Comments by "Antony Wooster" (@antonywooster6783) on "Cipolla’s 5 Laws of Human Stupidity" video.

@jamespardue3055 I remember my late, dearly beloved wife saying to a man she had been arguing with: "The trouble with you is that you look intelligent."
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@watchchimp3102 Yes. Intelligence and common sense do not always go together! I think the reason is that people tend to think in compartments and very often fail to make obvious connections between them, so that they fail to see the application of their knowledge in one compartment to their situation in another field.
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@jebeda Yes. It is very hard to know just how ignorant you are, or even that you are ignorant. Ignorance is, however, unlike stupidity, largely a voluntary misfortune.
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I think that there is a spectrum of intelligence in the newly-born. A child can become more capable of thinking correctly or less, depending on how it is educated by the people in its environment. Undoubtedly there are some extremely stupid and extremely intelligent people and this seems to be inborn rather than the result of their education or lack thereof. I myself, have met a quite extraordinarily cunning man with an uncanny ability to know what lies he could get away with on a particular mark, or in a particular situation, or to turn the situation to his own advantage, who had only an elementary school education, and I have seen also the quite self-destructive stupidity of a famously "wise" professor of Physics at a university College in London, UK. People who stop thinking and just obey orders for a long time, as happens to some low-ranking soldiers, seem to suffer atrophy of the thinking abilities, to a quite alarming degree. The Dunning-Kreuger syndrome is also relevant to this discussion.
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@watchchimp3102 By the measure of intelligence, I take it you mean IQ tests. I think this would be more useful if someone could define what "intelligence" is.
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@jebeda No. You are right about that. Like all organisms, human being are "economical". That is to say they do not spend energy (as a general rule) unnecessarily, if they can help it. The human brain takes about 25% of the human's energy, so thinking (and changing your mind is thinking) takes a lot of energy. Changing your mind about one thing may mean that you have to change your mind about a lot of other things so it probably takes a lot of energy. That, I think is why we are so reluctant to do it.
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@nickiemcnichols5397 Ignorance is popular because people are often very lazy, particularly about thinking and searching. In the modern world it is possible to get away with being lazy, albeit at a fairly low level unless you inherit wealth. Some months ago, I read a very interesting article (or saw a very interesting video, I forget which) about why the Chinese are so tough and so smart. The idea of this piece was that the ancient Chinese system was ruthlessly meritocratic, unlike most societies you did not automatically inherit your father's position in society. E.g. if your father was a duke you did not inherit his title you had a lesser title and unless you earned merit, you son would inhert a still less important title and so on. Jobs in the civil service, (the main route to wealth) could be gained only by passing exams. So, if an obviously bright child was born he would be schooled to pass the exams. This was expensive, so in a poor family, the extended family would all rally round to pay for the child's education, because having a relative working in the civil service benefitted the whole family. The law meanwhile, was very hard on anyone who tried to prevent anyone from sitting for the entrance exam. At the same time getting married was also expensive and poor men had a poor chance of getting married. So to pass on his genes, a man who could not pass the exams, had to work very hard to be able to afford a wife. The stupid and the lazy often did not manage to do that. So, for several thousand years, you had a ruthless weeding out of the stupid and lazy and a promotion of the bright. It shows!
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