Comments on: Stupidity versus Malice

By: tanasinn

tanasinn — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:43:52 +0000

“Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.”
–Aldous Huxley

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:59:02 +0000

I never heard of the Honda point incident earlier. Interesting!

By: otakucode

otakucode — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:24:27 +0000

Stupidity is no longer a concept understood by society. Stupidity is acknowledged as the universal condition. It is intellectual acuity that is insulted, disrespected, and avoided. All media cooperates to transmit the message that stupidity is the master of the human race, and that all rational, learned thinking is trickery and charlatanism. And malice? Since everyone is expected to be stupid, good intentions have been declared equivalent to good results. Since a persons motivation can never be known with certainty except, occasionally, by the person who committed the action, good intentions can always be claimed. No person acting out of ignorance and flawed thinking would ever be lambasted by society, but praised as a hero. Mother Teresa is a great example. She fought to keep women in poverty oppressed and treated like cattle. She fought to extend and expand poverty and the suffering of millions. However, because she was stupid enough to see “value” in suffering (an idea which flies in the face of every person alive who wishes to remain so) and she claimed she had good intentions, whether she secretly harbored malice is not even questioned.
If you’ve read this entire comment, with its big words and dense concept to sentence ratio, you are likely an enemy of society. A thinker. Someone interested in making sure that the things you believe and think are actually right and real. I’ve got nothing but sympathy for you. Try to keep your head down, and don’t let them know that you read and think. You’ll get nothing but grief for it.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:45:35 +0000

Don’t forget the corollary: Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:23:32 +0000

Thats true. This is often neglected.

By: bsaunder

bsaunder — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:16:09 +0000

The examples given seem more like inattentiveness than stupidity. Which makes sense. Attention to every detail requires effort (a lot of effort). Sometimes one person may not have all of the resources required to pay enough attention to every detail. The ones you pay attention to (e.g. aircraft maintenance) account for fewer problems.
Throughout my programming career, I’ve noticed a strong correlation of bugs with code that was given less attention (it was deemed to be an easier problem to solve, or compartmentalized and solved later).
I don’t think it’s fair to claim people were stupid just because a detail was overlooked. Perhaps they could have allocated their attention differently, but without knowing all of the trade offs it’s hard to say they made a bad choice.
I think that people have a finite amount of “attention” that they can devote to things during a day. Furthermore spending attention on a task seems to consume energy. It’s reasonable to think that occasionally some items get less attention than they should.

By: Vivek

Vivek — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:58:35 +0000

Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” has a chapter dedicated to how airplane crashes can be attributed to the social dynamics of an airplane crew.
After reading that I dont believe crew errors can be categorised under the banner of “stupidity”. Its more a problem of communication between crew members.

By: Schmoo

Schmoo — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:53:36 +0000

An aircraft manufacturer’s study found that aircraft weren’t to blame in the majority of accidents? While it may well be perfectly accurate, I’m taking that with a pinch of salt.

By: Somebody

Somebody — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:40:28 +0000

I have a quote “Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.” Even in an utopian world without malice, we still need to have regulations and laws. This is just to protect people from their own stupidity. Thinking about all the traffic laws in place today, no drunk driving, wear your seat belts, etc. Why on earth can’t we all do these little things?

By: ma.gnolia

ma.gnolia — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:38:23 +0000

A recent cloud based incident was the data loss of the social bookmarking website Ma.gnolia.com. They lost their entire user database. Their MySQL database had half a terabyte of data. It turned out that Ma.gnolia was pretty much a one-man operation, running on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis. It turned out they did not have a single database dump and had to use google cache, etc to restore data. A sad story but this was clearly not caused by malice.