{"id":1814,"date":"2019-07-01T02:28:10","date_gmt":"2019-07-01T09:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/random-thoughts-on-stupidity\/"},"modified":"2019-07-04T22:32:47","modified_gmt":"2019-07-05T05:32:47","slug":"random-thoughts-on-stupidity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/random-thoughts-on-stupidity\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Thoughts on Stupidity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clouds of Stupidity – A Short Poem<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ignorance in abundance<\/p>\n

My mind struggles with ambiguity<\/p>\n

An occasional bolt encompasses a few disparate ideas<\/p>\n

Just as suddenly, the clouds of stupidity reobscures the truth.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

Hanlon’s Razor…<\/strong><\/p>\n

“states that we should not attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity. \u201c<\/p>\n

[https:\/\/fs.blog\/mental-models\/<\/a>]<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

On Stupidity – A Short Story<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am stupid\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n

Despite the emphasis of the statement, I knew he was just trying it on for size.<\/p>\n

As we nursed our lime and tonic waters, I contemplated the merits of the statement just the same.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Grammatically, the utterance was sound. He rarely used contractions in his speech or his writing. He believed that saying two words in one syllable such as \u201cI\u2019m\u201d signaled ambiguity if not indolence. When someone, say a student in his writing class, said \u201cI\u2019m going to finish the paper tomorrow\u201d, what he heard was \u201cI might try to finish the paper tomorrow…unless you tell me I have until the end of the week\u201d. Whereas the statement \u201cI am going to finish the paper tomorrow\u201d was declarative. It was spoken to oneself as much as to the listener. In this context, \u201cam\u201d is an action verb that must be spelled out independently, not hidden behind the aprons of the subject.<\/p>\n

His academic accomplishments, on both sides of the lecturn, were profound and his social and family life could only be described as fulfilling. So, taken literally, his statement implied a radically uncommon definition of \u201cstupid\u201d.<\/p>\n

This led me to my own definition of \u201cstupid\u201d. Surely there must be multiple meanings of the word not to mention various interpretations in other languages and cultures. I realized that, though I had used the word, mostly in fits of despair at some untenable situation, I didn\u2019t really have a clinical definition for \u201cstupid\u201d. I imagined that it was related to a condition of coginitive inertia rather than an actual deficiency of knowledge. Unlike \u201cimbecile\u201d or other forms of insanity, \u201cstupid\u201d must be something that can be overcome under the influence of appropriate incentives. This form of \u201cstupid\u201d did not fit the evidence at hand.<\/p>\n

Another, broader meaning of \u201cstupid\u201d involves willful delusion. That is, intentionally believing and acting on a low probablility hypothesis. This is a question of judgement or value and is sometimes upgraded from \u201cstupid\u201d to \u201cbrilliant\u201d or, more often, \u201cjust lucky\u201d.<\/p>\n

Without the benefit of explanatory context, it was difficult to understand exactly what definition of \u201cstupid\u201d he was using at the moment so I just let the statement hang there and continued sipping my tonic and lime.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clouds of Stupidity – A Short Poem Ignorance in abundance My mind struggles with ambiguity An occasional bolt encompasses a few disparate ideas Just as suddenly, the clouds of stupidity reobscures the truth. ———- Hanlon’s Razor…...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29,8,39,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-human-behaviors","category-about-me","category-fiction","category-philosphy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p32pSF-tg","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1814"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1819,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1814\/revisions\/1819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjkpryde.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}