Incentivized Stupidity
Stupidity comes in different flavors.
Without comment, my (dearly beloved) late father put a sign up in my childhood bedroom that (probably wrongly) quoted an imploring Abraham Lincoln: “Better to remain silent and thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt.”
This week’s TBL focuses on stupidity, including sorts that Mr. Lincoln (or whoever it was) didn’t have in mind. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the creator of Sherlock Holmes, literature’s leading empiricist. Notwithstanding that seeming commitment to pure reason, he also believed he could communicate with the dead via seance. And in fairies. This TBL examines why that might have been so.
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Incentivized Stupidity
“Life is the sum of all your choices,” Albert Camus (allegedly) informed us. Unfortunately, our decision-making is often lousy, with too many outcomes weaned on bourbon and poor choices.
The Slate advice columnist, Dear Prudence, received the following sad, poignant, and probably futile letter.
“I keep making terrible decisions and can’t seem to stop.
“Last year I left my home, my family, my friends, a 20-year secure (if uninspired) career, to move 2,000 miles away to be with my first love. I’m 50 and I was his first love as well. He’s married and his wife invited me to their home. We decided to share him, although his wife and I were not interested in one another like that.
“My job here fell through. My dog died. The romance flopped spectacularly. I still love him desperately. And when he told me that it was over and that he didn’t love me and never had, I begged him to reconsider, only to have his wife come in and start screaming at me to keep my f***ing hands off her f***ing husband.
“I snapped. I tried to kill myself. I ended up in a coma and then went to the psych ward. I have been out for only a week. I’m back at work. I’m freshly diagnosed as Bipolar I. I’m on new meds I don’t think are helping. Of course, I had to move out and I’m living a very lonely life. I do not feel stable and I cry for hours every night. The loneliness is killing me. I have psychiatric follow-up and intend to do what I can to survive and thrive.
“My former boyfriend is now making noises about wanting to be ‘friends with benefits’ with me once I am ‘well again,’ which sounds more like he wants a self-supporting mistress that he can come and have sex with and then leave at will. I still love him but I realize this is a gross affront to my worth as a human being. I just don’t trust myself to say ‘no.’ Counselling may help but I still don’t trust myself to make good, healthy decisions. Everything I do blows up in my face.
“Any advice?”
That’s just-plain, not sharpest tool in the shed, stupid.
We humans are shockingly prone to bad ideas, ideas that escalate to terrible decisions, and then metastasize into actions that undermine, damage, or even ruin our lives. We’d all like to think that we’re a lot better off than the letter-writer above, and we probably are (if not so self-aware), but vanishingly few of us have a consistently good track record of decision-making and none of us is as good as we think we are.
In August of 2010, a 40-year-old man identified only as “Mr. Lee” missed an elevator at a shopping center in Daejon, South Korea when the doors closed on him a moment too soon. Angered, Mr. Lee backed up his motorized wheelchair and bashed into the elevator doors. Unsatisfied at merely denting the object of his rage, he backed up and became a human battering ram again. He “succeeded” this time, crashing through the doors and plunging to his death.
WARNING: The following is real security footage and is truly horrible.
Not surprisingly, shopping center officials vowed to strengthen the doors of their elevators to protect future morons.
On July 2, 1982, Larry Walters, a middle-aged California trucker, finally set out to fulfill his dream of flying. After packing sandwiches, beer, a CB radio, a camera, a pellet gun, a parachute, a life preserver, and 30 one-pound jugs of water for ballast – but without a seatbelt – he sat down on his lawn chair, to which he had attached 42 weather balloons, each filled with 33 cubic feet of helium. When the last cord that tethered the makeshift craft to his Jeep snapped, Walters and his lawn chair shot up to an altitude of about three miles (higher than a Cessna can go). He slowly drifted along, cold and frightened, for more than 14 hours, holding onto his lawn chair for dear life. A private plane buzzed below him. He eventually crossed the primary approach corridor of Los Angeles International Airport. A flustered TWA pilot spotted Larry and radioed the tower that he was passing a guy in a lawn chair with a gun at 16,000 feet.
In 1976, Italian historian Carlo M. Cipolla, of the University of California-Berkeley, published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he argued is humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity. The examples above provide excellent evidence in support of his argument. Sadly, this stupidity (epistemic irrationality) is mostly opaque to us. Our errors, foibles, and weaknesses leave no cognitive trace.
We choose poorly far too often on matters big and small, vital and prosaic, important and ordinary. This stupidity is self-defeating because it is normally in our best interest to be right about things.
But sometimes we’re “moron[s] in a deeper sense.” Sometimes, stupidity is a strategy.
Stupidity as instrumental rationality is common in the extreme. We are all susceptible to it. I am virtually certain we all exhibit it. Over and over. It works.
Since 2020, President Donald Trump has claimed that the election that year was “stolen” from him, by which he means that votes were miscounted, that false votes were counted, that dead people voted, and that voting machines were tampered with. Few Republican politicians or others whose livelihood is dependent upon Republican voters truly believe(d) the 2020 election was stolen. But unless you look carefully, it’s hard to tell. Some parse their words with precision. Some make a different case (e.g., changed voting laws on account of the pandemic stacked the deck against Mr. Trump, “rigging” the election). And some avoid the subject or insist that the unwashed masses must have confidence in the mechanisms of voting.
At least since 2020, those who could see and hear increasingly commented upon President Joe Biden having “lost a yard (or more) on his fastball” and thus his fitness for office (much less reelection). As we now know, if anyone ever doubted it, few Democratic politicians or others whose livelihood was dependent upon Democratic voters disagreed. Nonetheless, they kept going before television cameras to tell us not to believe our lyin’ eyes, that Mr. Biden was as sharp as ever.
These are obvious examples of strategic stupidity. We can be merchants of doubt or merchants of affirmation, all in support of our various commitments.
We are instinctive propagandists, after all, driven to paint our lives, our behavior, and our tribe in the most attractive light possible. Upton Sinclair offered perhaps its most popular expression.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
So, on the one (extreme) hand, some human behavior (like the examples up top) is just dumb-as-rocks stupid. Perhaps it’s exacerbated by delusions of grandeur, rage, desperation, obsession, or something else, but it’s absurd on its face. On the other (extreme) hand, some stupid human behavior (like the most recent examples above) is contrived and fake, if no less absurd. The stupid is intentional. These are savvy primates playing subtle social games.
What about the stupidity in between those extremes?
That sort of stupidity, I suspect, is contrived but honest. Like most of the social strategies we deploy, it is unconscious. It occurs when the incentives line up. It’s motivated reasoning.
As Oxford’s Teppo Felin pointed out, “what people are looking for– rather than what people are merely looking at – determines what is obvious.” C.S. Lewis’s version comes from The Magician’s Nephew: “What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
Cost-free stupidity that reinforces one’s ideological commitments is readily maintained. It’s even easier when there are tangible benefits. “Stupidity” that makes us look good, justifies our outlooks and decisions, demonizes our enemies, or encourages the tribe to be more cooperative falls into this category.
Our echo chambers and filter bubbles make it ever-so-easy to avoid evidence that disconfirms what we already think. And when it becomes unavoidable, because our standards for evaluating claims are so much lower for those that affirm our viewpoints and biases (we only ask it they can be true, not whether they must be true), we readily think our stupid beliefs are true and thus not stupid when “properly understood.”
As Yale’s Dan Kahan powerfully explained, “What people ‘believe’ … doesn’t reflect what they know. It expresses who they are.”
Indeed, as Philip Tetlock has shown, our commitments and motivations shield us from uncomfortable truths.
The classic study in this regard concerned smoking and cancer. If you are old enough, you may recall that in 1964 the U.S. Surgeon General famously issued a report finally linking smoking and cancer. It was a very big deal at the time and was extremely controversial.
Shortly thereafter, two scientists interviewed smokers and nonsmokers alike and asked them to evaluate the Surgeon General’s conclusions. Nonsmokers generally agreed with the Surgeon General. Smokers, however, who clearly had something significant to them at stake, were not nearly so sanguine. In fact, they concocted a variety of dubious challenges, including “many smokers live a long time” (anecdotal evidence to the contrary does not undermine the impact of the data in total – outliers are common) and “lots of things are hazardous” (So?). Bringing true believers together in a group tends to compound the problem and ratchet up the denialism (which goes a long way toward explaining social media).
Behind the Curve is a documentary about the surprisingly large community of people throughout the world who believe that the Earth is flat.1 As shown in the film, a true believer named Jeran Campanella devised a simple experiment designed to prove that the Earth is flat.2
Much to Campanella’s surprise, his experiment proved the opposite of what he expected. His reaction was not even to question his preconceived notion, much less repudiate it. “Interesting. Interesting. That’s interesting,” was the best he could muster.3 Bob Knodel, Campanella’s co-host on a popular Flat Earth YouTube channel, performed his own experiment in the film involving a laser gyroscope. As the Earth rotated, the gyroscope appeared to lean off-axis, staying in its original position as the Earth’s curvature changed in relation to it.
“What we found is, is when we turned on that gyroscope, we found that we were picking up a drift. A 15 degree per hour drift,” Knodel said, acknowledging that the experiment showed precisely what one should expect from a gyroscope on a rotating globe.
“Now, obviously we were taken aback by that. Wow, that’s kind of a problem,” Knodel said. “We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth.”
Not surprisingly, he “found” some.
Because of our confirmation bias, when we see information that confirms what we already think or believe, we ask ourselves if the information might be true. But if the information is disconfirming, as with Knodel, we consider whether it must be true, a wholly different and much more difficult standard.
Knodel’s reaction is a perfect example of John Kenneth Galbraith’s famous dictum, “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” According to Stanford’s John Ousterhout, “it’s easier to create a new organism than to change an existing one. Most organisms are highly resistant to change.”
In a study by the late Ziva Kunda, a group of subjects was brought into a lab and told that they would be playing a trivia game. Before they play, they get to watch someone else (the “Winner”) play, to get the hang of the game. Half the subjects are told that the Winner will be on their team and half are told that the Winner will be on the opposing team. The game they watch is fixed and the Winner proceeds to answer every question correctly. When asked about the Winner’s success, those who expect to play with the Winner are extremely impressed while those who expect to play against the Winner are dismissive. They attribute the good performance to luck rather than skill (self-serving bias, anyone?). Thus the exact same event receives diametrically opposed interpretations depending upon whose side you’re on.
The most resourceful creature in the universe is a human seeking to justify a favored position. We may acknowledge that we surely are wrong about some things, perhaps many things, we can’t come up with current examples.
Nobody thinks their sh*t stinks (“Stercus cuique suum bene olat,” per Montaigne). The “plasticity of disgust,” like “selective perception,” is a real thing.
Warren Buffett put it really well.
“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”
Humans are honestly but shockingly stupid about a huge variety of things: the abilities of our children, our team’s chances this season, how good my in-progress novel is, climate change, how our investments are going to turn out, how quickly we’ll get promoted, the effectiveness of vaccines, the prospects of our new business (pets.com!), tattoos, how long Saturday chores will take, the advisability of such things as smoking or drinking and driving, how easy it is to beat the house, the Segway, and many more.
As Yale’s Kahan explained, “misinformation is not something that happens to the mass public but rather something its members are complicit in producing.” We aggressively seek out bad ideas and often define our identity by commitment to contrarian beliefs and worldviews.
I thought I might have had a chance to compete in basketball at the collegiate level (in the “right situation,” of course), until I started playing regularly with college basketball players.
It’s astonishing the alacrity with which the stupidity of a (hilarious, 1979) Monty Python bit can become consensus and vice versa.
Of course, your mileage may vary.
As I often say, we like to think that we are like judges, that we carefully gather and evaluate facts and data before coming to an objective and well-founded conclusion. Instead, we are much more like lawyers, grasping for any scrap of purported evidence we can exploit to support our preconceived notions and allegiances. Which are often wrong.
Eventually the dying man takes his final breath But first checks his news feed to see what he’s ‘bout to miss And it occurs to him a little late in the game We leave as clueless as we came For the rented heavens to the shadows in the cave We’ll all be wrong someday
We’re all, surely, wrong about some things, probably many somethings, today and always. Sometimes, it’s just stupidity. Other times, such stupidity is a strategy. Most of the time, it’s motivated reasoning responding to incentives.
But it’s still stupid.
Totally Worth It
Grace is proven to me each and every day, most obviously by my lovely bride, to whom I have been married for 46 years today.
Joe Pantoliano is one of that class of actors known by many for the way he often winds up in a movie or television show: dead (particularly gruesome and NSFW example here). He played Cypher in The Matrix and Ralph Cifaretto in The Sopranos and is on the Mount Rushmore of guys who die in movies, alongside (presumably) Sean Bean, Pedro Pascal, and Christopher Lee. A new analysis tracked down exactly how many times “Pants” has bit the dust on screen, finding that he dies in 25 of the 160 credits in his non-animated film and television filmography. He dies roughly 17.5 percent of the time he shows up to work, a rate of professional demise that makes Star Trek’s Redshirt look like a desk job at OSHA. He has a page devoted to him on Cinemorgue, for heaven’s sake. That said, 83 percent of the time Pantoliano dies on screen, he is the bad guy. So, there’s that.
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This is the best thing I’ve read recently. The most extraordinary. The most annoying. Churches in Hing Kong are preparing for a crackdown. “The average American is now vastly more affluent than the average European.” By bus. Dylan. RIP, Sly Stone. RIP, Brian Wilson.
Please send me your nominations for this space to rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or via Twitter (@rpseawright).
Benediction
We live on “a hurtling planet,” the poet Rod Jellema informed us, “swung from a thread of light and saved by nothing but grace.” To those of us prone to wander, to those who are broken, to those who flee and fight in fear – which is every last lost one of us – there is a faith that offers hope and love. And may grace have the last word. Now and forever. Amen.
As always, thanks for reading.
Issue 189 (June 16, 2025)
Contrary to common belief, propagated first by Washington Irving and predominately to argue that there is an inherent conflict between science and religion, Columbus didn’t fear falling off the edge of the world. Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle had already written: “Again, our observations of the stars make it evident, not only that the Earth is circular, but also that it is a circle of no great size. For quite a small change of position to south or north causes a manifest alteration of the horizon.” Eratosthenes went so far as to measure the Earth’s circumference. He discovered that at noon in one Egyptian city, the Sun was directly overhead, whereas in a different city the Sun did not rise so high. Eratosthenes knew the distance between the two cities, measured how high in the sky the Sun rose in each at the same time, and then did some trigonometry. His method was crude, but his answer was in the right ballpark. Christian scholars agreed.
I find it fascinating that so many conspiracy theorists of various sorts are not skeptical of the scientific method. Indeed, they often look to science to validate their beliefs, as in this instance.
The seminal book in this area is When Prophecy Fails, a brilliant 1956 study of a UFO cult that predicted a specific end of the world and how they responded when the prophecy failed.
It is difficult to get man to tell the truth when his salary depends on not telling the truth