Ironic Idiocy

"Define irony. A bunch of idiots dancing on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash."
--Garland Greene (Con Air)

Nassim Taleb builds on our post yesterday with the below tweet.

1) When a collection of journos getting around minimum wage call someone consistently successful "an idiot", one is entitled to invoke Wittgenstein's ruler:
you don't just use a ruler to measure the table, but the table to measure the ruler.
(in Fooled by Randomness) pic.twitter.com/vhEqJJsJZK

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) January 6, 2018

Anti-Trumpers cope with their post-election cognitive dissonance with juvenile ad hominem strategies, i.e., "Trump's an idiot."

Those strategies are not completely satisfactory, of course, because the human mind will whisper to the accuser, "If he's an idiot who has achieved much success, then what does that make you?"

So the mind has to rationalize further. "It was dumb luck." Or better yet, "He rigged the game...it was FIXED!"

Enter Russians, et al.

The last thing cognitively dissonant individuals want to face is the realization that the lion's share of responsibility for a) not achieving as much as the designated antagonist, and b) severely underestimating the designated antagonist's capabilities...lies with them.

Quite ironically, such thought processes foster idiocy.