Ricky Gervais once said that stupidity is like death: it’s only painful for other people. And according to the historian and economist Carlo Cipolla, he’s absolutely right. In 1976, Cipolla wrote an essay where he laid out the five laws of stupidity, and the most important golden law is law number three. It says that a ‘stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or group of people when he or she does not benefit, or may even suffer.’ Stupidity is not the same as IQ, as with dumbness, or the ability to assess risks, as with foolishness. For Cipolla, stupidity is an action defined by its implications. And so, using this definition, we find that there are four different kinds of people. A helpless person is somebody who helps other people while harming themselves. A bandit is somebody who helps themselves while harming other people. A stupid person is somebody who harms other people while gaining nothing themselves, and may even harm themselves in the process. And finally, an intelligent person is somebody who works out how to help themselves and others at the same time. It goes without saying that we should avoid bandits in life, but in some ways this is actually easier than avoiding stupidity, because we all eventually get to know who the troublemakers are. But stupidity is a bit more subtle, and so we have to take note. We have to repeatedly watch those who have a habit of making situations worse. We have to remember those people who make their own and other people’s lives worse off. And then we can try to avoid them. We can slowly but surely cut them out of our lives and find someone else to be around. — TikTok @philosophyminis