The Power of Stupidity

Many times daily , we denote persons, events, or results as “Stupid” meaning that they lack wits knowledge, or rational justification, But, what is stupidity, and how it can represent power?. In English we are other names to describe, dolt, idiot, dullard, pillock, poor fish, pudding head, etc, bu only one antonym known (Bad Ass).

What is Stupidity? A shortcut to answering the question must be comparing stupidity to knowledge, although knowledge is not and exhaustive antonym to stupidity. Besides Knowledge, too, is defined in fuzzy teman at leasts in philosophy. It is referred to as a justified true belief. What its belief varies, depending on the circumstances. It might be a belief justified by observation, formal proofs, some preconceived ideas, dogmas, or whatever else. The justification seems to be the factor that makes the belief true, but justification , truth and belief are insufficient for establishing knowledge. It is therefore, important to ask what. Knowledge. If we don’t understand what it is, can we fully understand ourselves? And can we understand what stupidity is ? Questions like this king go all of way back to Plato.

In brief knowledge is what we know. It is stored in our brain, which can be thought of as our private encyclopedia. This representation helps us to fond the locations of chunks of knowledge. It also stores our beliefs and expectations, li led together into a vast networks of ideas, memories, reductions, and the like. The brain updates this map continually using and signals delivered by our senses. But, we do not base our decisions on the real world; we take them from our imaginary encyclopedia.

The brain storms interconnected pieces of knowledge (as well as data information). But in this respect the brain differ from Computers or smartphones. These are not mas+n-made brains. They do not store facts and information and manipulate them as zeros and ones, n?but have not idea about what they doing with the data or what information is good for. They do not ¨Understand ¨ the underlying processes, and cannot male any independent decision unless the man- made software leads them to make specific process decisions.

The crucial aspect here is that we are expecting independent decisios¨The computers and smartphones cannot make them; Humans can. What matters is the quality of these decisions: are they optimal and compatible with human aspirations, the laws of nature, the laws of human society, etc.? If yes, they are wise decisions, if not they are ¨Stupid¨ . This división, as long last , bring us into the realm of stupidity as exclusively human property.

What is surprising is the small amount of study dedicated to such an important subject, and in particular to the lawmakers and Politicians that govern us, which most probably all need to pass an IQ and EQ test prior to take office in any country worldwide.

The incompetent persons do not perform up to speed, They do not recognize their lack of competence. Moreover they do not even acknowledge the competence of other people.

Quantitative studies of stupidity are interesting although it might be more appropriate to talk about categorizing the tests subject intellectual performance into quartile rather than assessing their stupidity. Since the test subjects in many occasions are university students they should hardly be stupid i.e. intellectually impaired in the sense some members of the general public or Politicians might be.

Is that all? In this talk so far stupidity has been mostly exposed in negative terms as a human characteristic by absence of cognitive values. Few natural phenomena however, are only black and white. Usually they appear d shades of grey. Can it apply to stupidity, too? And can stupidity have a bright side of it? One of the most intellectually most intensive parameters in dealing with stupidity is intellectual curiosity. It incited man to investigate where the boundaries of what we perceive are. The people we denote as ¨Stupid ¨Lack, in my opinion that spark of life, the capability to use curiosity to obtain information and convert this information into knowledge. The stupid person is not curious, given the facts either orally virtually or written and believes in what told, it varies very little of the boundaries. , he perceives fragments of information as wholes and their constituent part as close entities of which there is nothing to now. That explains why the less rational people have a feeling of accomplishment even when obtaining ing mediocre results and why they think their performance is outstanding.

Noboy has expressed this more clearly than one of the greatest thinkers of the previous century.

¨The trouble with the World is that stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt¨