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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Cippola explains it
These are Cipolla's five fundamental laws of stupidity:
Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
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.
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.
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
I have come to understand that this is the explanation but it still doesn't make sense in a way that I can internalize. I don't get the mechanics of stupidity because having what I would have called average intelligence seems like such an easy bar to clear. A+B=C comes so naturally to me that I literally can't force my brain to do anything different and yet I know people personally who obviously don't do that at all on their own and it amazes me. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure out what they're actually doing with their thoughts. All I know for sure is that logic doesn't exist until someone else starts the process and that is baffling.
The way a stupid persons brain works is a mystery. Understanding that is my struggle even though I know that it is the answer to the original question.