[ikrima]

I love this insanely insightful crystalization for me. I see you got a degree in IR and you used the word axiom so I'd refract back to you: reformulate stupidity as ignorance and assume a continuous conserved action exists between < stupidity-ignorance-malice | danger > so that your observable is a danger measure-metric.

Basically the reason ignorance is so danger is that it aliases between harmless stupidity and extreme evil, but it fails to trigger our collective species evil detection pattern coding which results in an unbelievable cascade evil failure mode.

In a sense, religion is a meta-epistemic solution to the binding problem of our collective subconscious.

I think if you apply the epistemic quantum mechanics to different logic modalities, you get some interesting insights!

[jrvarela56]

> Basically the reason ignorance is so danger is that it aliases between harmless stupidity and extreme evil, but it fails to trigger our collective species evil detection pattern coding which results in an unbelievable cascade evil failure mode.

Great summary. The problem with ignorance is that you are more likely to forgive the perpetrator whereas a malicious actor would have been cutoff once detected. You then stick with the ignorant for way longer and suffer loses beyond what a malicious actor would've likely caused. This is my impression from relationships at work.

[Survived]

I think Bonhoeffer was referring to an acquired or affected stupidity; a position adopted defensively to fit into a social or political situation.

If the truth becomes dangerous or unpopular, a decent defense is adopting stupidity. I think that is subtly different from ignorance, which implies never knowing, as opposed to a rejection of truth.

Like much cognitive dissonance, it can be easiest to live with if you just change your beliefs rather than trying to rail against it.

The danger is, once truth is denied, reality becomes disconnected and atrocity much more abstract.

Maybe there is a better name yet for the phenomenon.