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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (403012)	3/16/2019 11:30:22 PM
From: bentway	2 Recommendations Recommended By Arran Yuan Sun Tzu Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542886

His sad conclusion: Declining societies have the same percentage of stupid people as successful ones. But they also have high percentages of helpless people and, Cipolla writes, “an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity.” “Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the [stupid] fraction and makes decline a certainty,” Cipolla concludes. “And the country goes to Hell.”

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (403012)

3/17/2019 12:08:48 AM

From: koan

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 542886

What is wrong with that statement s that most stupidity is the product of an inadequate education, nothing biological.

The fact that makes this true is that as James Flynn said (see TED talk on youtube) we gained 60 IQ points between 1900 and today because of mass education as we went from concrete thinkers to abstract thinkers.

Without education peoples perception of reality is very narrow and dogmatically specific.

And with a broad deep education one can see the existential nature of reality.

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Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

Cipolla posits stupidity 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. 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 law, anyway.

qz.com