November 5, 2025
Smart takes, dumb fights
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1987) [pdf]
1987 “Stupidity Laws” resurface and the comments are brawling over nature vs nurture
TLDR: A 1987 essay claims stupidity is universal and innate, sparking a noisy debate over whether it’s nature or a fixable behavior. Commenters split between grim realism and hopeful reform, with jokes and despair setting the tone—important because it shapes how we judge, teach, and plan for human behavior.
Carlo M. Cipolla’s vintage essay, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, just crashed the internet’s living room—and the comments are pure theater. The piece boldly claims stupidity is everywhere and baked in by nature, not learned. Cue the crowd: one camp is quoting the Third Law like scripture—“the stupid will harass you for no reason”—and nodding grimly, while others insist stupidity is more about choices than chromosomes.
User titzer amps the alarm, calling stupid behavior a danger to everyone, while pstuart drops a mic-splitting distinction: intelligence is the ability, stupidity is refusing to use it. Then anonu claps back with hope, saying “stupid can be de-stupefied through learning.” Meanwhile, java-man deadpans, “(the reader cries in despair),” turning the thread into a meme factory of gallows humor. The hottest flame war? Whether Cipolla’s claim that stupidity is a fixed trait is dark truth or fatalistic nonsense. Fans say the essay just names what we see daily; critics call it defeatist and unhelpful. The mood swings from bleak realism to motivational pep talk, with a side of “blood-type for dumbness” jokes. Verdict: timeless essay, timeless chaos—and the comments won’t stop coming.
Key Points
- •The First Basic Law states that everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals.
- •Cipolla avoids assigning a numeric value to the fraction of stupidity, denoting it by the symbol å due to systematic underestimation.
- •The Second Basic Law states that the probability a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic.
- •Cipolla argues stupidity is uniformly distributed across all groups and is determined by nature rather than nurture.
- •He claims education does not affect the probability of stupidity, citing observations from multiple universities worldwide.