Ignorant, Dumb, Stupid

Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid

The essay distinguishes between “dumbness” and “stupidity.” The former is lack of intellectual horsepower (and not the same as ignorance, which is the universal human default, though curable). The stupid apply the wrong model to the problem at hand—and don’t learn better.

Sometimes this is because the old model used to work, and the new problem sort-of looks like the old. He uses the example of Gen. Haig in WW-I:

British high command during the First World War frequently understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies from the cavalry battles of their youth. As one of Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s subordinates later remarked, they thought of the trenches as ‘mobile operations at the halt’: ie, as fluid battle lines with the simple caveat that nothing in fact budged for years. Unsurprisingly, this did not serve them well in formulating a strategy: they were hampered, beyond the shortage of material resources, by a kind of ‘conceptual obsolescence’, a failure to update their cognitive tools to fit the task in hand.

Stupidity needn’t just come from obsolete models “that used to work”; it can also come from adopting fashionable models from another context. His example is the currently fashionable “social justice” models from the US, which are being adopted in lands whose history isn’t remotely like ours—and whose social problems have different sources.

Education as such won’t fix “stupid,” since one of its attributes is unwillingness to change models even after painful experience. It might make the stupid worse, since the subject will now think himself more clever than usual. Stupid might even spread: “There are some things so stupid only an intellectual can believe them.” And they do.

Another essayist more charitably calls these “luxury belief systems.”

“Once upon a time, it was more advantageous to know the facts of the world than not to, so we developed science. Today, our beliefs are less a reflection of our reality than a means of identifying our respective political tribes and negotiating our status within them.”