From: scerir (scerir@libero.it)
Date: Thu Sep 07 2000 - 10:30:41 MDT
Carlo M. Cipolla, Professor Emeritus of Economic History at Berkeley, died in Pavia (Italy) yesterday.
All of his books are in English. Except - I suppose - a little, clean essay called
*The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity*.
Here are the Five Laws of Stupidity, according to Carlo M. Cipolla.
First Law - We always underestimate the number of stupid people.
This is not as obvious as it sounds, says Cipolla. Because people we had thought to be rational and intelligent suddenly turn out to be unquestionably stupid; day after day we are hampered in whatever we do by stupid people who invariably turn up in the least appropriate places. He also observes that it is impossible to set a percentage, because any number we choose will be too small.
Second Law - The probability of a person being stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
If you study the frequency of stupidity in the people who come to clean up classrooms after hours, you find that it is much higher than you expected. You assume that this is related to their lower level of education, or to the fact that non-stupid people have better chances of obtaining good jobs. But when you analyze university professors the distribution is exactly the same. The stupidity factor is the same in both genders. No difference in the sigma factor, as Cipolla calls it, can be found by race, color, ethnic heritage, education, et cetera.
Third Law - A stupid person is someone who causes damage to another person, or a group of people, without any advantage accruing to himself, or even with some resultant self-damage.
Fourth Law - Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid people. They constantly forget that at any moment, and in any circumstance, associating with stupid people invariably constitutes a very expensive mistake.That suggests that non-stupid people are a bit stupid.
Fifth Law - A stupid person is the most dangerous person in existence.
This is probably the most widely understood of the laws, if only because it is common knowledge that intelligent people, hostile as they might be, are predictable, while stupid people are not.
(more about his theory....)
http://mentalsoup.com/mentalsoup/basic.htm
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/serendipia/Stupidity.html
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/serendipia/Stupidity2.html
http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/stupidity/
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