[HN Gopher] The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1987) [pdf]
___________________________________________________________________
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1987) [pdf]
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 170 points
Date : 2025-11-05 22:58 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gandalf.fee.urv.cat)
(TXT) w3m dump (gandalf.fee.urv.cat)
| rawgabbit wrote:
| I like this quote: With a stupid person all
| this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic
| Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no
| advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable
| times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when
| and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with
| a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.
| pksebben wrote:
| kinky.
| hammock wrote:
| That actually sounds like what the more intelligent animals
| will do to you (monkey, cat, etc) not the least intelligent
| ones (bug, snake, bird).
| java-man wrote:
| (the reader cries in despair)
| titzer wrote:
| "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."
|
| Yeah, this lines up with my personal description of stupid:
| incapable of achieving one's own goals because of stubbornness,
| mean-spiritedness, pride, persistent misunderstanding, inability
| or unwillingness to learn. A danger to themself and others.
| Usually and unfortunately coupled with overconfidence.
|
| This is stark contrast to being merely ignorant (lacking
| knowledge, naive or sheltered) and dumb (incapable of learning or
| grasping complex subjects).
|
| Ignorance is generally fixable and with some capacity, dumbness
| too. But stupidity is a special kind of bad.
| cwmoore wrote:
| But, ummm, if nature abhors a vacuum? And all these things
| provide "opportunity" for improvement? Maybe the special bad is
| by design.
| pstuart wrote:
| I think we're well served by distinct language: *
| "intelligent" is the intellectual capacity one is born with
| * "stupid" is the failure to use that intellectual capacity
|
| I know plenty of very intelligent people who have been quite
| stupid at times. I know that while I may have adequate
| intelligence I've certainly been stupid more than once (or maybe
| even twice).
| elzbardico wrote:
| > I know plenty of very intelligent people who have been quite
| stupid at times. I know that while I may have adequate
| intelligence I've certainly been stupid more than once (or
| maybe even twice).
|
| I call those people skilled instead of intelligent.
| ergonaught wrote:
| That is not the "stupid" used in this context.
| pstuart wrote:
| Sure, the "stupid" is effectively "unintelligent" in that
| context (unless I'm being stupid here ;-)
|
| My point is that even intelligent people can be incredibly
| stupid and Dunning-Kruger can still apply (because they know
| they are intelligent and are too arrogant to question their
| positions)
| anonu wrote:
| > One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to
| the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group.
|
| But we also have self-awareness. Stupid can be de-stupefied
| through learning. Whereas you can't really change your race or
| blood type.
| gtech1 wrote:
| Don't you feel yourself getting stupider with age ? Try and
| correct that by learning. Now imagine that some people are
| actually born that way
| pksebben wrote:
| That's not a word. I think the phrase you were thinking of
| was "dumberer"
| ayongpm wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110420000627/http://wwwcsif.cs...
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is a characteristic of spite. Maybe spitefulness is stupid.
| But true spitefulness is a whole other level to watch out for.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| But the stupid usually have what they think are good
| intentions.
| gsf_emergency_4 wrote:
| _Omnis enim ex infirmitate feritas est_
|
| --Seneca
|
| The modern nuance on "infirm" makes that seem more relevant.
| aside from the unintentional cruelty..
| pksebben wrote:
| I saw that movie, and I don't recall seneca ever talking
| about infirm ferrets. I know for a fact that eminem wasn't
| in it.
| gsf_emergency_4 wrote:
| https://youtu.be/0pSVV_LxqRg?t=23s
| taneq wrote:
| Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from
| enemy action.
| evilduck wrote:
| Spite implies intent.
|
| As an outside observer spitefulness and stupidity may appear
| the same, but the stupid person may have had good intentions
| and no ill-will towards those they harm.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > This is a characteristic of spite.
|
| I don't think so. The motivation behind spiteful actions is to
| purposely cause losses to others, and the gain derived from
| this action is rejoicing on other people's losses. This implies
| having and displaying power over others, and exercising this
| power to establish themselves even with so little gain.
|
| Very different than deriving no gain.
| Edman274 wrote:
| Consider the Ultimatum game. Alice and Bob are part of a
| millionaire madman's experiment, and so Alice and Bob are
| told the following: they have won a sum of $10,000 and Alice
| will be given the authority to decide how to divide their
| winnings. If Bob accepts Alice's offer, then both of them get
| the money as decided in the offer. If Bob rejects Alice's
| offer, then both of them get nothing. In addition, they have
| no ability to communicate or negotiate the offer; it's a one
| and done thing. So let's say Alice offers 100 dollars to Bob,
| and she will keep 9900.
|
| Now, most people would say that Bob is acting out of spite if
| he rejects Alice's offer, because he's causing Alice losses
| and he gains nothing, and the benefit he receives is that
| Alice is made sad by this. Is that a fair interpretation,
| though? He believes that he's acting out of a moral
| obligation to screw over someone who themself is (in his
| mind) acting unjustly. He's valuing punishing someone that he
| feels is breaking a social contract greater than the 100
| dollars that he would otherwise have. What do you call what
| he is doing in this situation if not spite? And if he is
| acting out of a principled objection to an unfair situation,
| does it become something other than spite? And if it's
| actually principled, why does the principle seem to melt away
| when the offer is $7000 to $3000?
|
| I feel like spite is a huge motivator behind a lot of
| cultural issues nowadays but it can only come from people who
| feel as if they are coming from a place of weakness or
| victimization. There is always a moral indignation. The
| gratification is in seeing their vision of justice meted out.
| It isn't always a psychopathic, sadistic behavior but it can
| be in those cases where a vision of justice is distorted and
| psychopathic. Consider this: isn't imprisoning people often a
| form, ultimately, of societal spite? In isolation it may be
| cheaper to just give petty criminals whatever they want
| rather than paying the cost for them being jailed. Amortized
| cost, it's probably a lot cheaper to pay a drunkard's taxi
| home from the bar every single time he goes drinking than to
| lock him in jail for 3 months for a second DUI. Is spite the
| reason that we don't just give him that? Again, the justice
| thing.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| "... it can only come from people who feel as if they are
| coming from a place of weakness or victimization."
|
| That's a good thought experiment. Let me add the
| terminology of Francis Fukuyama's "demand for dignity"---
| seems to go even closer to the nerve.
|
| https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2019/02/11/ep209-1-fukuya
| m...
| radialstub wrote:
| The mathematically correct way to distribute the winnings
| is 50-50. In a situation where value is created only if 2
| entities come together, the only fair way to distribute the
| winnings is 50-50. If Alice provided $1m dollars of startup
| capital, but can only achieve her goal having Bob on the
| team. Mathematically, Bob should be entitled to half the
| profits. In your game Bob is clearly being disadvantaged.
| Real life doesn't typically have the constraint "In
| addition, they have no ability to communicate or negotiate
| the offer; it's a one and done thing". Without this
| constraint, Bob can act rationally by threatening and
| following through with spitefulness in order to negotiate
| better terms. If Alice is not willing to negotiate until
| the fairness mark is reached, they are just as liable for
| the net loss in value.
| fuoqi wrote:
| I think the whole sentence is a bad take. The described
| behavior can be perfectly rational (and thus commonly
| considered not "stupid") in the case when cost function of the
| acting person has a negative weight assigned to the counterpart
| group/person. In other words, when someone considers the other
| an "enemy", it makes sense to hurt the other even such act
| results in some direct losses.
|
| Now, we can argue that playing negative-sum games is "stupid".
| And in most contexts of the modern human society such heuristic
| would be correct, but I would be really careful with a sweeping
| generalization, otherwise instead of a proper understanding of
| the underlying behavioral motivations you are likely to devolve
| into primitive explanations of someone being "stupid" or even
| "evil".
| jobigoud wrote:
| Hurting the enemy is intentional and thus has an implicit
| "gain" built into it, even if it's just psychological. The
| physical losses can be deemed acceptable because of it, if
| the satisfaction derived from hurting the enemy balances them
| out. The OP is describing stupidity where the result is a
| true loss or zero gain, because the intent wasn't to hurt in
| the first place.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I suspect there's a strong correlation between people who
| are motivated by harming others, especially organised
| hatred of specific groups, and people who self-harm through
| poor modelling of consequences.
|
| Harming others correlates with personality disorders.
| Personality disorders - especially Cluster B - correlate
| with poor impulse control, an emotional rather than a
| rational orientation, addictions, unreliability and
| dishonesty, and general inconsistency.
|
| Disordered people with high IQ and EQ tend to get away with
| disordered relationships for longer. But it's rare to live
| one of these lives with zero consequences. So these types
| are at least as likely to go through catastrophic collapse
| as to get away with their chaos and dysfunction.
| nathias wrote:
| spite is just willed stupidity
| Sateeshm wrote:
| Satisfaction is not nothing
| xivzgrev wrote:
| So in this metaphor, is
|
| -trump a B2 (aims to enrich himself, while overall a net negative
| to society)
|
| -his voters are helpless (by voting for him, they don't actually
| gain anything)
|
| -and intelligent people, including myself, are mostly sitting on
| the sidelines, save attending a no kings protest.
|
| A few are valiantly fighting (filing court cases to check trumps
| power grabs, newsom pushing prop 50, journalists / media folks
| calling out the emperor has no clothes)
|
| The only way this country gets saved from Trump is either the
| intelligent get off their duff and start fighting, or the
| helpless wake up and turn on Trump
| komali2 wrote:
| I am sorry to say that according to the metaphor of the PDF,
| your resistance probably falls into either "helpless" or
| "stupid," since it doesn't really do anything to check Trump's
| power (ICE agents still freely roam and abduct people at
| gunpoint, SNAP will run out and judgement induced distribution
| is blocked by Trump) and at best do nothing to him or anyone
| else or help him by giving him ammunition to justify further
| domestic action. Or if you're just sitting on the sidelines,
| then under the model, you're not defined as intelligent, but
| helpless, whereas his supporters are stupid.
|
| According to the model I would class legal efforts and some
| media efforts as intelligent or banditry (media is self
| serving; in the end it loves Trump for the headlines), and a
| protest as maybe intelligent but maybe also helpless.
|
| Inarguably intelligent might be something like following ICE
| movements and warning neighborhoods when they're coming, or
| establishing mutual aid food systems for people whose SNAP is
| about to run out. Or wasting ICE time somehow through civil
| disobedience to reduce their effectiveness.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > your resistance probably falls into either "helpless" or
| "stupid," since it doesn't really do anything to check
| Trump's power
|
| Some combination of "helpless", "lazy", and "stupid", like
| the narrator in Niemoller's poem "First They Came." [1]
|
| It is to do nothing except to fret (and to post on _social
| media_ ), despite knowing that eventually no one will be
| spared by energetically unethical monsters.
|
| [1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
| greesil wrote:
| There are four kinds of people, those that put things into
| categories, and those that like matrices.
|
| There's at least two meanings for stupid. One is someone who is
| not intelligent, and it's just kind of an intrinsic thing. The
| other is someone who does something stupid, irrespective of their
| intelligence. This is a conditional attribute that depends on
| available information / motivation / laziness.
|
| Point being a 2x2 matrix is just an oversimplification of real
| life and also wtf are the axes here???
| danparsonson wrote:
| > There are four kinds of people, those that put things into
| categories, and those that like matrices.
|
| I must be missing the joke here - those are not exclusive
| categories, and there are only two of them.
|
| > wtf are the axes here???
|
| It's explained in the text just below the drawing....
| dieselerator wrote:
| The number of responses here lends statistical support to the
| first basic law.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| the 0th law of human stupidity: the urge to categorize human
| stupidity numbs the intellectual ability for self-reflection.
| Thus the categorizer is by definition not stupid, and their
| assignment of categories and observations obviously correct.
|
| -- Kurt Godel
| infakelife wrote:
| Full issue of the Whole Earth Review in which this appeared:
| https://wholeearth.info/p/whole-earth-review-spring-1987?for...
|
| Highly recommend spending some time in the Whole Earth
| publication archives if you haven't had the chance.
| ListeningPie wrote:
| Is there a modern day equivalent to The Whole Earth catalog?
| Maybe a collection of blogs and online media or otherwise
| infakelife wrote:
| No equivalent as far as I know but would love to see one. The
| function it served has been scattered across Youtube, X,
| Substack, Hacker News, etc. but scale makes it hard to curate
| exclusively for such a specific audience with such a specific
| aesthetic.
|
| Kevin Kelly is still writing through The Technium [0], which
| might scratch some of the itch but is more an island than a
| colony like Whole Earth was.
|
| Time for a hippie futurist revival?
|
| [0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/
| max_ wrote:
| "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."
|
| Reminds me of people supporting the senseless bombings and
| genocide in the middle east.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Reminds me of Trump supporters.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > Reminds me of people supporting the senseless bombings and
| genocide in the middle east.
|
| The genocidal arguments frame them as solutions to long-
| standing problems, including labelling them as a "final
| solution". This is clearly an attempt to frame it as something
| where they derive a gain.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| In this copy, the letter sigma appears to have been replaced by
| a, presumably due to an encoding error...
| douglee650 wrote:
| Ha, I have independently arrived at this theory, with far less
| structure and elegance.
|
| Flaize = flail + lose. You're flailing and you're losing (and
| taking other people down with you).
|
| "The world is full of flaizers, non-stop flaizing," encompasses
| laws 1 and 3.
| hammock wrote:
| Crabs in a bucket
| douglee650 wrote:
| Crabs in a bucket is probably the bandit left triangle,
| people competing by dragging others down.
|
| Flaizers are the lower left quadrant, what original author
| refers to as "stupid" -- causing harm to themselves and
| others with no benefit for any parties.
|
| Yeah I know stop trying to make fetch a thing
| adornKey wrote:
| This article is a good starting point for researching stupidity.
| Nowadays stupidity is big on the rise to power, so I appreciate
| anything going into researching it. The article calls the stupid
| unpredictable, but I think most of them are very rational emotion
| maximisers.
|
| Motivation for stupid people is often an imaginary gain. They
| think they do something for society or themselves, but the
| payment is only in emotions. From the outside this looks stupid,
| but for the stupid the gains are often very measurable feelings.
|
| In the end the psychology of stupidity isn't that different from
| normal rational psychology. Adding emotions to capitalistic
| thinking can also be used to explain "Stupidity in large groups".
| The stupid get good vibes from others around while just causing a
| total loss for everyone. Maybe this is a starting point for
| counter measures...
|
| I think the most dangerous people out there are the good helping
| stupids that just want to help - and just make everything worse.
| They get a lot of gain from the emotions that they did something
| good.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Ever notice how you'll meet lots of people who think everyone
| else is stupid, but you almost never meet someone who believes
| they're stupid? Here's another law of stupidity: Stupidity is
| unable to recognize itself.
| Zorbanator wrote:
| That is the Dunning Kruger effect.
| jobigoud wrote:
| > The bandits who fall in area B1 are those individuals whose
| actions yield to them profits which are larger than the losses
| they cause to other people.
|
| Are there real life example of this? Or does anyone that scams
| people richer than them qualifies maybe?
| adornKey wrote:
| Maybe Robin Hood... and rare cases when a competent leader
| invests tax payer money into something really good. Maybe this
| was a thing back in ancient history.. Having a solid reserve of
| overproduction is a good thing for society. Seizing
| overproduction could also be B1.
| egberts1 wrote:
| America is powered by influx of immigrants of all sorts.
|
| Yet, shows the weakness the greatest while wielding its strength:
| thru its American people.
| 131012 wrote:
| I stopped reading when the author classified people in binary
| categories. Absolute proof of their own stupidity.
| tyleo wrote:
| To be fair they aren't binaries, they are a spectrum.
|
| I think it's fine to classify things like this. It doesn't
| preclude the existence of other dimensions. It limits the
| analysis and makes it easier to understand because the point
| gets lost when you classify things on an n-dimensional
| spectrum.
| hammock wrote:
| General Hammerstein: "I distinguish four types (of soldiers).
| There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually
| two characteristics are combined.
|
| "Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General
| Staff.
|
| "The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up ninety percent
| of every army and are suited to routine duties.
|
| "Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest
| leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and
| strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions.
|
| _"One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking;
| he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will
| always only cause damage."_
| lisper wrote:
| I often tell people without irony that laziness is my super
| power. Laziness motivates me to put my efforts into finding
| ways of getting things done with less effort, to the endless
| annoyance of those around me who work a lot harder than I do.
|
| > One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking
|
| Oh, so true.
| tempodox wrote:
| "HLADE'S LAW:
|
| If you have a difficult task give it to a lazy man -- he will
| find an easier way to do it."
|
| -- Arthur Bloch
| Isamu wrote:
| Larry Wall: 3 great virtues of a programmer are Laziness,
| Impatience and Hubris.
|
| Which is both a joke (turning virtue on its head) and kinda
| true, in that laziness makes you automate things, impatience
| spurs you to make things faster, and hubris spurs you to make
| sure that they work.
| tempodox wrote:
| That amount of wisdom can only come with boatloads of
| experience. Those are words to live by.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he
| will always only cause damage.
|
| In observing the current dark political period, we see clearly
| that the energetic but stupid person can be entrusted _to cause
| damage_. He is a type of _zealot_ or _fanatic_.
|
| If you can marshal groups of such people, especially at arm's
| length from your own reputation and assets, such groups of
| energetic but stupid people can do significant damage.
|
| I think I would re-order the Laws as stated:
|
| THE THIRD (AND GOLDEN) BASIC LAW _ 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. Human beings fall into four basic categories: the
| helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. (The four
| categories are H, I, B, S.)
|
| combines with
|
| THE SECOND BASIC LAW _ The probability that a certain person be
| stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that
| person.
|
| leads to
|
| THE FOURTH BASIC LAW _ 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.
|
| leads to
|
| THE FIRST BASIC LAW _ Always and inevitably everyone
| underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
|
| leads to
|
| THE FIFTH BASIC LAW _ A stupid person is the most dangerous
| type of person. The corollary of the Law is that: A stupid
| person is more dangerous than a bandit.
| demetris wrote:
| My personal system is simpler:
|
| A stupid person is a person who thinks other people are stupid.
| Quitschquat wrote:
| Needs a section on Performance Stupidity. "The January 6 people
| where tourists taking a guided tour"
| antonvs wrote:
| Performative stupidity is much more widespread than many people
| realize.
|
| This article has many examples:
| https://afterdarkconfessions.com/acting-dumb-on-purpose/
|
| And as the Jan 6 example suggests, it's been weaponized in the
| US lately. It encourages tribalism and discourages intellectual
| engagement.
| nowittyusername wrote:
| Reading this made me think of "Ferengi Rules of Acquisition"
| quite a lot. Maybe it was inspired by this...
| luckyobserver wrote:
| https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| "Every once in a while, declare peace. It confuses the hell out
| of your enemies."
|
| Darkly real.
| slicktux wrote:
| Maybe I'm too stupid to understand this sentence: " A stupid man
| is born a stupid man by an act of Providence."
|
| How is being born stupid and act of providence? How can parents
| willingly have the foresight to spawn a stupid person? Isn't it
| rather the lack of providence by the parents?
| kileywm wrote:
| In this context, "Providence" likely refers to a deity, which
| is indicated by the capitalization of the word.
| bruce_the_bruce wrote:
| In this context, I believe the author uses 'providence' to mean
| an act of God. Translated to a non-religious context, it might
| be "A stupid man is born a stupid man by pure chance".
| tyleo wrote:
| I generally liked this PDF but disagreed with this part. I've
| seen intelligent people become stupid depending on the context
| and vice-versa.
| abdulhaq wrote:
| Sn act of Providence means an act of God expressed in this way
| so as not to disturb those who don't like to talk about God
| Joker_vD wrote:
| The word "Providence" means "an influence that is not human in
| origin and is thought to control people's lives", or "God
| conceived as the power sustaining and guiding human destiny",
| or something like that. It does not mean "prudence" or
| "provision of care", usually.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Wow. Was it written by a 15-year-old high-schooler who had
| recently found a thesaurus? That is just so clunky to read.
|
| A great way to detect stupidity is by finding the people who use
| the biggest words they can, all the time.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| If you had read all the way to the end, you would have seen
| this:
|
| (There is genius at work in this thesis. It came round about by
| way of reader Sam Keen, who sent us a thin gray monograph
| printed in Bologna, Italy. The trail eventually led to Carlo M.
| Cipolla, the author, who is currently Professor of Economics at
| UC Berkeley - Kevin Kell)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_M._Cipolla
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Which is great, but I don't like having to unpick word salad.
| capitanazo77 wrote:
| Traduccion al espanol de The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1987)
|
| https://las-leyes-basicas-de-la-estupidez-humana.pages.dev/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-06 23:01 UTC)