Your notion of stupidity suffers from an excessive vesting in parlor games. The economic perspective pioneered in the seminal article by Carlo M. Cipolla referenced above, is an indispensable antidote to the Forrest Gump fallacy perpetuated by your approach. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to support the hypothesis that economic failures fail to attend upon grave mental deficiencies, with evidence more substantial than the consensus of your LJ coterie buttressed by badly digested sociobiological notions. To the contrary, your anecdotal examples tend to show, at the most, that standardized tests are bad at predicting palpable stupidity.
I've been following in the footsteps of divine Erasmus sitting on the shoulders of great Bacon... and then you suddenly appear and order me to climb down and seek support for someone else's hypothesis that reduces the magnificence of human folly to trivial and obscene notions of economic gain and loss? That's preposterous!
Nowhere did these two sages define folly or even "palpable stupidity" considering it self-evident that folly is a privation of wisdom that was created, like other privations of Good, by thy Lord, for His greater Glory. Folly, by diminution of wisdom, creates greater vistas on this everlasting Glory thereby constituting the unquestionable gain, whereas the increase in wisdom only reveals the gaping abyss of folly, constituting the regrettable loss.
Since you are relying on Lord Bacon, consider that scientia est potentia, whence by contraposition impotentia est stultitia, which coincides with Cipolla’s pragmatic definition of stupidity.
You should've known better than using this argument on me... Read Of Heresies and see for yourself whose knowledge Bacon was talking about:
...The third degree [of heretics] is, of those who abridge and restrain the former opinion only to those human actions which partake of sin, which actions they will have to depend substantively and originally, and without any sequel or subordination of causes upon the will, and make and set down and appoint larger limits of the knowledge of G-d than of His power, or rather of that part of G-d's power, (for knowledge itself is a power whereby He knoweth,) than of that by which He moveth and worketh, making Him foreknow some things idle, and as a looker on, which He doth not predestinate nor ordain : not unlike to that devise which Epicurus brought into Democritus' opinion, to take away destiny, and make way to fortune, to wit ; the start and slip of Attemus, which always of the wiser sort was rejected as a frivolous shift : but whatsoever depends not of G-d, as author and principle by inferior
( ... )
Your reading is spurious to the point of absurdity, on a par with Diogenes Laertius misattributing to Socrates the antinomy of hoc unum scio, me nihil scire, εἰδέναι μὲν μηδὲν πλὴν αὐτὸ τοῦτο [εἰδέναι]. Nowhere does Bacon gainsay the fact of men partaking in real knowledge.
Then what was the meaning of your comment reading, verbatim,
...Since you are relying on Lord Bacon, consider that scientia est potentia, whence by contraposition impotentia est stultitia, which coincides with Cipolla’s pragmatic definition of stupidity.
If "scientia est potentia" does not apply to human knowledge, as you belatedly admit, what am I to think of this insightful yet impenetrable remark? Precisely how the contraposition to Bacon's observation that divine "knowledge itself is a power whereby He knoweth" leads to "Cipolla’s pragmatic definition of stupidity?" I am most interested to follow your logical deduction, for I am impotent to detect any sense in it, my folly being as great as your wisdom.
It's mind boggling that this obscure passage on heresy and divine will somehow ended up as the motto of positivist science. I cannot imagine how could it happened (serial misquoting? total misattribution?)
That knowledge itself is a power whereby the knower knoweth, is a commonplace of Aristotelian philosophy. See e.g. EN 1139a: “The attainment of truth is indeed the function of every part of the intellect, but that of the practical intelligence is the attainment of truth corresponding to right desire.” (Translated by H. Rackham.) This is echoed in Dante characterizing sinners in Inferno, Canto 3, as “le genti dolorose c’hanno perduto il ben de l’intelletto”. Any sound reading of Aquinas must make room for the human good of the intellect.
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Nowhere did these two sages define folly or even "palpable stupidity" considering it self-evident that folly is a privation of wisdom that was created, like other privations of Good, by thy Lord, for His greater Glory. Folly, by diminution of wisdom, creates greater vistas on this everlasting Glory thereby constituting the unquestionable gain, whereas the increase in wisdom only reveals the gaping abyss of folly, constituting the regrettable loss.
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...The third degree [of heretics] is, of those who abridge and restrain the former opinion only to those human actions which partake of sin, which actions they will have to depend substantively and originally, and without any sequel or subordination of causes upon the will, and make and set down and appoint larger limits of the knowledge of G-d than of His power, or rather of that part of G-d's power, (for knowledge itself is a power whereby He knoweth,) than of that by which He moveth and worketh, making Him foreknow some things idle, and as a looker on, which He doth not predestinate nor ordain : not unlike to that devise which Epicurus brought into Democritus' opinion, to take away destiny, and make way to fortune, to wit ; the start and slip of Attemus, which always of the wiser sort was rejected as a frivolous shift : but whatsoever depends not of G-d, as author and principle by inferior ( ... )
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...Since you are relying on Lord Bacon, consider that scientia est potentia, whence by contraposition impotentia est stultitia, which coincides with Cipolla’s pragmatic definition of stupidity.
If "scientia est potentia" does not apply to human knowledge, as you belatedly admit, what am I to think of this insightful yet impenetrable remark? Precisely how the contraposition to Bacon's observation that divine "knowledge itself is a power whereby He knoweth" leads to "Cipolla’s pragmatic definition of stupidity?" I am most interested to follow your logical deduction, for I am impotent to detect any sense in it, my folly being as great as your wisdom.
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http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1014.htm#article8
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1019.htm#article4
I am afraid that through having this kind of will you cannot avoid being omnipotent, as argued by St. Thomas
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1019.htm#article6
It's mind boggling that this obscure passage on heresy and divine will somehow ended up as the motto of positivist science. I cannot imagine how could it happened (serial misquoting? total misattribution?)
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