The five laws of stupidity (part 2)

As promised, I’ll try to explain how Professor Cipolla view stupidiy and its five laws that make it a danger to the world. 

To help us visualize his concept, he partitioned humans in four main quadrants: Intelligent, Bandit, Helpless and of course, Stupid, These quadrants show how the above traits can be beneficial or detrimental to the individual or to society.

Now, here are Cipolla's five laws: 

Law 1: Everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation 

No matter how many idiots you think you’re surrounded by, you are invariably underestimating the total. This problem is compounded by the biased assumption that some people are intelligent because of superficial factors like their job, education, or other traits that we think might rule out stupidity. 

Law 2: The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. 

That one seems a little bit arbitrary and Cipolla might be going on limb by postulating that stupidity is a variable that remains constant in all populations. Every category you can imagine – gender, ethnicity, education, income, nationality and nations – has a fixed percentage (?) of stupid people in quantities that Cipolla didn’t measure. 

Law 3. A stupid person will causes losses to other people without benefiting from their action. 

That's the golden law of stupidity: A stupid person causes problems for others without any clear benefit for themselves. The stupid person will harass you without any reason, without any advantage, without any plan, at the most improbable times and places. You get absolutely no rational warning signs and are at their complete his mercy. 

Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid individuals. 

People who aren’t stupid tend to forget that at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances, dealing and/or associating with stupid people is always a costly mistake. We underestimate idiots, and we do so at our peril. 

Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. 

Its direct consequence: a stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit. Essentially stupid people are dangerous and harmful because reasonable can’t difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. They can understand the logic of a bandit, it’s bad but always rational, not true of the stupid. 

It’s pretty obvious to me that non-stupid people are neither perfect, nor consistent. Sometimes people act intelligently, sometimes they’re abused, at other times they behave selfishly, or show a little bit of everything. On the other hand, the stupid are models of consistency, acting at all times with unwavering idiocy. 

Okay, that’s it, now you know the whole deal and I hope you won’t fall in the “stupid” trap!