Humanity’s Greatest Existential Threat 

From GM, a regular contributor:

“After witnessing the stupendous failure of the Secret Service in Butler, PA (and the press conferences), and not wishing to believe it was intentional, I sought to find another excuse. I believe I may have found the answer and am anxious to share. Many of you inherently know this, but even with non-life-threatening situations it is good to be armed (poor choice of words?) with this validating info. If you have ever had to call customer service, there is a 95% (my estimate) chance you will benefit by simply remembering (in advance) the following laws of human stupidity as laid out in an article from the Quartz website. My recent call to Comcast comes to mind.

In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley, published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.

Law 1: Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

Law 2: The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

“Click here for a full explanation of the above.” – GM