These are Cipolla’s five fundamental laws of stupidity:
1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4. 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 a costly mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
I must be a reincarnation of this guy, cuz I’m literally working on a micro-book called, “Rationalized Malice: How Faulty Logic Justifies Harm.”
The book won’t be out for a while (I’m in uni and have some high-impact research projects coming up), but it’ll be practical in that 80% of it will be what you can do, as an individual.
Do you have a mailing list? Yours would be a periodic email I’d actually love to see.
No, but I will by April. 👀 Thank you for the idea.
I’ll reply to this post when I set it up. It’s high priority on my to-do list.