What Makes Humans Stupid

It takes intelligence to get things spectacularly wrong. An essay on our undoing.

I have never heard a rock described as stupid. And the same would be true of a river, a hurricane, and even a thermostat. Stupidity seems to be a sophisticated form of behavior despite its ignominious associations.

Human beings can land autonomous rovers on Mars, sequence a genome in hours, and engineer nanometer circuits. And yet conspiracy theories, anti-scientific political movements, and institutional hatred proliferate on a scale that might embarrass the meager success record of a medieval alchemist.

One might say that stupidity implies a capacity for getting things right before it can get them spectacularly wrong. Stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence but its evil twin, the dissimulating Cain to a cerebral Abel. And perhaps surprisingly, the degree of stupidity available to any system scales directly with the intelligence that system possesses—more intelligence begets greater feats of stupidity. It would be a stretch to call a bacterium stupid, and we know that cats and dogs achieve modest feats of it. But human beings, equipped with language, abstraction, technology, institutions, and ideology, can be stupid on a truly civilizational scale. This is not a joke; it is close to a law of nature. A law that might very well be our undoing.

We have thousands of research programs on intelligence, and not all of them are intelligent, including studies of IQ, AI, animal cognition, and collective problem-solving. These take place in celebrated departments and are published in prestigious journals devoted to understanding how minds make hard problems easy. These days we cannot take a step without crashing into another article on intelligence and AI. Researchers from all fields without any knowledge of intelligence research and its history have become self-declared “thought leaders” in natural and artificial intelligence.

Yet stupidity gets almost no attention at all. It is treated as a mere absence, as if once we subtract intelligence what remains is stupidity. It is likened to a form of psychological darkness experienced after you have switched off the lights of deliberation. But this is a mistaken belief. Darkness does not do anything pernicious in the way that stupidity does. Stupidity takes an easy problem and, with great effort and misdirected ingenuity, makes it hard. That effort is the key to grasping stupidity, in that you need sophisticated machinery to be genuinely, consequentially stupid.

Here is how I like to think about this from a scientific perspective. If intelligence means making a problem of difficulty X easier, by deploying tools, using mathematics, and adopting strategies that reduce its cost, then stupidity means making a problem of difficulty X harder. And contrary to expectations, the most reliable way to make an easy problem hard is to bring to bear an impressive apparatus of complicated theories, elaborate beliefs, and sophisticated algorithms that sound tremendously convincing but perform worse than doing nothing. A person who does not know the answer to a question is merely ignorant. A person who constructs an ingenious hundred-page argument for the wrong answer is stupid. As great writers, artists, and philosophers throughout time have understood, such constructions require intelligence of a high order.

Consider this analogy. When a meteor collides with the Earth, there is no sense in which it is doing anything wrong. It is obeying classical mechanics, and that is all there is to say about it. But when a bird flies into a glass window, something different has happened, something we can with justification call an error.

Life, uniquely among physical systems, has the capacity to be wrong. Stupidity is a very special species of failure and not all errors qualify. People err from ignorance (insufficient data), from noise (a signal is distorted), or from the honest misapplication of a rule to a novel situation and changing context. These are the misfortunes of our lives about which we should be forgiving. Stupidity begins where error is elaborated, defended, refined, institutionalized, and made the foundation for further action. Stupidity makes everything progressively worse. And it is this elaboration of erroneous belief and behavior that demands, paradoxically, the prior existence of intelligence.

Some of the most impressive feats of stupidity consist in applying a perfectly good theory to the wrong problem. Some would argue that quantum mechanics is one of the most “intelligent” inventions of physics, one that provides a framework of extraordinary precision for describing the behavior of subatomic particles, despite its truly counter-intuitive requirements.

But there is a small cottage industry of thinkers who have tried to apply quantum mechanics to human consciousness, decision-making, and psychology to explain why people are indecisive and why they eventually make up their minds. There is nothing wrong with the mathematics and the physics is sound. But the application is peculiar. What was an elegant and parsimonious description of photons and electrons becomes, when imported into psychology, an absurdly over-complicated way of saying that people sometimes change their minds. A phenomenon that a novelist could illuminate in a paragraph has been buried under a formalism designed for a completely different scale of reality. The theory did not become less intelligent, it was asked to solve a problem it was never designed for, and in the process, it made that problem harder to understand, not easier. This flies in the face of the purpose of science, which is, as the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach described it, “the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.”

The early cybernetics movement offers a similar cautionary tale. Norbert Wiener and his colleagues at MIT developed a powerful framework for understanding feedback, control, and communication in machines and organisms. The mathematics was original, the engineering applications impressive, and the cybernetic enterprise even provided the groundwork for the development of complexity science.

Then the management consultant Stafford Beer and others tried to apply cybernetic control theory to the management of entire national economies, most famously in Salvador Allende’s Chile, where Project Cybersyn attempted to run the Chilean economy through a network of telex machines. The idea was to model the economy as a dynamical system with inputs and outputs, and to use real-time feedback to optimize production and distribution.

Unfortunately, an economy is not a servomechanism. The feedback loops in a national economy involve millions of adaptive agents with private information, conflicting goals, and a tendency to evolve their preferences. The seduction of applying cybernetic methods to complex systems is described beautifully by my Santa Fe Institute colleague, the writer Francis Spufford, in his novel Red Plenty: “The world was lifting itself up out of darkness and beginning to shine, and mathematics was how he could help. It was his contribution. It was what he could give, according to his abilities. He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason.”

A simple behavioral intervention, such as adjusting a price, changing a regulation, or God forbid, simply asking people what they need, could often have achieved in an afternoon what the cybernetic apparatus was struggling to model in weeks. The intelligence of the cybernetics as a framework for control of simple systems is unquestionable, but its application to the economy inflated the difficulty of the problem it was meant to solve.

The Austrian novelist and essayist, Robert Musil, in a 1937 lecture, “On Stupidity,” described what may be the most important distinction in the whole literature of stupidity. He separated “honorable stupidity,” which is a simple cognitive limitation, or the inability to grasp a difficult argument, from “intelligent stupidity,” which he considered far more dangerous. This insight is the central concern of my favorite novel of Musil’s, The Man Without Qualities. Intelligent stupidity marshals all the resources of the intellect in the service of an error. It is not the failure to think; it is thinking flamboyantly and systematically in the wrong direction. A student who cannot follow a mathematical proof is not stupid in Musil’s sense. A math professor who builds an elegant theoretical edifice to defend a proposition a child could see is false is intelligently stupid.

Musil was not alone in taking stupidity seriously. Novelists have long understood the intelligence-stupidity relationship with a clarity that most scientists choose to ignore. Perhaps because fiction can show the process by which an intelligence can devour itself, a rather unpalatable spectacle to a rationalist.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels describes the Academy of Lagado, whose researchers deploy a variety of elaborate experimental methodologies. One is extracting sunbeams from cucumbers while another softens marble into pillows. A third colleague breeds naked sheep. Swift’s satire is obviously targeted at a variety of forms of misdirected systematic inquiry. These are forms of intelligence trapped in frameworks so rigid that they produce outcomes that are worse than doing nothing. In the sky city of Laputa, brilliant mathematicians and accomplished musicians apply projective geometry in order to build with no right angles and chefs prepare meals based on geometric figures. These are abstractions of exquisite subtlety and power in mathematics that become helpless when directed at the wrong practical problems.

William Gaddis in his The Recognitions presents a society of forgery, misattribution, and counterfeiting in which enormous ingenuity is expended in the service of inauthenticity. The protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon, produces forged Flemish paintings that require more skill and knowledge than original compositions. His forgeries are technically masterful, art-historically impeccable, and completely fraudulent. Each of his many characters talk past one another in dialogues of escalating misrecognition, deploying considerable verbal intelligence to deepen general confusion.

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow describes a vast bureaucratic and military apparatus of World War II that functions as a machine for converting rational planning into catastrophe. Pynchon’s cartels and rocket engineers are not unintelligent, quite the opposite, and their competence is the V-2 rocket, that threatens to annihilate the war-ravaged cities of the West. Pynchon describes a world in which institutional intelligence becomes a form of collective stupidity.

A number of philosophers have sought to provide a framework for understanding this perverse phenomenon. Erasmus, in 1511, in The Praise of Folly, suggests that folly is the engine of human accomplishment. Without self-delusion and overconfidence, nothing would ever get attempted. The challenge for Erasmus was not whether a civilization produces stupidity, but whether it will produce the kind that can be survived.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison in 1943, suggests that stupidity is not a cognitive defect but an imposed sociological structure. People under the spell of power tend to surrender their capacity for independent judgment and become “stupid” instruments. And Carlo Cipolla, an Italian economic historian, in the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity published in 1976, defined a stupid person as someone who causes losses to others while deriving no gain, or even harm, for themselves. Cipolla was daring enough to propose that the proportion of stupid people is constant across all populations, from professors, plumbers, generals, and janitors. I would suggest, in line with the speculations of Swift and Musil, that it only gets worse with complication.

If stupidity is costly to its practitioners why does natural or perhaps even cultural selection not eliminate it from populations of organisms? One obvious possibility is a change in the environment that renders a previous behavior obsolete.

For millions of years, maintaining a fixed angle to a distant celestial light source, the moon and the stars, proved to be a vital navigational heuristic across the animal world. It is efficient, reliable, and requires minimal neural hardware. Once humans invented artificial illumination, a strategy that had worked for eons became suicidal. A moth spiraling into a candle flame is not failing to navigate, it is using a time-tested rule-of-thumb rendered catastrophically wrong by a change in context.

Intelligence and stupidity turn out to be chronometrical. A brilliant heuristic and a fatal one can be the same heuristic, separated by an unexpected shift in the world. Sea turtles have followed moonlight to the ocean for 100 million years and now they orient toward the artificial illumination of mushrooming beachfront condos. Albatross have evolved to scoop fish from the ocean surface and now unknowingly collect floating plastic and feed it to their chicks.

The fungus Ophiocordyceps infects carpenter ants and coopts their behavioral circuitry. An infected ant climbs to a precise height on a plant stem, clamps its mandibles onto the underside of a leaf, and dies, ideally positioned for the fungus to disperse its spores. The ant’s behavioral program has been hacked. The ant is performing a sophisticated sequence of actions, including climbing, orienting, and gripping in the service of another organism. This is an ant perfectly captured by Bonhoeffer’s idea of competence co-opted by a malicious agent to solve the wrong problem. Perhaps specialization produces local intelligence that when overextended can generate global stupidity. This would be a change in scale and domain that corresponds to the moth’s change of environment.

The physicist Lord Kelvin marshaled all his physics knowledge to prove that heavier than air flying machines are impossible less than a decade before the Wright brothers flew a heavier than air airplane. Nikola Tesla rejected quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity and argued that future human civilization would run on the energy of the Earth through “earth resonance.” And Percival Lowell used his telescopes to map “canals” on the surface of Mars that he claimed were alien irrigation ditches. These are all examples of the overcommitment, and overdevelopment of an idea, far from the territory in which an idea once grew and flourished or from which it was unceremoniously banished.

Artificial intelligence is by design the most powerful cognitive artifact ever created. It is engineered to minimize user effort by performing tasks that humans would otherwise find time consuming or impossible. The problem of course is that the better the tool gets the less the user needs to think for themselves. And in a vicious spiral, the less the user thinks the more dependent they become on their tools. That is until the tool disappears and the whole system collapses.

If intelligence is a necessary precondition for stupidity, and intelligence and stupidity scale together such that it takes real intelligence to be spectacularly stupid, then super-intelligence will be the opening act to an era of super-stupidity.

AI hallucination might be the first evidence of this dynamic. Large language models produce fluent, confident, detailed text that is, with some regularity, factually wrong. And this is not a simple bug but a structural feature of systems that optimize for appeal and plausibility rather than truth. And the danger is not that the AI will be wrong, after all, humans are wrong all the time, but knowing this, humans have invented means to detect and correct errors. We call this the scientific method.

The danger is that an AI will be wrong in ways humans can no longer detect because the very capacities that would catch the error have been outsourced to the machine or exceed the capacities of human minds. We face the prospect of a stupidity so sophisticated that it becomes indistinguishable, to its beneficiaries, from intelligence. This is the parable of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the answer to the ultimate question, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is 42.

I would like to make a modest proposal and suggest that we need a science of stupidity as rigorous as our emerging sciences of intelligence. This will not require billions of dollars of investment. It would involve inquiries into the mechanisms by which intelligent systems produce stupid outcomes. It would include studying the evolutionary dynamics that maintain stupidity despite its selective costs. It would promote the development of design principles that distinguish tools which enhance cognition from tools which replace it. And it would include surveying the institutional conditions under which collective intelligence degrades into collective stupidity.

Stupidity is not what remains when intelligence is subtracted, it is an active mechanism with its own logic, its own dynamics, and a capacity for unbounded growth parasitic on ingenuity. In a world obsessed with ever more powerful cognitive technologies, understanding stupidity is not merely an academic exercise, it might prove to be the most intelligent thing we do.

Related Reading

• Adams, D. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Pan Books, London (1979).
• Bonhoeffer, D. After ten years. In Behtge, E. (Ed.) Letters and Papers from Prison SCM Press, London (1953).
• Cipolla, C.M. The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity Il Mulino, Bologna, Italy (1976).
• Erasmus, D. The Praise of Folly (1511); translated by Miller. C.H. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT (1979).
• Gaddis, W. The Recognitions Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York, NY (1955).
• Musil, R. On stupidity. Lecture delivered in Vienna (1937). In Pike, B. & Luft, D.S. (Eds.) Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1990).
• Musil, R. The Man Without Qualities (1930–1943); translated by Wilkins, S. & Pike, B. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY (1995).
• Pynchon, T. Gravity’s Rainbow Viking Press, New York, NY (1973).
• Spufford, F. Red Plenty Faber and Faber, London (2010).
• Swift, J. Gulliver’s Travels Benjamin Motte, London (1726).

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