Best Self-Improvement Tips: How to Deal with "Stupid"
How to keep it real without judging others
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A 4 - Minute Read
Q. Lewis, I lead a good life. The one thing that always seems to get in the way is stupid people. I know it’s not right to call people stupid, but I can’t help it. They are stupid! Do you have advice in dealing with this problem? (Answer below…)
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A. The average person without critical thinking skills, and lacking real common sense is one of the most dangerous people you will ever meet. Dangerous both to themselves and to everyone else.
Why? Because they usually…
· are not mindful,
· lack a sense of purpose,
· care mostly about themselves, focusing on wants rather than needs,
· are seldom collaborative in any productive way,
· require short-term gratification,
· need lot’s of attention and ego-stroking,
· have a poor, or overly obsessive attention to important details
· are underdeveloped in most of the multiple intelligences.
Many of these qualities can be learned, so they really aren’t stupid, they haven’t been trained properly.
A skilled game theory strategist is most likely the most knowledgable and wisest person you are likely to ever meet. They also tend to be rich in Multiple Intelligences.
Multiple Intelligences broadens the traditional notion of intelligence. Howard Gardner a developmental psychologist introduced eight different types of intelligences consisting of: Linguistic, Logical/Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and Naturalist.
When you bring the idea of “stupid” into this you soon realize that person might have a genius I.Q. or be a musical genius and still be stupid in the other seven intelligences.
I have translated this idea of “stupid” to the more specific designation of incompetent, clueless, and dysfunctional (ICD).
Let’s explore in greater depth the most common types of ICD game theory strategists. This exploration is based on an article published on Quartz.com called “The Five Universal Laws of Human Stupidity” by Corinne Purtill
Purtill’s article is based a 1976 essay by Carlo M Cipolla, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley. In his essay Cipolla outlined the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.
This brings to mind a comment attributed to the philosopher comedian George Carlin who is said to have stated “50 percent of the world is stupid, and the remaining 50 percent, is even dumber than the first 50 percent.”
Cipolla, explained that what he called “stupid people”, share several identifying traits and patterns of behavior: they are…
· abundant,
· irrational,
· they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves,
In the professors vie the behavior of stupid people lower’s society’s total well-being. He also believed that there are no defenses against stupidity. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren.
This point of view is both humorous, enticing, and makes total sense, especially if you are a skilled strategist (especially one well-versed in the multiple Nobel-Prize winning concept of game theory)
I have taken Cipolla’s five basic laws of human stupidity, and often reframe them as the ICD patterns we need to be aware of in individuals who consistently make poor decisions, especially decisions that might affect us.
Law 1: You must understand (and you may need to learn it the hard way) that most of the people in the world are intentionally ignorant, lack common sense, are driven by their emotional baggage, are immature, hunger for instant gratification, and might sell their souls for a few shiny trinkets and mirrors. The comedian and philosopher George Carlin once said “50% of the world is stupid and the other 50% is dumber than the first 50%”. This problem is compounded by biased assumptions that certain people are intelligent based on superficial factors like their income, education level, social connections job, that we stupidly believe protects them from their stupidity.
Law 2: The probability that a certain person will be intellectually, morally, or ethically ICD is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
Patterns of ICD is a variable that remains constant across all populations. Every category one can imagine—gender, race, nationality, education level, income—possesses a fixed percentage of stupid people. There are stupid college professors. There are stupid people at Davos and at the UN General Assembly and among Nobel Prize Winners. Give me 100 Nobel Prize winners and in a day or so I can tell you which of the bunch is the most ICD. There are stupid people in every nation on earth. How numerous are the stupid amongst us? It’s impossible to say. And any guess would almost certainly violate the first rule of stupid, anyway.
Law 3. An incompetent, clueless, and dysfunctional person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. This level of incompetence, cluelessnesss, and dysfunctionality borders on mental illness. My mentor, a psychologist often said “incompetent, clueless, dysfunctional and mentally ill people aren’t necessarily unhappy. They just make everyone around them unhappy!
The individual who insists on posting fake news articles to Facebook, gets blocked and doesn’t understand why? This person is incompetent, clueless, and dysfunctional.
The customer service representative who has been poorly trained and doesn’t know it and continues to fight with a digital reality of badly designed algorithms while trapping you in the middle and never actually solving the problem you called about. This person is incompetent, clueless, and dysfunctional.
In all this “stupid” behavior, we need to distinguish between what are called genotypes and phenotypes.
A genotype: The genetic makeup of an organism; in other words, it describes an organism's complete set of genes.
A phenotype: The set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment.
This concept of incompetence, cluelessness, and dysfunctionality (stupidity) presents three other phenotypes
The intelligent person (speaking of the multiple intelligences here), whose actions benefit both themselves and others.
The cheat who benefits themselves at the expense of others.
The helpless person, whose actions enrich others at his or her own expense.
The Takeaway
We can all do better. None of us is perfect so it is fair to say that even the most competent, wise, and functional will at times be flawed and inconsistent. Be compassionate and if people don’t want to improve themselves just keep on moving.
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I wrote an article on game theory and logical thinking for my students. See below
Here is a short video interview with Lewis Harrison the author of this article about the basics of applied game theory. The interviewer is Jim Selman, one of the most influential American Leadership Gurus of the last half-century.
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Author: Lewis is a writer, teacher, and master results-oriented life coach. He is the author of over twenty books, numerous self-improvement, and personal development courses, and is the former host of a talk show on NPR Affiliated WIOX91.3 FM. He can be contacted at LewisCoaches@gmail.com
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