“Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff.

“The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up ninety percent of every army and are suited to routine duties.

“Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions.

“One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.”

Highly recommend spending some time in the Whole Earth publication archives if you haven't had the chance.

This is a characteristic of spite. Maybe spitefulness is stupid. But true spitefulness is a whole other level to watch out for.

Motivation for stupid people is often an imaginary gain. They think they do something for society or themselves, but the payment is only in emotions. From the outside this looks stupid, but for the stupid the gains are often very measurable feelings.

In the end the psychology of stupidity isn't that different from normal rational psychology. Adding emotions to capitalistic thinking can also be used to explain "Stupidity in large groups". The stupid get good vibes from others around while just causing a total loss for everyone. Maybe this is a starting point for counter measures...

I think the most dangerous people out there are the good helping stupids that just want to help - and just make everything worse. They get a lot of gain from the emotions that they did something good.

     With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.

  * "intelligent" is the intellectual capacity one is born with
  * "stupid" is the failure to use that intellectual capacity

-- Kurt Gödel

Yeah, this lines up with my personal description of stupid: incapable of achieving one's own goals because of stubbornness, mean-spiritedness, pride, persistent misunderstanding, inability or unwillingness to learn. A danger to themself and others. Usually and unfortunately coupled with overconfidence.

This is stark contrast to being merely ignorant (lacking knowledge, naive or sheltered) and dumb (incapable of learning or grasping complex subjects).

Ignorance is generally fixable and with some capacity, dumbness too. But stupidity is a special kind of bad.

How is being born stupid and act of providence? How can parents willingly have the foresight to spawn a stupid person? Isn’t it rather the lack of providence by the parents?

https://las-leyes-basicas-de-la-estupidez-humana.pages.dev/

Are there real life example of this? Or does anyone that scams people richer than them qualifies maybe?

Flaize = flail + lose. You're flailing and you're losing (and taking other people down with you).

"The world is full of flaizers, non-stop flaizing," encompasses laws 1 and 3.

Yet, shows the weakness the greatest while wielding its strength: thru its American people.

Stupid = Spite (lose / lose); Helpless = Altruism (lose / win); Bandit = Selfishness (win / lose); Intelligent = Cooperation (win / win)

The OP "Laws":

Everyone underestimates the number of spiteful individuals in circulation.

The probability that a certain person be spiteful is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

... and so on through ...

A spiteful person is more dangerous than a selfish person.

But we also have self-awareness. Stupid can be de-stupefied through learning. Whereas you can't really change your race or blood type.

-trump a B2 (aims to enrich himself, while overall a net negative to society)

-his voters are helpless (by voting for him, they don't actually gain anything)

-and intelligent people, including myself, are mostly sitting on the sidelines, save attending a no kings protest.

A few are valiantly fighting (filing court cases to check trumps power grabs, newsom pushing prop 50, journalists / media folks calling out the emperor has no clothes)

The only way this country gets saved from Trump is either the intelligent get off their duff and start fighting, or the helpless wake up and turn on Trump

Reminds me of people supporting the senseless bombings and genocide in the middle east.

There's at least two meanings for stupid. One is someone who is not intelligent, and it's just kind of an intrinsic thing. The other is someone who does something stupid, irrespective of their intelligence. This is a conditional attribute that depends on available information / motivation / laziness.

Point being a 2x2 matrix is just an oversimplification of real life and also wtf are the axes here???

A stupid person is a person who thinks other people are stupid.

A great way to detect stupidity is by finding the people who use the biggest words they can, all the time.