Perspective.
When Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Pastor, Theorized How Stupidity Enabled the Rise of the Nazis
Open Culture: “Two days after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer took to the airwaves. Before his radio broadcast was cut off, he warned his countrymen that their führer could well be a verführer, or misleader. Bonhoeffer’s anti-Nazism lasted until the end of his life in 1945, when he was executed by the regime for association with the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. Even while imprisoned, he kept thinking about the origins of the political mania that had overtaken Germany. The force of central importance to Hitler’s rise was not evil, he concluded, but stupidity.
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice,” Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter to his co-conspirators on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship. “One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.” When provoked, “the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack….
You can see Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity explained in the illustrated Sprouts video above, and you can learn more about the man himself from the documentary Bonhoeffer. Or, better yet, read his collection, Letters and Papers from Prison. Though rooted in his time, culture, and religion, his thought remains relevant wherever humans follow the crowd. “The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent,” he writes, which held as true in the public squares of wartime Europe as it does on the social-media platforms of today. “In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like, that have taken possession of him.” Whatever would surprise Bonhoeffer about our time, he would know exactly what we mean when we call stupid people “tools.”
Tools & Techniques.
Research Tools: Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Introduces Ai2 Paper Finder
Note: Ai2 is also the provider of the wonderful Semantic Scholar database. The new research tool discussed below (Paper Finder0 is free to access.
Today we release Ai2 Paper Finder, an LLM-powered literature search system.
We believe that AI-based literature search should follow the research and thought process that a human researcher would use when looking for relevant papers in their field. Ai2 Paper Finder is built on this philosophy, and it excels at locating papers that are hard to find using existing search tools.
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