Stupidity: Encyclopedia II - Stupidity - Stupidity manifested by the educated

Stupidity - Stupidity manifested by the educated

Recently a great deal of attention has been paid to another class of stupidity: stupid actions by those that are highly educated and worldly. It is an important subject as it is increasingly evident that powerful, and generally very intelligent, people sometimes do stupid things. In recent years a number of notions such as groupthink have been developed to explain this. This is a fairly new topic for researchers and there are still few academic works on the subject, though in the 19th Century Oscar Wilde wrote There is no sin except stupidity. [1]

Otherwise intelligent individuals may also become stupid when their rational thought is derailed by strong opinions or rigid beliefs. In this case the victim falls into confirmation bias and begins selecting data: becoming intentionally blind and deaf to contrary evidence, while at the same time collecting evidence which supports the beliefs. Rather than being based on low intelligence or missing knowledge, this is the stupidity of closed-mindedness and willful ignorance. Note that modern science specifically evolved to combat this form of stupidity. During scientific thought we constantly criticise our own beliefs and assumptions (attempt to disprove hypotheses), while also using humility and extreme self-honesty to reduce our ego-based biases.

The Encyclopedia of Stupidity by Matthijs van Boxsel is based on the author's contention that "stupidity is in fact the foundation of our civilization" and his idea that no one is intelligent enough to realise how stupid they are. This is not as stupid as it sounds if one includes in the definition of stupidity "unwitting self-destruction, the ability to act against one's best wishes". A saying attributed to Albert Einstein is "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." Therefore stupidity is not solely the opposite of intelligence but may also be considered a very human kind of flawed or mistaken intelligence, the darkness that makes the light of true intelligence visible.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Stupidity manifested by the educated", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki