do gain somewhat. On the other hand, as a stupid person, I might simply dump the siphoned gas on the ground. And eventually, I run out of gas, making it more difficult for me to victimize others.
If you can get past the curt/cocksure/consciously-provocative first two laws, the laws starting at the third have an interesting quadrant-based analysis of human interactions.
The stuff about 'bandits with overtones of intelligence' brings to mind Coasian analyses -- we really don't want to prohibit such net-positive banditry, just arrange side payments. So it didn't surprise me to find at the end that the piece was written by an economics professor.
It's a 2-by-2 matrix, so of course it's going to be oversimplified.
The stupid people often believe they're pursuing their own gain, but are too ignorant and misguided to do so.
In practice, I think the bandits are more dangerous. In a corrupt and declining society such as ours, they end up running the show.
Stupid people are like the magnetic charges in a block of iron. Because their stupidity is fairly random, they tend to cancel each other out under normal conditions, and therefore are not very dangerous (except to themselves) on a macroscopic level. When those charges become aligned and they now have macroscopic pull (as we see in the modern "religious right" and the Tea Party movement) they become scary, but that can only happen when they've been manipulated by (crafty, and likely intelligent at least in the IQ sense) bandits.
Stupid people usually are a burden. But for startups they're an asset. We make complicated things so simple and dangerous things so easy that those morons out there can use them without hurting others and themselves (too much). The process of creating a solution for the non-geeks out there means: "Dumbing down." It's a pain. And the price they pay heals our intellectual wounds. :)
if you suffer from the action of a stupid person, you have participated in an interaction where both you and the other party lost. By the author's definition, you are stupid.
The author starts off by being blatantly offensive to the point where I wondered if he was trolling.
Then, as if to excuse himself with a "ahhh! got you all!" he drops this gem halfway down the article:
> "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."
Thanks, if we're going to go around redefining the accepted and colloquial definition of "stupid", it would seem relevant to put this near the top of your treatise.
This would also seem to contradict the author's previous assertion that stupidity is genetic and largely unrelated to nurture - unless the author seriously believes that personality traits (i.e., the tendency to go for lose-lose arrangements) are genetic.
Plausible claim, but pointless without real research, or at the very very least some semblance of qualification for the author to make such a wild assertion.
I couldn't really make it too far beyond that without being profoundly disturbed by the author's self-important vigorous mental masturbation.
