CuriositiesAUG 31, 2020

50 Surprising Cases Of "It Ain't Stupid If It Works"

Inga Korolkovaite and Rokas Laurinavičius

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Life is full of problems, big and small, and everyone has to deal with them. Running away from them to a remote island won't solve them; the pesky darn things seem to know how to get around, constantly finding a way to haunt us. Most of us mortals don't have the money for it in the first place.

So we have to solve them. And, believe it or not, we can do it even without having all the answers. All it takes is a little creativity. And to show you that human ingenuity has no limits when it comes to making life easier, Bored Panda has compiled a list of clever life hacks. Can't cut an onion without tearing up? Put on your ski goggles. Don't have a coin for a supermarket trolley? Use a round-headed key instead. In a way, I guess, we're all engineers, applying rational thinking to develop solutions. We just need to remember it.

#1 I Wanted Natural Light In A Basement That Has No Windows

Paid $10 for two old windows, painted them, frosted the glass, installed them into my wall with LED lights behind them. Now it’s always 2 pm at the basement bar.

ZZbrew

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853points

Don't worry to implement an idea you've just come up with, even if you think it looks dumb. Bence Nanay Ph.D., who is a BOF Research Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp, for example, thinks that stupidity is part of human nature.

"We are influenced by various cognitive biases that we are not aware of," Nanay wrote in Psychology Today. "The music we are listening to influences our opinion of the wine we drink, the weight of the spoon influences how creamy we find the yogurt and our moral assessment of strangers depends on what movie we have just watched. I call this paradigm of empirical findings the 'We're All Stupid' paradigm."

#2 That’s Brilliant

Rae Ellis

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805points

According to Nanay, even expert probability-theorists are very easily fooled into making the most basic mistakes about probability and wine experts routinely mistake white wine with added odorless colorant for red wine.

"I argue that we should embrace our stupidity. Rather than setting ourselves up to fail all the time, we should take our emotion-infused, irrational, oversimplifying mental setup as the baseline," Nanay said, adding that it is only in those rare and exceptional moments when we manage to overcome our stupidity and achieve true rationality.

To put it simply, you won't come up with something extraordinary if you're afraid to fail -- we all do.