During the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 the cautious Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, in overall command of the British forces, sent a signal to Nelson’s forces ordering them to discontinue the action. Naval orders were transmitted via a system of signal flags at that time. When this order was brought to the more aggressive Nelson’s attention, he lifted his telescope up to his blind eye, saying, “I have a right to be blind sometimes. I really do not see the signal,” and most of his forces continued to press home the attack.
I have this theory about the difference between stupid people and smart people.
A smart person has the ability to receive and weigh evidence, apply critical thinking, and draw conclusions about the world. They’re capable of “figuring things out”.
Stupid people only know things because somebody else (a smarter person) told them.
This helps explain, in part, a lot of the resentment that stupid people have to being corrected. If you provide different or better information, they’ll get offended: “what makes you think you are so smart?” (I noticed this on social media: if you correct a smart person’s factual error, they’re happy for the new information. Dumb people feel threatened)
I also think it informs some of the love for Trump. Because dumb people are dependent on others for knowledge, they are beholden to authority figures in their lives (the church leader, the boss, the man in the suit on the tv, et al). It sucks, but they don’t have the skills to make their own decisions. Trump pisses off these types of authority figures, or he acts like he doesn’t need or care what they think; he is a stand-in for stupid people getting their chance to reject that dependence.
Was Forrest slow, yes. Autistic, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and he won a ping-pong competition. That ain’t stupid. He was a goddamn war hero. You know any stupid war heroes?
Even a person who is a genius can make decisions that would make them appear as if they were “stupid” to the casual observer. Do it often enough, people are going to think they are stupid, regardless of how smart they are.
In fact, I would argue that it doesn’t matter how smart a person is if they continually disregard reason and logic and evidence in favor of emotion and personal bias. There may be many reasons they do this:
Arrogance - like Nelson, thinking they know more than the person providing them critical information or that they can handle any consequences that arise
Prejudice - Feeling so strongly about something they aren’t interested in other points of view
Survivor bias - Feeling that because something worked for them it must be universally applicable
Nobody’s exerting all of their mental capacity on absolutely every possible issue. It can’t be done.
Somebody who has lots of mental capacity, or for that matter someone who has less of it, will be exercising it on the issues that matter to that person, and on the ones among those issues about which the person realizes they need to exercise it. This isn’t mental laziness, any more than exerting one’s physical abilities by splitting wood to heat the house instead of getting in a car and driving to a gym to lift weights (or vice versa) is physical laziness. It’s simply a matter of there being only so much one person can do.
The problem arises when people put particular issues into the category of ‘things I know as much about as I need to’ and simultaneously into the category of ‘things I’m going to opine on, act on, vote on’ when they’re mistaken about putting them in the first category.
We’re all liable to this. Some people are better than others at realizing that even if nearly everyone they know takes something for granted, it might not be true, and they ought to check further into the evidence. Some people have more time than others for doing this.
“Stupid” is a tricky word. It can mean ‘physically incapable of performing many mental tasks most humans can do’, which IMO makes it touchy to use; because it’s pretty clearly pejorative. For cases in which somebody’s deliberately ignoring contrary evidence against something they’re espousing, I prefer “willfully ignorant”, though that’s got the problem of being quite a bit of a mouthful. However, I’m having trouble finding a good equivalent for its most common use, which is along the lines of ‘reasonably intelligent person did something they should have known better than to do’; and which seems to be something we really do need a word for, because humans doing stupid things, in that sense, is very common; including that all of us do something stupid from time to time.
Maybe try to apply it to the action/statement/belief instead of to the person? There’s a distinct difference, IMO, between ‘you did /said / believe something stupid’ and ‘you’re a stupid person’.
I see the word ‘stupid’ being assigned a lot to the victims of scams (either specific victims I talk about, or theoretical victims of a scam I describe). The typical comment is something like “This is so obvious. Anyone who falls for must be stupid and they deserve what they get”.
The subtext being: ‘because I say this singular thing was obvious to me, I am very smart in a general sense [and therefore deserve good things]’
I just don’t find that useful at all. Assigning the label ‘stupid’ in that way achieves nothing useful. It does not offer the assignee any remedy for their ‘stupidity’, and it grants the speaker an often false sense of moral and intellectual superiority (which in the context I mention here - scams - translates to a false sense of invulnerability).
I do think the term ‘stupid’ has utility in identifying actions that are uncharacteristic, and arise from, say, momentary diversion of attention, carelessness, hasty assumption, and so on. People - including ‘smart’ people - sometimes do ‘stupid’ things, and I think it can be useful to say ‘Wow, that thing I just did was stupid. Why did I do that?’ - because ‘why did I do that?’ leads to ‘how can I avoid that?’.
