Can you define "stupidity"? David Krakauer, president and William H Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute, takes a stab at it in a Nautilus essay.
"Stupidity takes an easy problem and, with great effort and misdirected ingenuity, makes it hard," Krakauer writes. "That effort is the key to grasping stupidity, in that you need sophisticated machinery to be genuinely, consequentially stupid."
The same scientist who postulates a brilliant theory and wins a Nobel Prize can also act stupidly. Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling made several brilliant discoveries about molecular disease as well as inventing artificial blood plasma that saved millions of lives.
He is widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century and stands as a foundational figure in both quantum chemistry and molecular biology. Notably, he is the only person in history to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes.
And yet, this genius refused to accept the idea that he could be wrong about anything. In 1982, materials scientist Dan Shechtman discovered "quasicrystals"—a structure of atoms that violated the established laws of crystallography.
Pauling, the world’s foremost expert on chemical bonds, refused to believe he could be wrong about crystal structures. Instead of looking at the data objectively, he used his powerful status and flamboyant speaking skills to publicly humiliate Shechtman, famously declaring at a conference: "There are no quasi-crystals, only quasi-scientists."
Linus Pauling spent years publishing complex, highly technical papers trying to prove Shechtman had just made a mistake. Pauling fought this until his death in 1994. In 2011, Shechtman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the very discovery Pauling spent a decade trying to discredit.
We tend to simplify stupidity in the same breath we think of a lack of academic achievement or simple errors in judgment. In fact, stupidity runs rampant throughout the sciences, academia, business, and culture, and is largely the result of a lack of rigorous thinking.
"Stupidity is a very special species of failure and not all errors qualify," Krakauer writes. "People err from ignorance (insufficient data), from noise (a signal is distorted), or from the honest misapplication of a rule to a novel situation and changing context."
Stupidity only gets worse when, instead of apologizing or changing course, humans double down.
"Stupidity begins where error is elaborated, defended, refined, institutionalized, and made the foundation for further action," writes Krakauer. "Stupidity makes everything progressively worse."
It's even more problematic when some woke social scientist tries to shoehorn a perfectly good unrelated theory into the wrong problem.
But there is a small cottage industry of thinkers who have tried to apply quantum mechanics to human consciousness, decision-making, and psychology to explain why people are indecisive and why they eventually make up their minds. There is nothing wrong with the mathematics and the physics is sound. But the application is peculiar. What was an elegant and parsimonious description of photons and electrons becomes, when imported into psychology, an absurdly over-complicated way of saying that people sometimes change their minds. A phenomenon that a novelist could illuminate in a paragraph has been buried under a formalism designed for a completely different scale of reality. The theory did not become less intelligent, it was asked to solve a problem it was never designed for, and in the process, it made that problem harder to understand, not easier. This flies in the face of the purpose of science, which is, as the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach described it, “the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.”
"Human beings, equipped with language, abstraction, technology, institutions, and ideology, can be stupid on a truly civilizational scale, Krakauer writes. "This is not a joke; it is close to a law of nature. A law that might very well be our undoing."
Indeed, how dumb would it be to engage in a nuclear exchange with Russia, China, or even North Korea? "Save face"? "Geopolitical reality"? Meanwhile, 100 million dead within hours, atmosphere poisoned, and the survival of the species called into question.
Stupidity is always irrational, although sometimes hidden, and follows no logic train except its own inner incoherence. Take the case of management consultant Stafford Beer, who tried to apply cybernetic control theory to managing Salvador Allende’s Chilean economy.
Unfortunately, an economy is not a servomechanism. The feedback loops in a national economy involve millions of adaptive agents with private information, conflicting goals, and a tendency to evolve their preferences. The seduction of applying cybernetic methods to complex systems is described beautifully by my Santa Fe Institute colleague, the writer Francis Spufford, in his novel Red Plenty: “The world was lifting itself up out of darkness and beginning to shine, and mathematics was how he could help. It was his contribution. It was what he could give, according to his abilities. He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason.”
"A simple behavioral intervention, such as adjusting a price, changing a regulation, or God forbid, simply asking people what they need, could often have achieved in an afternoon what the cybernetic apparatus was struggling to model in weeks," Krakauer quips.
Indeed, the KISS philosophy ("Keep It Simple, Stupid") is usually the best approach. Unnecessarily complicating a problem leads to more stupidity than not.
Austrian novelist and essayist Robert Musil gave a lecture on stupidity in 1937 that nailed the most important distinction among the thousands of papers and dozens of books written about stupidity.
"He separated 'honorable stupidity,' which is a simple cognitive limitation, or the inability to grasp a difficult argument, from 'intelligent stupidity,' which he considered far more dangerous," Krakauer observes.
In the film Gettysburg, a Confederate General tells Gen. George Pickett, "I gotta hand it to you, George. You certainly do have a talent for trivializin' the momentous and complicatin' the obvious."
There's a lot of that going around.
