If you find it difficult to define a term or a situation, the consideration and definition of the opposite can be helpful. In workshops with companies thinking about how to prepare for the future, the following questions provide many new approaches and insights: “What if we didn’t make money with our most important product?” or “Would anyone notice, if our company didn’t exist anymore?” or “How could we make life the hardest for our customers?”

So let’s ask ourselves the following question: What is the opposite of intelligence?

Stupidity

Amos Tversky, who was a cognitive scientist, Stanford professor and research partner of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, quipped:

“My colleagues may study artificial intelligence, I study human stupidity.”

How can stupidity be described now? Long before his compatriot Silvio Berlusconi began to dominate the already chaotic Italian politics, the late Berkeley professor Carlo M. Cipolla dealt with it and defined five basic laws of human stupidity:

1. We all always and inevitably underestimate the number of stupid people among us.
2. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of other characteristics of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes harm to another person or group of people without benefiting from it or even suffering harm.
4. Non-dumb people always underestimate the possible damage effect of stupid people. Especially non-dumb people always forget that at any time, in any place and under any circumstances, dealing with and associating with stupid people will always turn out to be an expensive mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. From this follows: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Everyone talks about artificial intelligence or intelligence itself and how it should be defined, but we should also look at the opposite – stupidity. It could give great insights into us and machines.

This article was also published in German.