I am slowly discarding my differentiations between stupid and evil, there’s a different, mysterious third thing that combines both but exists on its own. And whatever this thing is, it’s raging through our population like fire through dry brush.
I am slowly discarding my differentiations between stupid and evil, there’s a different, mysterious third thing that combines both but exists on its own.
Willful Ignorance. Choosing to remain stupid despite access to information.
Yah it’s something like that, the WWE/kayfabe thing but spreading through reality broadly, where one chooses to believe something they know isn’t true, and thus it becomes true to them. Abandoning of accountability for one’s own beliefs and embracing whatever corresponds to whatever feels most validating or satisfying. I lost a family member to this in the form of conspiracism and delusion, instead of getting help for voices and visions, they found a community to support them and started making money from people seeking meaning and truth (the truth they want to hear that is) and as a result just tripled down on every crazy idea and was eventually arrested for taking a weapon to a school and was eventually released and went right back to their supportive community online.
I think the AI/atomized internet is going to either destroy us all, or it will force some people to actually reconcile their weaknesses as a cognitive being and how limited and vulnerable our minds really are in order to create safeguards against the most devious mental traps imaginable.
HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex “real world” and instead established a simpler “fake world” for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.
Some links you may find interesting. It took me a few sittings to finish it because there’s so much information to process but I highly recommend watching that documentary.
For real, I thought I knew this, I thought I was aware of the problem, then when covid hit I had an actual mental breakdown realizing just how bad it actually is, how the number of people who have cognitive thoughts is actually a slim, slim margin of the population and how “stuck” we are as a species. Most people with a few brain cells have no idea how bad it really is, and the rest are too stupid to care.
What’s worse is we’ve taken ourselves out of selective processes for improvement. We will never, ever get smarter or fix this because it offers our species no advantages to do so.
We will never have the stars. I mourned that fact. Not in my lifetime, not a thousand years after me. If anyone leaves our speck in space, it won’t be us, it will be some descendant species that we created or changed into over time.
OOOOF. This is a gooder. Cuz like, technically being terrible at math is an independent characteristic, meaning that I can’t categorize you as stupid, thus adhering to the 4th law.
I feel like it’s worth noting that anyone, including you, can be a stupid person, and acknowledging that fact does not exempt you from potentially being a stupid person
Just think it could stand to be more explicit. Some people, being stupid, wouldn’t be able to figure out that they may themselves be stupid based only on those laws
At some point I’m not going to care if the punch you’re swinging at me is from ignorance or not. I’m still getting hit and I’d be stupid not to defend myself.
no. just belief. people believe in all sort of arbitrary nonsense.
i dated a woman who thought eating breakfast was only for children, for example. she basically told me i was a man-child for wanting to eat food before noon. you could not argue with her and she could not accept that people eat breakfast. she thought eating breakfast as a man made me weak and pathetic and she told me i had to stop eating breakfast if i wanted to keep seeing her.
no idea why she believed this, but to her you can’t be ‘adult’ if you eat food before noon. probably how she was raised and she never questioned it her entire life. she was 37.
I’ve also had people tell me that I organize ‘wrong’. and a million other arbitrary things they were adamant were the ‘only way’ you could do something or eat something or whatever. the most common one is that I’m must be gay because I have a cat. a ‘real straight man’ can’t own a cat.
So then they fall under the “stupid” category if they actually believe and live their lives according to unprovable mythology and “evil” if they don’t actually believe and just use the religion as an excuse to oppress others.
even if that person is a woman who thinks it’s natural/normal to be subservient to a dominate man, and calls herself a feminist/progressive/liberal/independent woman?
If you think one gender needs to be subservient to another you’re either an evil person, a stupid person, or both.
Republican?
They’re both evil and stupid.
I am slowly discarding my differentiations between stupid and evil, there’s a different, mysterious third thing that combines both but exists on its own. And whatever this thing is, it’s raging through our population like fire through dry brush.
Willful Ignorance. Choosing to remain stupid despite access to information.
Yah it’s something like that, the WWE/kayfabe thing but spreading through reality broadly, where one chooses to believe something they know isn’t true, and thus it becomes true to them. Abandoning of accountability for one’s own beliefs and embracing whatever corresponds to whatever feels most validating or satisfying. I lost a family member to this in the form of conspiracism and delusion, instead of getting help for voices and visions, they found a community to support them and started making money from people seeking meaning and truth (the truth they want to hear that is) and as a result just tripled down on every crazy idea and was eventually arrested for taking a weapon to a school and was eventually released and went right back to their supportive community online.
I think the AI/atomized internet is going to either destroy us all, or it will force some people to actually reconcile their weaknesses as a cognitive being and how limited and vulnerable our minds really are in order to create safeguards against the most devious mental traps imaginable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
https://youtube.com/shorts/gs1-ebayUIs
Some links you may find interesting. It took me a few sittings to finish it because there’s so much information to process but I highly recommend watching that documentary.
I’ve heard some of this before but I’ll dive in deeper and make myself even more depressed for the sake of understanding.
Got me remembering Badiou’s Ethics and how part of evil involves “fidelity to the lie” and actively denying the shared truth of reality.
https://bonpote.com/en/the-5-basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/
Law 1: Everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation
Law 2: The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or group of people when he or she does not benefit and may even suffer losses.
Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid individuals.
Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
I am saving this, it’s very well said.
For real, I thought I knew this, I thought I was aware of the problem, then when covid hit I had an actual mental breakdown realizing just how bad it actually is, how the number of people who have cognitive thoughts is actually a slim, slim margin of the population and how “stuck” we are as a species. Most people with a few brain cells have no idea how bad it really is, and the rest are too stupid to care.
What’s worse is we’ve taken ourselves out of selective processes for improvement. We will never, ever get smarter or fix this because it offers our species no advantages to do so.
We will never have the stars. I mourned that fact. Not in my lifetime, not a thousand years after me. If anyone leaves our speck in space, it won’t be us, it will be some descendant species that we created or changed into over time.
What if I estimate the number of stupid people in circulation to 10 trillion?
OOOOF. This is a gooder. Cuz like, technically being terrible at math is an independent characteristic, meaning that I can’t categorize you as stupid, thus adhering to the 4th law.
Congratulations. You solved stupidity.
Then you really know your people.
TIL of the godfather of the quadrant meme, is that the name?
Nolan Chart.
Not to be confused with Gartner Chart.
I feel like it’s worth noting that anyone, including you, can be a stupid person, and acknowledging that fact does not exempt you from potentially being a stupid person
Yes that’s what rule 2 is for.
Just think it could stand to be more explicit. Some people, being stupid, wouldn’t be able to figure out that they may themselves be stupid based only on those laws
It’s a combination of both. Stupid people stuck in echo chambers being brainwashed and manipulate by the evil people.
At some point I’m not going to care if the punch you’re swinging at me is from ignorance or not. I’m still getting hit and I’d be stupid not to defend myself.
it’s called having a belief.
Did you mean faith? People believe lots of stuff for good reasons.
no. just belief. people believe in all sort of arbitrary nonsense.
i dated a woman who thought eating breakfast was only for children, for example. she basically told me i was a man-child for wanting to eat food before noon. you could not argue with her and she could not accept that people eat breakfast. she thought eating breakfast as a man made me weak and pathetic and she told me i had to stop eating breakfast if i wanted to keep seeing her.
no idea why she believed this, but to her you can’t be ‘adult’ if you eat food before noon. probably how she was raised and she never questioned it her entire life. she was 37.
I’ve also had people tell me that I organize ‘wrong’. and a million other arbitrary things they were adamant were the ‘only way’ you could do something or eat something or whatever. the most common one is that I’m must be gay because I have a cat. a ‘real straight man’ can’t own a cat.
Do you believe this to be true?
believe what? that i’m gay because I have a cat?
No. But lots of other people believe that.
No, that people believe in all sorts of arbitrary nonsense.
I believe it the same way I believe I need oxygen to breathe.
Most of those people tend to believe such things because of their religion… Which they think is good, wise or both.
So then they fall under the “stupid” category if they actually believe and live their lives according to unprovable mythology and “evil” if they don’t actually believe and just use the religion as an excuse to oppress others.
even if that person is a woman who thinks it’s natural/normal to be subservient to a dominate man, and calls herself a feminist/progressive/liberal/independent woman?
that opinion involves other women. they can make what ever choices about themselves but the belief that others are to be subservient is evil.
so it’s evil only if she preaches it as a lifestyle?
and the latent belief that others should be subservient.
That woman thinks wrong and should think the way that I, a man, say she should.