this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Hm, I'd say it's individual actions that are stupid, and if a person does a lot of stupid actions, then they get called stupid as a person by association. Same for being smart - you can say one smart thing and not be considered smart in general, but if you do a lot of smart things consistently you get called a smart person. (Or any other trait, really - if you sing a song once in the shower that's just one action, if you sing every day for a living you get called a singer.)
I think that probably all people are smart and stupid in different ways. Steve Jobs was stupid about his health but smart about his business. People can be amazingly intelligent doctors, but horrible at social skills, or incredible artists but terrible at money management. I suppose it depends on how often you act one way or the other and how much impact your actions have. Steve Jobs dying because of his juice cleanse choice makes that action have more weight than if he was wearing an amethyst healing necklace but also getting regular treatment. The consequence of the former was that he died; yhe consequence of the latter would be that he'd look silly but (probably) live.
So it’s wholly dependent on how you’re being observed and the collective understanding and knowledge of your actions?
I feel that makes the entire concept nothing but something that exists in the mind of the observer; which would imply stupidity doesn’t really exist at all
Are we all’ Schrodinger idiot’ and whether we are or aren’t stupid depends entirely on if we’re known to do stupid things?
To the same extent that every trait is relative, I suppose. There's not a big physical block of stupid somewhere we can point to, so we have to judge it relative to others. If someone is kinder than most people we say that they're kind, if someone is smarter than most people we say they're smart, if someone is more beautiful than most people we say they're beautiful - it's not something unique to stupidity or to negative traits. It 'doesn't exist' in that it's not something you can pick up and hold in your hand, but it can be measured as an identifying trait when compared to other people and generally agreed upon.
I could say my dog is brown and my friend's dog is white. I can't go touch 'brown,' it exists only in my mind and my brain's perception of wavelengths of light, but the brown dog is still more brown than the white dog. As long as you have 2 objects you can come up with these kinds of differentiated descriptions of them. (I wouldn't say "my dog exists in 3-dimensional space and breathes air" because all dogs exist in 3-dimensional space and breathe air, therefore it isn't usefully descriptive the way "brown" is.)
Yes but those are measurable qualities of a dog. It can been seen and confirmed by science. Can stupidity?