What's the difference between dumb and stupid?

What's the difference between being dumb and stupid?

What’s the difference between being dumb and stupid?

08/08/21

 

Is there a difference between being dumb and stupid? According to an article in the online magazine, Psyche, there is.

 

Dumb is ignorance. You just don’t know something.

 

Stupid is when you’re not using the right conceptual tools for the job, but think you do and are smart enough to rationalize your bias.

 

A couple of other points. Dumb can be dangerous. The bumper sticker says, If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. Stupidity is even more dangerous because it is not just an individual phenomenon but a property of groups and traditions. Stupid is excused with statments like, “That’s the way it is done,” and “we’ve always done it that way,” and “you don’t know what you’re talking about, this is how you do it.”

 

A second feature is that stupidity can be right part of the time but not all the time so there is a kernel of truth in the wisdom of its application in any particular situation. But when the cognitive tool is misapplied like drinking bleach to eradicate a virus it can be deadly. While dumbness is not associated with high educational achievement, stupidity often is and is sometimes recognized when people appear to be educated idiots. They think they know stuff when they lack wisdom and/or emotional intelligence.

 

This leads to a final observation, people can’t make themselves dumb but they can make themselves stupid. There is no negative moral judgment when a person is dumb, but there is when they act stupid.

 

How do you fix stupid? That’s where psychotherapists come in. Fixing stupid is not a matter of education in the sense of providing more information and skills, it is a matter of enhancing self awareness and a raising of consciousness. In order for psychotherapy to be helpful, the therapist must be less stupid and operate at a higher level of consciousness than the client.

 

Are there stupid psychotherapists? Thousands. I meet new clients every day who have sought out a new therapist because their previous therapists were stupid. “All she did was tell me to breathe.” “All he did was give me worksheets.” “My previous therapist waved two fingers in front of my eyes and told me my problems would disappear.”

 

Oh, golly. Stupidity abounds. Perhaps more dumbness would be preferable. At least with dumbness we would be applying the ethical principle of primum non nocere.