Philosophy             There Are Almost No Stupid        20 October 2025
                            People Around Us


   I mean, seriously.  Of course, this sounds like I'm dismissing Carlo
   Cipolla, who argued we systematically underestimate the number of
   stupid people around us, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who observed that
   stupidity is a sociological phenomenon rather than an intellectual
   defect, arising when external power discourages independent thought.
   But actually, I agree with both, and my position complements theirs.
   There are no stupid people, that's right.  There are people who,
   instead of thinking for themselves, that is, computing, turn to
   accumulated societal knowledge as cache and accept it
   unconditionally.

   So yes.  "Stupid" people access caches at various levels: their
   personal cache, the cache of public knowledge, the cache of the arts.
   Why compute everything from scratch when you can borrow an
   established idea from your environment?  For example, if it's a
   romantic relationship, then it must involve unconditional ownership
   of each other.  If it's a state, then it must have taxes and cops.
   If it's life, then it must have meaning.  It's just easier to live
   this way: no need to work out why we consider something good to be
   good, and something bad to be bad.  Any useful knowledge is retrieved
   from the cache in O(1) time.  What more could you want?

   Who's one of us and who's an outsider; whether what we consider to be
   true is actually true and not false; whether what we consider good is
   actually good and not the opposite; whether we're choosing the right
   goals in life, the right priorities, whether we look respectable in
   the eyes of others, whether we're choosing the right candidates in
   elections, whether we meet societal expectations, whether we're
   thinking correctly.  All of this easily fits into the cache and is
   just as simply retrieved from it.  That's why most people rarely
   experience a cache miss and a fall-back from cache to computation.

   In short, people generally aren't stupid.  They're energy-efficient.
   So if you ever want to call someone stupid, call them energy-
   efficient: they probably won't understand they've been insulted, and
   they'll likely take it as a compliment.





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