OK this relates to WWI - why smart people can be dumb.

JoeArthur

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"This is easiest to introduce with a tragic case. British high command during the First World War frequently understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies from the cavalry battles of their youth. As one of Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s subordinates later remarked, they thought of the trenches as ‘mobile operations at the halt’: ie, as fluid battle lines with the simple caveat that nothing in fact budged for years. Unsurprisingly, this did not serve them well in formulating a strategy: they were hampered, beyond the shortage of material resources, by a kind of ‘conceptual obsolescence’, a failure to update their cognitive tools to fit the task in hand."
 

Michael Dorosh

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"This is easiest to introduce with a tragic case. British high command during the First World War frequently understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies from the cavalry battles of their youth. As one of Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s subordinates later remarked, they thought of the trenches as ‘mobile operations at the halt’: ie, as fluid battle lines with the simple caveat that nothing in fact budged for years. Unsurprisingly, this did not serve them well in formulating a strategy: they were hampered, beyond the shortage of material resources, by a kind of ‘conceptual obsolescence’, a failure to update their cognitive tools to fit the task in hand."
Kind of tedious seeing people taking swipes at Haig without any kind of detailed explanation. Easy to do if your audience is predisposed to believe you. There are more recent works that paint Haig in a different light than the mid-20th Century revisionists.

The greater premise of the article though - which the Haig example doesn't seem to fit anyway - seems flawed. Though Bugliosi had some interesting things to say about competence, which is not the same as stupidity, a subtlety the author of the piece seems not to have grasped. Humans are inherently incompetent, Bugliosi says.

He gives a great example. Frank Borman, one of the many renaissance men of the US space program, spent much of Apollo 8 radioing back to earth with the call sign Gemini 8. He was definitely not a stupid person. He had the human flaw of not being perfect.
 

Michael Dorosh

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The lie put forth by Alan Clark about lions led by donkeys goes well beyond just the source of the quote (which incidentally he made up or at the least wrongly attributed it to German generals who never said it). Haig may not have been technologically savvy but he encouraged his generals to be. Golob's piece in the original post makes passing reference to cavalry. By the time of the Somme cavalry represented less than 5% of the British military force in France, and by 1918 the British had more armoured cars and tanks in service than anyone else in the world, along with more combat airplanes which were learning how to fly close support missions. Artillery had gone from gun positions in the front line firing over open sights to laying down incredibly complex fire plans, including rolling barrages, box barrages, etc. It took them a long time to get there, but the British Army became the most 'modern' military force in the world in 1918. The learning curve wasn't the result of stupidity. What had to happen was a major transformation to an entirely new kind of warfare which was decentralized in the extreme. That hadn't happened in large scale conventional warfare before.
 
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Michael Dorosh

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Jordan Peterson talks a bit also about the difference between intelligence and wisdom in this short clip.

Why the disconnect between intellectuals & The working class? - Jordan Peterson - YouTube

Being smart and being wise, he says, are two very different things, which may be the same thing Golob is trying to say - but he obfuscates his own message by using the word "stupidity" which I don't think is at all what he's talking about, or at least, it doesn't apply to the Haig example.
 

bendizoid

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Jordan Peterson talks a bit also about the difference between intelligence and wisdom in this short clip.

Why the disconnect between intellectuals & The working class? - Jordan Peterson - YouTube

Being smart and being wise, he says, are two very different things, which may be the same thing Golob is trying to say - but he obfuscates his own message by using the word "stupidity" which I don't think is at all what he's talking about, or at least, it doesn't apply to the Haig example.
INTELLIGENCE x WISDOM = COMMON SENSE

Wisdom is the application of intelligence

Maybe a better word than stupid would be insanity.
 
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BattleSchool

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Haig has been a convenient punching bag for many things over the past century. John Terraine, was one of the first to push back with his To Win a War in 1978.

A charge of stupidity in the First Degree would be hard to prosecute, not least because, according to Golob, "stupidity is primarily a property of groups or traditions, not individuals." So why dredge up Haig?

Well, because it's not about Haig, stupid! ;)

The article is more about groupthink and the propensity of those with "enlightened," usually academic credentials, to dominate the discourse. As Thomas Sowell observed, "The ignorance, prejudices, and groupthink of an educated elite are still ignorance, prejudice, and groupthink—and for those with one percent of the knowledge in a society to be guiding or controlling those with the other 99 percent is as perilous as it is absurd." Or as Sowell also noted, "As George J. Stigler said of some of his fellow Nobel Laureates, they 'issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis.'”

And so the stupidity-groupthink of which Golob speaks remains responsible for so much of what today passes for "consensus." Indeed, Golob warns that "Once stupidity has taken hold of a group or society, it is thus particularly hard to eradicate – inventing, distributing and normalising new concepts is tough work."

As I mentioned in the thread on Covid--although it could be applied equally to any number of "social-justice" obsessions, our descendants could well come to the conclusion that, at best, the consensus was stupid. At worst, it was evil.
 
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