Atanu Dey on India's Development » Stupidity

A Taxonomy of the Stupid

Atanu Dey — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 07:26:13 +0000

I have mentioned the basic laws of human stupidity enunciated by Prof Cipolla before on this blog. For your convenience, I repeat the basic laws here:

First Basic Law: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

Second Basic Law: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

Third (and Golden) Basic Law: A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Fourth Basic Law: 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 costly mistake.

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

Corollary to the Fifth Basic Law: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

I am sure you have questions. Who are the stupid? How can we identify them? Are they a heterogeneous or a homogeneous bunch? What can be done to help them? All excellent questions and we should address them.

Most certainly someone must have come up with the taxonomy of the stupid but I am too lazy to look it up on them internets. So as a public service, I will do the hard work of figuring out a taxonomic scheme of my own.

First Order Stupid: Plain old garden variety stupid. The cause of the stupidity is basic ignorance. This can be cured with knowledge. Pre-requisite: must be at least of average intelligence and have an open mind.
Second Order Stupid: Not just ignorant of the facts but what is worse that the head is filled with patent nonsense and falsehoods. As with First Order Stupidity, this can be cured but it requires the additional step of erasing before writing. Pre-requisite: as in the previous category and the ability to change one’s mind.

Third Order Stupid: Not only having wrong information but even when presented with the correct information, the inability to recognize the need to re-evaluate the situation and change one’s mind. Therefore it is nearly impossible to fix this kind of stupid.

For expositional purposes only, here’s an example. (The persons mentioned below are entirely fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is quite likely coincidental. Or perhaps not so coincidental. You decide.)

Meet Ashok. Ashok does not know anything about a man (loosely speaking, of course) named Dr Manmohan Singh. He assumes that Dr Singh is about average when it comes to integrity. He is essentially ignorant of the fact that Dr Singh is a despicably dishonest person, but when presented with the facts, readily admits that Dr Singh is a spineless toady and astonishingly dishonest. Ashok is 1st Order Stupid.
Meet Basanti. Basanti is the gullible sort. She reads newspapers which claim that Dr Singh has personal “integrity.” If you ask her why, she will tell you because “everyone says so.” She’s not incorrigible, though. You first explain to her that she’s totally mistaken. Given the evidence, she updates her beliefs and correctly believes that Dr Singh is a despicably dishonest person. Basanti is 2nd Order Stupid.

Meet Chandan. Chandan is convinced that Dr Singh is competent and honest. His mind is made up and no amount of evidence about Dr Singh’s dishonesty is going to make the least difference to him. You can present all the damning evidence till the cows come home but he will steadfastly refuse to alter his belief and insist that Dr Singh is honest. Chandan is incorrigible. He is 3rd Order Stupid.

Moving on to a related matter. In a comment reader Mallikarjuna writes,

Our current PM, comes with impressive integrity, but is not a man, who can “Get it Done”.

Either I have totally misunderstood the meaning of the word “integrity,” or the current appointed PM is as far as one can get from integrity while still being in the same galaxy. I wish I could talk to someone who believes in the PM’s integrity. I want to know what their definition of the word is in the context of that man. Does integrity mean “the character trait that makes a person incapable of judging right from wrong; the total lack of moral conviction; the absence of all and any ethical considerations in one’s actions; devoid of all sense of fairness and justice” to them?

I would seriously like to know.

Innumerates of the Times of India

Atanu Dey — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 00:32:39 +0000

Those who refuse to do arithmetic are doomed to speak nonsense. That one is a favorite quote from a computer science guru John McCarthy. To it I would add that those who are incapable of reasoning are doomed to being innumerate. The ability to reason is a prerequisite for knowing how to do arithmetic. Let me give you a shining example of innumeracy arising from an inability to reason.

The article headline summaries the point that the writer was trying to make: “Tier II, III cities power nation’s growth.” And the evidence for that conclusion? Certainly not to be found anywhere in the article.

Small towns are churning out big news. Unbelievable as it may sound, people from BIMARU regions are making more money, in turn, fuelling the nation’s economic resurgence.

According to latest Income Tax (I-T) data, economic powerhouses Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata have lost out to Patna, Lucknow, Meerut, Chandigarh, Kanpur and Kochi in net personal I-T (PIT) mop up.

None of the metros, barring Bangalore, figure in the top 10 cities that have posted highest growth in personal I-T collection during the April-July 2010 period as compared to the same period in 2009.

The highest growth (95%), among all regions, has been posted by Bihar and Jharkhand followed by Purvanchal or eastern UP, where collection shows an increase of 91%.

Meerut, or western UP region (51%), is third on the list, followed by Bangalore (50%); Chandigarh (41%); Kanpur (40%); Guwahati (23%); Pune and Kochi (22%) and Nagpur (18%). In comparison, the growth of PIT in megapolises like Delhi and Mumbai have been a paltry 4% and 6%, respectively. {Emphasis added.}

The writer includes a painful list of growth rates but nowhere in the article even bothers to indicate the bases on which the growth rates are computed. I am certain that he does not even understand why comparison of growth rates are meaningless without the bases. I am sure he has no idea that there’s a distinction between stocks and flows.

Sure it is better to have a higher growth rate than a lower growth rate of positive indicators such as life expectancy, or income or whatever. But one cannot conclude anything of importance from comparing growth rates alone. Here’s a concocted example.

Ethiopia and Zambia have trumped the most developed richest nations in terms of growth of life expectancy at birth in the last decade. Life expectancy grew at a phenomenal 38 percent in Ethiopia and a mercurial 64 percent in Zambia. Compare that to Switzerland (2 percent), the US (2 percent), and Denmark’s anemic 1 percent. The conclusion that Ethiopians and Zambians contribute more to the overall health of the global population than the developed countries is inescapable.

What’s missing is the information that the life expectancy at birth in the developed countries is around 80 years and that of the poorest, hardest hit by AIDS and such countries is around 30 years. (All numbers are for illustrative purposes only and are not claimed accurate.)

It may appear that I am needlessly nitpicking. But actually this sort of innumeracy and illogic among the general public is dangerous in a democracy. People vote based on their understanding of what is happening around them. If they cannot reason out the implications of policies — most of which are to some degree quantifiable — they will make the wrong choices.

Though much of the policy errors are the result of self serving myopia of the politicians and bureaucrats, I would not be surprised that some of it arises out of innumeracy.

The editors of the Times of India clearly are innumerate in this instance. That is why they end up publishing nonsense.

When in Rome, only Monotheism

Atanu Dey — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 06:36:43 +0000

I gather from Kanchan Gupta’s piece — “In Rome, Durga is not welcome” — the officials in Rome are jerking around Hindus who want to celebrate puja. But for the efforts of the Indian Ambassador, Mr Arif Shahid Khan, this year’s Durga puja celebrations in Rome would have been a disaster. A deep bow for Mr Khan in appreciation of his help to the Hindus in Rome.

I don’t blame the officials in Rome. They are at least not being hypocritical in their action. They are monotheists and their religion says that non-monotheists are destined for eternal torment in the hell their god has prepared for people like me (atheists) and polytheists (like most Hindus supposedly are.) The previous bishop of Rome, the pope, visited India some years ago and had the gall to tell Indians that they need to be saved — and he said this during Diwali — and that the Catholic church will bring India under the cross. That instrument of torture and death that they proudly wear around their necks.

But anyway, India cannot do much about this blatant slap on the face. The Indian government headed by Manmohan Singh works for Sonia Gandhi, an Italian by birth and a Roman Catholic by faith. The head of the state, the president of India, is Pratibha Patil. Ms Patil occupies that position at the pleasure of Sonia Gandhi. Neither Manmohan Singh nor Pratibha Patil can criticize the Italian government or the Vatican because Sonia Gandhi would not allow it.

Divided loyalties is the main reason that people of foreign birth are not allowed to hold high office in most civilized nation states. What a sorry state of affairs. Sad, very very sad but then one has to remember that Indians voted to put a foreigner into the driving seat. The mentality of an occupied people is not easy to change. The British left over 60 years ago but the mentality that elevates white-skinned people other brown-skinned ones is too deeply rooted into the collective psyche.

We are, as the song goes, prisoners of our own device.

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

Atanu Dey — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 09:21:11 +0000

The prime directive that the Buddha gave to humanity was as simple as it was wise: First do no harm; then try to do good. Easy enough to state but it is astonishingly hard to follow for the average human being. Granted that the average human has occasional flashes of genius, but those are rare and therefore shine brightly against a backdrop of all-pervasive darkness of the general stupidity of humanity at large. No one, present company included, is quite exempt from moments of supreme stupidity and random acts of senselessness. Stupidity is as much part of our human condition as our much vaunted rationality. Which is why it is so difficult to follow the Buddha’s directive: we are just not smart enough.

I believe that the first hints of the dawning of wisdom lies in the realization that one is stupid. That realization is as profound – if not profounder – as that of one’s mortality. In the Mahabharata, someone asks, “Of all the wonders of the universe, which is the most wondrous of all?” It is one of those occasional geniuses who replies, “Man sees death and mortality all around him all his life. But he is never quite fully persuaded of his own mortality.”

We see stupidity and senselessness around us all the time but are never fully convinced of our own stupidity. That is the most marvelous fact about the human condition.

Codifying the regularity of the natural world into laws is a basic instinct of scholars. So I presume that human stupidity has been studied systematically by many scholars. I have not done an exhaustive study of such laws. Just a cursory search on the web led me to Prof Carlo Cipolla’s “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.” He was an economic historian and professor emeritus at University of California at Berkeley, my alma mater, until he passed into the great unknown in September 2000 at the age of 78 in his native Italy.

One has to read the entire article to fully appreciate the beautifully expressed thesis. I excerpt here the basic laws as Prof Cipolla saw them, for the record:

First Basic Law: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
Second Basic Law: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
Third (and Golden) Basic Law: A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Fourth Basic Law: 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 costly mistake.
Fifth Basic Law: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
Corollary to the Fifth Basic Law: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Which brings me to why I am so interested in stupidity. I think that most of the world’s ills, including India’s, are fundamentally explained by the conjecture that it is the result of stupidity. Therefore I extend the Fifth Basic law:

Second corollary to the Fifth Basic Law: A stupid person who is supremely powerful is more dangerous than a thermonuclear bomb.

The United States, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, is surely being destroyed by its leaders and that destruction is worse than would be caused by a few thermonuclear bombs, in my considered opinion.

Closer to home, I note that India has no real cause to be so poor other than the fact that systematically over the decades policy decisions have been taken that have ensured that India does not achieve its potential. Though the routes are different, the actions of very powerful but stupid people have consequences that are not ultimately distinguishable from that of thermonuclear destruction, that of hundreds of millions of lives cut short and many other hundred millions not really living a decent human existence.

India’s development, I am forced to conclude, depends on non-stupid leadership taking charge of the country. Possible? Of course. Probable? Not very.