I want you to think of the last time someone you know did something
really stupid
You have it?
Can you explain why they did it?
Not that easy, is it?
In fact it's something difficult to understand
why are people stupid?
"Hi, my name is Fede and this is 'Eternally Curious.'"
Before we can begin to understand
why do people do stupid things
we first did a framework.
In 1972 italian Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla
wrote an essay on human stupidity
CARLO M. CIPOLLA - 'HAPPY BUT NOT TOO MUCH' Fundamental Laws of Human Stupidity
which despite its tongue in cheek tone
was remarkably scientific in its formulation.
It outlines the fundamental Laws of human stupidity,
just like Newton, but not on physics,
on... Stupid people.
There are 5 fundamental Laws
that can help us understand how to navigate
the sea of nonsense that sorrounds us
and makes us lose
money, time, energy, appetite,
cheerfulness, good health,
and makes us want to blow our brains out.
The First Law
This is pretty important.
no matter how many stupid people
you think are around,
there is probably a lot more.
So, whatever percentage you're thinking of right now,
it's probably an underestimate.
Let us call it Sigma, the percentage of stupid people around.
The Second Law
You might think that among certain groups
stupid people would be abundant
whereas in other places
they would be rare.
NOPE.
Stupid people seem to be equally distributed
among ANY population.
It's like a genetic trait.
Nature somehow just... figures it out.
This is not actually scientific theory!
The Third Law
It's important that we define our terms.
What is a stupid person anyway?
Stupidity doesn't mean to be ignorant,
silly or slow to understand things.
No, no, no no, no, no, no.
So, if what you do hurts others,
and hurts yourself too...
You're stupid.
In economic terms this is the opposite
of a win-win situation.
It's essentially a non-zero sum game
where every body loses
for no f*****g reason.
Yeah, that's pretty stupid!
Yeah but... Who does that, right?
Uhmpf! I know.
Except... The First Law.
This is some important implications and corollaries.
Thanks to the third fundamental Law of human stupidity
we can divide the entire planet
into 4 kinds of people.
The intelligent,
the helpless,
the bandit,
and, of course, the stupid.
We can conveniently represent them
in these Cartesian quadrants.
The X axis shows personal gains.
The more you go to the right,
the more the actions that you do
benefit you.
Similarly, the Y vertical axis
shows other people's.
The more you go down,
the more you're hurting them.
All clear?
See how the 4 categories
perfectly fall into place:
high personal gains
while also doing gains for others.
Intelligent people do things
that benefit themselves
as well as everyone else.
They literally make the world a better place
which you can actually calculate
and give it a numerical value.
The higher that number,
the more intelligent they are.
Remember that this has nothing to do
with how much they have studied,
how much money they have,
what their IQ is.
This is purely calculating
how good they're doing for themselves
and everyone else at the same time.
The helpless take actions
that benefit others while hurting themselves.
You see where I'm going with this.
The bandits do things that benefit themselves
while causing losses to others...
Usually the helpless.
And of course on the polar opposite
of the intelligent you have
the stupid.
With their unpredictable seemingly nonsensical
and utterly stupid actions
they hurt themselves
and everyone else around them.
Let's see some examples!
Say someone shoots you in the leg
just to rob you 50 bucks.
Or if the kill you
so they can rape your wife
for one night?
That's not a very good bandit.
First off, their benefit is very slim,
while taking extremely big risks.
And the loss for you and others
is... huge.
A perfetc bandit is somewhere
on this line:
huge benefit for themselves
with either no losses for you
or... a lot.
The rapist murderer, on the other hand,
is somewhere around here,
very close to the border
of sheer stupidity.
Those behind the multinational corporations
that in order to save some quits
cause one of the biggest environmental disaster
and public health crises in human history (BP),
are also very f*****g close
to be utterly stupid.
Again, small gain,
huge loss, to themselves too.
The helpless usually do not recognize
how dangerous stupid people are.
This is not at all surprising.
Their failure to understand
is just another expression
of their helplessness.
What's truly outstanding
is that also intelligent people and bandits
fail to recognize
how dangerous stupid people are.
If you're intelligent,
you think you can predict
and somehow counteract
the actions of stupid people.
And if you're bandit
you think you can take advantage of them.
Ho ho ho, you are SO wrong!
First off, you might think
that a stupid person will only
do harm to themselves.
But this is confusing
the stupid with the helpless.
Let me be perfectly clear:
All they would do is bring you
misery and suffering for inexplicable reasons
which go beyond your understanding.
Always!
And that's the whole point:
their actions are incomprehensible.
You can understand the actions of a bandit.
They want more for themselves
and they don't care about you.
You know this, so you can
reasonably predict what they're gonna do.
The same goes for the helpless.
They will be taken advantage of
by the bandits.
They just can't help themselves.
But a stupid person
it's a whole different thing.
And the worst part about it is
they don't know that they're stupid.
If they did, they would do something
to stop hurting themselves
for no apparent reason,
which would make them... less stupid.
It's an endless trap of stupidity.
Which brings us to the 4th Law.
I think you got the point by now.
The 5th and last Law
is really just a corollary
of the previous 4.
Which also means that a stupid person
is more dangerous than a bandit!
If you think about society as a whole,
if everyone were a bandit
there would be no net loss for society.
Just a transfer of wealth and welfare
from one person to another.
And overall, they would cancel each other out.
Society wouldn't get better
but also wouldn't get any worse.
And if everyone were intelligent,
we would all be better off
and we would live in a more sane society
which improved exponentially over time.
But when stupid people are at work
the story is completely different.
Now, because of the 2nd Law
the number of stupid people
is not affected by time, race, space
or any other socio-economic factor.
So how do we explain a thriving society
versus a collapsing civilization?
Remember that both societies are plagued
by the same percentage of stupid people (Sigma).
The difference is that in declining societies
stupid people have POWER.
The helpless can't help themselves.
But the intelligent and the bandits should.
So it's their fault.
If you watching this video
you're probably intelligent (or a bandit).
Either way, this framework
should help you understand
the dangers of stupidity
and you should avoid it
at all costs.
In particular if you want the society
you're living to thrive
and not go into chaos
STOP PUTTING STUPID PEOPLE
IN POSITIONS OF POWER!
Where they can exercise their talents
and make everyone miserable.
If you can, put someone intelligent.
But if you absolutely can't
and all you can choose from
is between a bandit and a stupid person
choose the bandit!
At least you know how the would act
and you can take the necessary precautions.
Also big part of your job
is trying to convince the helpless.
When they're not being fooled
by the bandits... or the stupid.
Last, nobody's perfectly consistent
with their actions.
So, if sometimes you do
something very stupid
and then you're fooled by someone,
but generally you're doing
pretty intelligent things,
on average you're intelligent.
So where you fall in the quadrants,
is calculated as the overall awaited average position
of all the actions you take in your life.
To help you with your mission
in making the world less stupid
I have prepared this handy prints
(link in the description).
It's simple:
put the name of your friend, co-worker,
boss, lover, or whatever, in here.
And day by day, map all of their actions.
Do this for a while
and very soon you'll have a pretty good picture
of whether that person is a bandit,
intelligent, helpless or... stupid.
And if they're stupid,
there's only one thing you can do:
RUN AWAY FROM THEM!
For the ready adventurers,
you can ask your friends to do the same for you.
And if turns out that you're stupid
then you think about it
and you accept it.
Then you're not so stupid after all.
And there is hope for you too.
I hope you enjoyed this video,
I certainly had a lot of fun doing it.
If you'd like to read
the original essay by Cipolla
I highly recommend it.
You'll find the ling in the video description.
If you like this video
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that I can keep making videos like this
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and you can follow all the courses I'm teaching
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Thank you for being curious.
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