This essay is brilliant. As such, it will do absolutely no good for those who (ideally) would most benefit the world and themselves by it: the stupid. Why? Instead of assimilating the essay's wisdom and thereby correcting his behavior, the stupid man would trip over something he left on the floor and go headfirst into the computer monitor, killing himself and causing a short circuit. The apartment building and surrounding city block would then burn to the ground, causing untold losses to neighbors.

And it would do no good even if the stupid person managed to make it to the computer without incident. As Bertrand Russell said, "A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."

I'm not a fan of declaring people stupid.

There do exist the retarded, and the extremes of foolishness, but when we come to a piece like this one, the author seems to be talking about normally functional people who occasionally screw up.

People like you and me.

People who have a normal wish to stay alive.

We all encounter situations which we don't size up immediately, and our instincts let us down. The most brutal common example of instinctual letdown is trusting a person or even a company who proves unworthy of such trust. Deceived, yes. More cynical, of course. A proven stupid person, not.

So who keeps spammers in business? Stupid people? Sure. There exists a world of people who are just trying to do something for the family which loves them when they pursue a free gift into a trap. People who are in fact mentally impaired, but retain access to resources. Usually elderly people. But to categorize them as simply "stupid people" misses something important. If one knows such people, one understands the world they live in, and describes the issue in far different terms.

I'll add a story of a stupid person.

This guy owned a chainsaw. The clutch was sticking, meaning that at idle the chain would continue to move. So he set out to fix that. He opened up the clutch a bit, and saw something like a 5-piece pie. He fired up the chainsaw, and sprayed carburetor cleaner into the cracks of the pie while reving up the chainsaw.

The next thing our hero experienced was being knocked on his ass. The injuries turned out to be substantial.

Turns out that this kind of clutch works by having weights which have a spring around them. As the revolutions of the engine raise, centrifugal force overcomes the spring, and pressess the weights against an outer drum, which is connected to a gear which drives the chain. By opening the clutch up, hero has removed the cover which holds the clutch together, and at high engine speed, it flies apart.

Later, a lawyer explains that such stupidity wouldn't warrant an injury claim against the chainsaw manufacturer for not warning, because a normally intelligent person wouldn't have been so stupid to remove the cover and run the chainsaw.

Y'all can guess who our hero might be.

It seems to me that all the previous comments come from people who have not understood Cipolla's definition of stupidity. Please refer to the complete Cipolla theory and to his cartesian graph of human behaviour: the stupid person is a person whose action causes a damage both to himself and to another person, as compared to a "hopeless" person whose action causes a damage to himself and an advantage to another person (in the case of the chainsaw hero, he does not cause damage to other than himself and, probably, the chainsaw maker will sell him another chainsaw if he was not too badly damaged....).