I burned through the free articles and don’t really wanna pay just to see what this specific one is.
What’s it they say? There’s five minutes I’ll never get back.
But what exactly is stupidity? David Krakauer, the President of the Santa Fe Institute, told interviewer Steve Paulson, for Nautilus, stupidity is not simply the opposite of intelligence. “Stupidity is using a rule where adding more data doesn’t improve your chances of getting [a problem] right,” Krakauer said. “In fact, it makes it more likely you’ll get it wrong.” Intelligence, on the other hand, is using a rule that allows you to solve complex problems with simple, elegant solutions. “Stupidity is a very interesting class of phenomena in human history, and it has to do with rule systems that have made it harder for us to arrive at the truth,” he said.
“It’s an interesting fact that, whilst there are numerous individuals who study intelligence—there are whole departments that are interested in it—if you were to ask yourself what’s the greatest problem facing the world today, I would say it would be stupidity. So we should have professors of stupidity—it would just be embarrassing to be called the stupid professor.”
Same old, same old.
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Not a definition, but a view :
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and anti-Nazi resistance fighter, identified stupidity as a greater threat than evil itself.
Unlike malice, which can be confronted, stupidity is immune to logic, resistant to reason, and dangerously convinced of its own rightness .
Bonhoeffer observed how Nazi Germany transformed intelligent individuals into blind followers, illustrating how stupidity spreads in society when people surrender their independent thought for conformity.
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Rich german businessmen funded the Sturmabteilung brown shirts in the 1920s and 30s .
I mean the guy they’re referring to seems to have a lot of strong views on things, at least from this interview:
David: Probably. But I would never have known that. That’s the point. Right? And so that’s the beginning of it. And then, of course, very early, actually, my teens, this kind of coalesces into a set of core interests that have never left me, right, which are, on the one hand, the evolution of order and, to include the evolution of ideas, through the instrument of the mind and brain. And I don’t view those as separable.
Most people, by the way, nowadays will get into all this rubbish on LLMs and all this. Actually, the strong functionalists, the immaterialists, who are basically modern dualists, don’t take matter seriously enough as far as I’m concerned. So I consider evolution integral to any conception of intelligence and consequently to the world of ideas. So my career decisions were very directly connected to this early obsession, I guess.
Jim: Interesting. And so the idea of the idea led you to think about what does it mean for there to be an idea? What is it honed in? What are the attributes of something that’s differentiated from noise, for instance. Right?
David: Exactly. And where does it come from, and is it everywhere? Is it in things, nonliving things? And, of course, once you go down that path, which seems a bit silly, you realize there are entire edifices built on this conception. Right? Platonism and on it goes. And then you make contact with a world of other people who have had the same pornographic fixations as you. Right? That is with the idea. Then you develop a kind of virtual community.
So that’s a very important point. Who am I? I am a person whose community is mainly not alive. I live in the graveyard of ideas or of books, much more than of community, despite the fact that I’m in community. But the history of ideas is as alive.
Definitely has some odd takes.
I’m pretty sure you’re confused on this. Bonhoeffer was not a business man
Once more you deviate the topic with your obsessions.
And the brownshirts were not created by capitalists, even if Capitalists financed Hitler.
Are you trying to give us an exemple of stupidity ?
Your simplistic explanations of why things happened doesnt do it for me.
What does this have to do with the topic?
I didnt introduce the nazis into this.
Bonhoeffer was introduced. His ideas about what he called “stupidity” were based on his observations of the Nazis and the people who followed them. His ideas can be applied to any rise of authoritarianism.
Any comments on other reasons for the Nazis do not counter Bonhoeffer’s thesis.
Rich german businessman funded the Sturmabteilung . Stupidity was not the reason . 
Then you are off topic.
I could answer, I will not.
How can it be off topic when i am making a point about your comments ???
Sorry, i made a mistake. That’s the off topic point.
This has all gone pretty far from what I was saying.
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Then your comment i pointed to is off topic