Highly recommend spending some time in the Whole Earth publication archives if you haven't had the chance.
This is a characteristic of spite. Maybe spitefulness is stupid. But true spitefulness is a whole other level to watch out for.
As an outside observer spitefulness and stupidity may appear the same, but the stupid person may have had good intentions and no ill-will towards those they harm.
I don't think so. The motivation behind spiteful actions is to purposely cause losses to others, and the gain derived from this action is rejoicing on other people's losses. This implies having and displaying power over others, and exercising this power to establish themselves even with so little gain.
Very different than deriving no gain.
Now, most people would say that Bob is acting out of spite if he rejects Alice's offer, because he's causing Alice losses and he gains nothing, and the benefit he receives is that Alice is made sad by this. Is that a fair interpretation, though? He believes that he's acting out of a moral obligation to screw over someone who themself is (in his mind) acting unjustly. He's valuing punishing someone that he feels is breaking a social contract greater than the 100 dollars that he would otherwise have. What do you call what he is doing in this situation if not spite? And if he is acting out of a principled objection to an unfair situation, does it become something other than spite? And if it's actually principled, why does the principle seem to melt away when the offer is $7000 to $3000?
I feel like spite is a huge motivator behind a lot of cultural issues nowadays but it can only come from people who feel as if they are coming from a place of weakness or victimization. There is always a moral indignation. The gratification is in seeing their vision of justice meted out. It isn't always a psychopathic, sadistic behavior but it can be in those cases where a vision of justice is distorted and psychopathic. Consider this: isn't imprisoning people often a form, ultimately, of societal spite? In isolation it may be cheaper to just give petty criminals whatever they want rather than paying the cost for them being jailed. Amortized cost, it's probably a lot cheaper to pay a drunkard's taxi home from the bar every single time he goes drinking than to lock him in jail for 3 months for a second DUI. Is spite the reason that we don't just give him that? Again, the justice thing.
Now, we can argue that playing negative-sum games is "stupid". And in most contexts of the modern human society such heuristic would be correct, but I would be really careful with a sweeping generalization, otherwise instead of a proper understanding of the underlying behavioral motivations you are likely to devolve into primitive explanations of someone being "stupid" or even "evil".
--Seneca
The modern nuance on "infirm" makes that seem more relevant. aside from the unintentional cruelty..
With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.Yeah, this lines up with my personal description of stupid: incapable of achieving one's own goals because of stubbornness, mean-spiritedness, pride, persistent misunderstanding, inability or unwillingness to learn. A danger to themself and others. Usually and unfortunately coupled with overconfidence.
This is stark contrast to being merely ignorant (lacking knowledge, naive or sheltered) and dumb (incapable of learning or grasping complex subjects).
Ignorance is generally fixable and with some capacity, dumbness too. But stupidity is a special kind of bad.
-- Kurt Gödel
There's at least two meanings for stupid. One is someone who is not intelligent, and it's just kind of an intrinsic thing. The other is someone who does something stupid, irrespective of their intelligence. This is a conditional attribute that depends on available information / motivation / laziness.
Point being a 2x2 matrix is just an oversimplification of real life and also wtf are the axes here???
But we also have self-awareness. Stupid can be de-stupefied through learning. Whereas you can't really change your race or blood type.
* "intelligent" is the intellectual capacity one is born with
* "stupid" is the failure to use that intellectual capacity
I call those people skilled instead of intelligent.
Reminds me of people supporting the senseless bombings and genocide in the middle east.
The genocidal arguments frame them as solutions to long-standing problems, including labelling them as a "final solution". This is clearly an attempt to frame it as something where they derive a gain.
-trump a B2 (aims to enrich himself, while overall a net negative to society)
-his voters are helpless (by voting for him, they don't actually gain anything)
-and intelligent people, including myself, are mostly sitting on the sidelines, save attending a no kings protest.
A few are valiantly fighting (filing court cases to check trumps power grabs, newsom pushing prop 50, journalists / media folks calling out the emperor has no clothes)
The only way this country gets saved from Trump is either the intelligent get off their duff and start fighting, or the helpless wake up and turn on Trump
According to the model I would class legal efforts and some media efforts as intelligent or banditry (media is self serving; in the end it loves Trump for the headlines), and a protest as maybe intelligent but maybe also helpless.
Inarguably intelligent might be something like following ICE movements and warning neighborhoods when they're coming, or establishing mutual aid food systems for people whose SNAP is about to run out. Or wasting ICE time somehow through civil disobedience to reduce their effectiveness.