This post is inspired by 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. (More dangerous than self-interested sociopath/bandit)

Cipolla said that stupidity is unpredictable, unlike sociopathy which has a clear selfish logic. And because of this unpredictability, rational people have a hard time constructing their defenses and responding against stupidity so that they can avoid losses from stupid people actions.

In my opinion, we can somewhat reduce this unpredictability using this hypothesis: All stupidity is based on faulty premises and/or faulty logic (logical fallacies).

Many stupid actions have the red thread of one or several shared faulty premises. That is, some wrong assumptions are shared by many people and from this fact emerges phenomena of patterned stupidity. By finding out these common wrong assumptions, we can better predict the stupidity that will happen in the future based on previously observed patterns of stupidity.

Some example of commonly occurring wrong premises:

  • acting like a thug will make people respect me
  • not admitting my own mistakes will make people trust me

We also know many common logical fallacies (e.g. strawman, appeal to authority, hasty generalization, etc.). We can also use those to better predict stupidity.

Obviously, even with these two tools, the possibility of stupid actions/decisions is still endless because of the endless possibility of faulty premises and the endless way to wrongly combine them using logical fallacies to create stupidly wrong conclusions. Predicting all of the possible stupid action is probably impossible and hence the best defense is to avoid stupidity as Cipolla’s 4th fundamental law said.

But those two tools are good tools for avoiding stupidity in one’s own self. Strive to get correct premises and to avoid logical fallacies, and one can avoid doing stupid things that cause losses.