Salt by itself is unpalatable, just notice how disgusted we are to have some sea water in our mouth to get a feel for that. But basically all food can be made better with a sprinkling of salt. Likewise I feel the same with stupidity. By itself it destroys your life, but if you didn't have any you'd be in another type of hell, the hell that intelligent (or rather clever) but miserable people end up building for themselves.
As Darren Allen puts it very well: 1
A healthy body contains lethal bacteria. Stunning beauty contains unsettling ugliness. Great originality contains concealed plagiarism. Total confidence contains perfect fear.
A way to see the value of stupidity, when it is contained by intelligence, is that it keeps you humble. People with lesser minds are necessarily confronted with the limitations of their intelligence sooner or later, sometimes fairly quickly in life, and ultimately that is a good thing, because no mind can grasp, by itself, the nature of Reality and of the Divine, or even understand the byzantine complexity of our modern society.
People with more intelligence however can spend their entire life surrounded by people who are astonished by how smart they are, giving them a sort of free pass and allowing them to say whatever they want. This is especially true for academics, because most of them go from school straight into grad school, and then the world of research, which means that they essentially spend their entire life in school, a mediated institution which devolves into an echo chamber at the top.
'Mediated' means that the people in academia do not ever contact Reality, but only discuss ideas with other intellectuals, or in general interact with things that other people have made, leading to a sort of experiential inbreeding. Modern society is for the vast majority mediated, which is why people believe in all sorts of crazy ideas nowadays, because they can afford to, since their mind is not engaged in a feedback loop with Reality which would naturally correct bad ideas. This disconnect from reality doesn't magically get solved by being more intelligent, if anything it can get far worse, which is why as Orwell points out here: 2
Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.
This is because intelligent people tend to (not always but usually) have more complicated ideas, which then leads to more disconnect from Reality, because it makes people miss the forest for the trees, 3 and can also create a lot of attachment to their own pet theories.
Less bright people on the other hand have simpler ideas, which are easier to adapt to any given situation, and more prone to questioning and reflection, which is good, because it allows them to step back from them ideas and question their validity, since they do not take their mind and themselves too seriously. Instead of thinking that you are the next Einstein, or the second coming of Christ with your ideas and vision, you realize that you are probably bullshitting yourself and just get on with your day.
Stupidity can also be the key ingredient that propels you to action rather than be stuck in analysis. A lot of "intelligent" people have simply become masters at hiding their cowardice behind their bookreading and their clever arguments, which is why they can sometimes be baffled at the kind of boldness and lifestyles of much more stupid people around them, who aren't constrained by the need to predict and understand everything around them as much.
At the end of the day, the people with "stupid" ideas but good execution will always beat those with "intelligent" ideas and horrible execution. Genuine intelligence is about letting go of your ego and focusing on what actually happens in life and what you can do about it, but the problem is that far too often, intelligent people have a way of translating everything into a problem of intelligence, when it is actually rarely the case. You can't think your way into courage. You can't think your way into relaxation. You can't think your way into good relationships. You can't think your way into joy. The mind can be a good assistant to all of those, but it can never be the one in charge.
Another thing that a small amount of stupidity helps with is coming up with novel ideas. Take for instance [the early history of the continental drift theory], which started out as a simple observation that the shape of South America fit into the Western side of Africa. It's difficult to know exactly what the reception towards this idea was in the very beginning, especially because the history of Science is constantly rewritten so as to make itself look more rigorous and intelligent, but it's not very difficult to imagine "serious" scientists dismissing that hypothesis as groundless speculation based on a child-like observation. Imagine for instance if I said that the human nervous system is the remnant of the body of a jellyfish from which mammals have grown so as to accustom themselves to the land, because it kind of looks like the strands of a jellyfish. My theory is obviously bullshit, yet from afar, using visual similarities as the starting point for a larger theory is also what continental drift theory does, there is a similar quality of "chidlike" observation if you didn't know anything about how continents were formed.
The value of 'stupidity' in this case is that it helps people explore ideas, because it is impossible to know ahead of time which ones are good or not. Dogmatic scientists will tell us that there is an 'a priori' way to know what is good science or not, but it's really bullshit. Truth, even the scientific kind, couldn't possibly be distilled down to an algorithm, because Reality and the frames from which we view it from couldn't possibly be this simple. All the dogmatic scientists can do is repeat the same sets of methods like automatons, which ironically makes them much further from the revolutionary scientists such as Einstein or Darwin, than a young kid who is curious about all kinds of things happening around him and who wants to understand the world. They don't explore genuinely novel ideas because they take their reputation and their self-image as a "serious" scientist too seriously, they can't allow themselves to be stupid, or child-like, which greatly hinders their creativity.
And the last thing I will write here is that while life is very serious, it is not that serious. For me it's not a 50/50 split between seriousness and not, it's more like 90/10 or perhaps 85/15, but those last 10 to 15% are very important. It's serious business to not take it too seriously! A writer who only engages in humor quickly becomes dry, because it feels like an attempt to escape the deeply serious, and sometimes horrifying, aspects of our lives, but one who is unable to see the silliness in all of it is perhaps even worse, like having to eat a soup with too much misery pepper.
Don't put too much pepper in your food. A little is fine. Same thing with salt.
1 Aphorisms at the end of the Fire Sermon.
2 Most famous quotes are misattributed (and it is interesting to wonder why that is the case) and this one might fall in that bucket.
3 My most vivid example of a field which is filled with bullshit but which impresses the average person because of all of the complicated maths that it employs is probably quantitative finance, which is filled to the brim with unreasonable assumptions in basically every model, assumptions which are never questioned or tested out in practice, because the implicit constraint is that the models need to be mathematically tractable at the end of the day. In other words, the assumptions are picked so that the model leads to tractable formulas, and then they rationalize why the assumptions are fine and the model can be trusted, which is totally backwards for a model. You should worry about the truth first, and about computational considerations later.
Then there is a second major issue but which would take too long to introduce in-depth, which is that to the extent that financial models work in practice, they only work when there is no crisis occuring, but the problem is that as Nassim Taleb argues again and again in The Black Swan, is that those "exceptional" events are precisely the thing you would want to model, because they change everything and create so many problems. What's the point of making good predictions when nothing notable is happening?
Go back to the list of blog posts
Counterintuitive Intelligence Cowardice Humility
2026-05-04