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Tag: On Bullshit

  • Book Review: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Carlo M. Cipolla)

    Book Review: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Carlo M. Cipolla)

    (Human) Stupidity

    We all see it daily, maybe even hourly. We encounter it when we’re least expecting it — as well as when we are expecting it. Perhaps it can even happen to us – or from us. Of course, I am talking about human stupidity.

    We encounter it all the time in our daily lives. At work, at home, online (especially online), while driving, while out eating, while out shopping, etc, etc, etc.

    Perhaps its one of those things we just accept and move on, knowing that its going to be involved in our lives and there isn’t much we can really do about it.

    Thankfully Carlo M. Cipolla gave us a codified look at the Laws of Human Stupidity. Philosophy in that same sense as ‘On Bullshit’ by Harry G. Frankfurt and ‘Assholes: A Theory’ by Aaron James. This is a quick dive into the stupidity of human nature.

    Audio Book

    While doing inventory at work today, I opened up Libby (an audio book app that lets you borrow books from libraries to listen to). It was a super quick read, and read extremely well too. Less than an hour for the book to be read all told, and it was read with the dry wit and humor that this piece is attempting to invoke while also being true and smart and intelligent.

    It was narrated by Paul Boehmer.

    The Laws:


    1. Everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals among us.
     2. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
     3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses themselves.
     4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.
     5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

    Book Review – The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

    The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity – written by Carlo M. Cipolla with a forward by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (and narrated by Paul Boehmer)

     

    GoodReads Blurb:

    In the spirit of On Bullshit and Assholes: A Theory, an economist explores the five laws that confirm our worst fears: stupid people can and do rule the world

    Since time immemorial, a powerful dark force has hindered the growth of human welfare and happiness. It is more powerful than the Mafia or the military. It has global catastrophic effects and can be found anywhere from the world’s most powerful boardrooms to your local pub. This is the immensely powerful force of human stupidity.

    Seeing the shambolic state of human affairs, and sensing the dark force at work behind it, Carlo M. Cipolla, the late, noted professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley, created a vitally important economic model that would allow us to detect, know, and neutralize this threat: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.

    If you’ve ever found yourself despairing at the ubiquity of stupidity among even the most ‘intellectual’ of people, then this hilarious, timely, and slightly alarming little book is for you. Arm yourself in the face of baffling political realities, unreasonable colleagues, or the unbridled misery of Christmas day with the in-laws with the first and only economic model for stupidity.

    “Cipolla’s subtle tongue-in-cheek humor made this book an underground classic in Italy. Today, under current worldwide political trends, it reads more like black humor. Keep in mind: reliable statistical data shows that 98% of the people seriously believe that they are far less stupid than the average.” –Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

    The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (GoodReads)

    One of my favorite quotes from the book: “A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.”

    This about sums up stupid people. The laws are pretty irrefutable, and there isn’t much room for negotiation on it. Again, the laws are:

    1. Everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals among us.
     2. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
     3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses themselves.
     4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.
     5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

    The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

    The first is exceptionally true. We all underestimate the number of stupid individuals among us. They are everywhere. Its like shape shifters, alien lizard people, like the Skrulls from Marvel, they are hiding in plan sight. They might even be someone you know – your best friend, your mum, your girlfriend even, who knows? Thats how insidious this “disease” [stupidity] is.

    The book is pretty blunt in its language and phrasing. Theres no real political correctness, but there is no real political [in]correctness either. It just is. For example, rule number two is pretty straight forward – the stupid person is stupid because he’s not stupid; not because of any other defining characteristic. His race, his ethics, his nationality, his location, his place of birth, the way he looks, his gender, the skin color, etc, doesn’t matter. He is stupid — simply because — he is stupid.

    George Carlin pretty much best sums it all up:

    “Consider that the average person is stupid. Now, consider that most people are below average.”

    George Carlin

    I would have to look up the date for Carlin’s quote in question to see if he was inspired by Cipolla or vice versa; but they are basically cribbing off each other on this one.

    Whereas Carlin is looking at things kind of more on an anecdotal, sociological side of things, more for the purposes of just humor with a bit of provocation of thought – Cipolla is doing it on kind of a philosophical, sociological, and academically / scholarly side. The economics and finance background of Cipolla lends him some credibility with the probability, the statistics, and the scholarly worldview. Whereas Carlin is making the statement and moving on with his monologue, Cipolla has science to back himself up and gives it to us.

    Stupidity comes in many forms. And with that – in comes to people of all different levels; people who we would “think” are intelligent. Noble Prize Winners can do some stupid things (example – James Watson, the DNA co-discoverer, claiming that Blacks are inferior to Whites), politicians (…actually, this might not come as much of a shock to many people), leaders of all sorts – Hitler attacking Russia, people who have extreme values and allow them to cloud their normally intelligent judgments, people who express conspiracy theories long after they’ve been proven wrong; and these can be from all forms of walks of life – teachers, mentors, professionals and experts in their fields, etc, etc, etc.

    “Whether the Second Basic Law is liked or not, however, its implications are frightening: the Law implies that whether you move in distinguished circles or you take refuge among the head-hunters of Polynesia, whether you lock yourself into a monastery or decide to spend the rest of your life in the company of beautiful and lascivious women, you always have to face the same percentage of stupid people—which percentage (in accordance with the First Law) will always surpass your expectations.”

    The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

    This book borderlines on the brevity, one might even call it a pamphlet more than an actual rigorous book of academic value. But that might also be its best feature, its saving grace. For if it this was taken too far, to continue too long, it would become more on the bore, more on the tedious side, and lose much of that sharp wit, much of what makes it so poignant. On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt follows that same similar ideology.

    As some might say, this book goes a long way to showcasing the “downfall of Western Society since 1945”. Might be a bit too harsh on society… but then you have to remember – the stupid walk amongst us.

    My GoodReads Rating: ****
    My LibraryThing Rating: ****1/2
    GoodReads Average Rating: 3.88 (as of 11.20.23)

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    More Information

    Carlo M. Cipolla

    Carlo M. Cipolla on August 15th, 1922
    (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

    The following biography comes from Wikipedia:

    Carlo M. Cipolla (15 August 1922 – 5 September 2000) was an Italian economic historian. He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society

    …

    As a young man, Cipolla wanted to teach history and philosophy in an Italian high school, and therefore enrolled at the political science faculty at the University of Pavia. While a student there, thanks to professor Franco Borlandi, a specialist in medieval economic history, he discovered his passion for economic history. He graduated from Pavia in 1944. Subsequently, he studied at the University of Paris and the London School of Economics.

    Cipolla obtained his first teaching post in economic history in Catania at the age of 27. This was to be the first stop in a long academic career in Italy (Venice, Turin, Pavia, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and Fiesole) and abroad. In 1953 Cipolla left for the United States as a Fulbright fellow and in 1957 became a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Two years later he obtained a full professorship.

    Carlo M. Cipolla (Wikipedia)

     

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  • Book Review: On Bullshit (Harry G. Frankfurt)

    On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt

    Don’t Step In It

    Another ‘philosophical treatise’ that is a bit ‘out there’ that I had to have once I saw it. (Similar to the Assholes – A Theory book by Aaron James). Saw it on the philosophy shelf at Barnes and Noble while my daughter was looking for her manga, and saw it was 9.95$ for 67 pages, and passed on it. Found it on AbeBooks for 2.95$ with no Shipping and Handling, and scooped it up. (Woot…. that’s a 7$ discount….)

    Kind of funny how I drew the line there at that, for all of 7$, like looking at the book, I said to my self…. “Nope, 9.95$ is just too much”, but picking it up online for 2.95$ seemed much more reasonable. Maybe it was because my hands were already full of books for me and for books for my daughter, or maybe its because mentally I drew a line at the 67 pages/9.95$ cost and did some kind of mental calculation/algorithm on pages to dollar ratio, I don’t know.

    I have been using AbeBooks.com more and more and more and more. Nearly daily I am coming home to 2 – 4 packages of books (each package being just one book, maybe two). Its an independent online seller that lets independent bookstores sell through them to customers. Similar in a way to eBay but with always fixed prices, no auctioning. It is a wonderful resource that helps out small, independent bookstores rather than always just going to Amazon or Barnes and Noble or other big retailers. I once even got a book that came from MidTown Scholar in Harrisburg. (I often forget to check to see who the seller is when selecting the books.) You can visit AbeBooks here: AbeBooks.Com.

    Little Quirky Philosophy Books

    This falls under philosophy, but at the same time it doesn’t. Its kind of hard to explain it. Like, its the ‘philosophy of bullshit’, if that can be said to be a thing. This was published in 2005, and since then, it has certainly taken on more interest due to the past two election cycles. There’s a bit of a cottage industry of small, stylized essay type books that are somewhat philosophical, like quasi-philosophy, not pseudo-philosophy, but quasi-philosophy. I think this falls into that realm.

    I do think there is some meat to this, and I think it is illuminating, especially in regards to where we find ourselves in 2020 – 2021…. but I don’t think its quite as deep as many think it is, especially those on GoodReads with their reviews. Maybe its due to how much I think he spends just breaking down the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED), and how that makes up for the basis for a lot of the essay, and when the essay itself is only 67 (small book, regular sized font) pages, and he spends 20 or so pages detailing the definition and breaking it down, and discussing it, I find that… …pedantic perhaps would be the term.

    Book Review

    As the last paragraph eludes to, lets get into the actual review of this work. The essay is 67 pages. Its a small size book, with normal size font, and each page is basically one paragraph or a paragraph and a half (he writes in large paragraphs, but that should still give you an idea of the size and scope of the written word in this book). Like I said above, the first roughly twenty pages are devoted to breaking down the etymology and definition of the word, using primarily the OED but also some other sources.

    I understand the idea of breaking down the definition to start off the essay, and it is the right decision and smart thing to do, but I think it becomes belaboring and the point is loss when it takes up nearly one third of your entire essay.

    I do enjoy the work, and it was a quick and easy read (less than a day to read it). But at the end of it, unlike many of the reviewers on GoodReads, I didn’t necessarily feel ‘illuminated’. I feel like its a bit looping in a lot of places and feels more like the Professor, Mr. Frankfurt, is trying to amuse himself, more than he is trying to amuse us – and if we get amused as well, all for the better. Like he realized he was getting to write an essay on bullshit, and was getting paid to do it, and found it ironic and funny in and of itself. As if the entire thing was an inside joke.

    There is some interesting comments and ideas in the book. And there are a few sardonic or funny lines in it as well. But not enough that really screams that this is definitive, or must read, or even illuminating. I think anyone who would buy a book called ‘On Bullshit’ probably has a strong enough grasp of what bullshit is, that its all self redundant in and of itself. All in all I don’t think there’s enough here or to this, and I don’t think it bestows any kind of wisdom on us or makes us know more about bullshit. At the end of the day, we know bullshit isn’t completely the same as lying, we know people do it for a few reasons, and we know its not always (and often isn’t) done maliciously.

    Conclusion

    Is it worth reading? I suppose. I’d say this is a more of a fun, quick, ‘library read’, then I would suggest buying it. It’ll be a quick read, and really won’t be as illuminating as the GoodReads reviews tell you. (Its interesting how that word ‘illuminating’ popped up in several of the reviews.)

    GoodReads Rating: **
    GoodReads Global Average Rating: 3.58 (as of 10.7.21)
    LibraryThing Rating: **.5

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    -B. Kline

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