What makes a person stupid and why do stupid people win over smart ones? An essay.
There is a logic behind stupidity, and why it grows so fast. It’s a mathematical function. Before I show the reader the function of stupidity, we might want to clarify how one should define stupidity.
This, however, is more complicated than we might think. We could define stupid people as people with a low Intelligence Quotient (IQ). This Quotient measures your abilities in reasoning, logical deduction, abstract and visual thinking, and language skills in comparison to the average skills of your peers. An IQ of approximately 100 (it varies in different countries) means your intelligence is average. However, IQ is often criticized for not being diverse enough. It doesn’t measure emotional intelligence (EQ), street life intelligence, practical thinking, or common sense.
In 1976, an Italian professor called Carlo Cipolla found another definition of stupidity. He claims: ‘’A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses’’ (source: here). This is an interesting approach that I don’t plan to refute, yet we could very much think of an intelligent person who still wants to see the world burn but receives nothing in return. As the old saying goes, there’s a fine line between genius and insanity. It seems, though, that the line between stupidity and evil is also a fine one sometimes.
I will state another definition of stupidity here. A definition that involves people who act stupidly because of ignorance, greed, or other false motives and people who are actually…well stupid. A stupid person is someone who explains simple things as complex and complex things as simple and binary. Maybe you heard the Einstein quote before, ‘’smart people simplify things’’ because they undertsand so well that they know how to make things understandable for others too. However, a smart person would also not explain something to you as black and white and right or wrong, when the matter has nuance, because a smart person wouldn’t want you to see things falsely. The stupid person might lie to you intentionally so it can take advantage of your naivety, or the stupid person doesn’t undertsand the things himself and therefore does something utterly inefficient and dangerous. Portraying things as either more simple or more complicated than they are, and might lead to a false experience of our world, our community, and science.
So now here comes the math. Why do the stupid always win against the smart ones?
Let’s imagine two people. A smart one and a stupid one. Both have a theory about the same topic and they try to convince other people about their thoughts. What will the stupid person do? The stupid person will explain the topic and his theory in an oversimplified way so that people understand his theory quickly. Well, that and because his theory has no nuanced, complex foundation, it’s built on. The smart person, however, knows things need time to be understood in their foundation. He explains the problem and his theory in all its complexity so that people understand its core. Thus, it will take him more time to explain his theory to people and convince them to believe him instead of the stupid person.
That is the first phase, where the number of people who believe the stupid theory increases more rapidly than the number of people who believe the smart theory. In fact, the stupid theory grows exponentially.
While the smart theory takes more time to explain to one person. During the time the smart person explains the foundation of his theory in its complexity, the number of stupid people has grown so fast that the smart theory people move in circles because they can only further explain their theory and what good it does, to the people that already know and understand the foundation of the theory.
You could say the stupid theory in the first phase grows exponentially and the smart theory grows linear and then stops growing as soon as we reach the end of the circle.
In the second phase, the stupid theory can only survive in practice, if stupid people make things more complex and complex to solve the problems that they face. Because they are so deep into the theory, they don’t question the foundation of the theory. An excellent theory would have made things easier for people in the long run and would have a firm foundation to do that. The smart theory has that and things are easier for smart people because their theory solves problems more efficiently. Even though they are fewer in numbers, they are stronger than the bunch of stupid people because their theory works better. For the majority of the world, however, they might be seen as fools.
When I say theory, you could replace this word also with argumentation, invention, or morality.
The function of stupidity works in a way that we put something simple, let’s call it x, into the function and receive a complex output f(x). We made things more complex because we simplified things before.
The function of Intelligence works in different directions. We put something complex called x into the function and we get a simple output g(x). We made things easier because we acknowledged nuance and complexity beforehand.
So when we don’t look at the number of people we can convince for the smart or relatively for the stupid theory but the efficiency we get from the theories, we see the following graph.
So stupid people do not really win. But the smart person very much has to make a fool out of himself before he can succeed. That is why many smart people can be lonely. They think differently from others. This is probably also the reason why racism and sexism are still a thing, why people like Andrew Tate can build a huge fanbase because they use the exponential growth of stupid arguments, theories, etc. that grow so fast only because they make complex things overly simple and have no foundation, no nuance, no content.
So tell me, are you a stupid person?
Thanks for reading till the closing. if you enjoyed share and comment and be good!
References:
https://qz.com/967554/the-five-universal-laws-of-human-stupidity/
