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It's a nice story -- but you're apparently confusing moral and ethical behavior with the intelligence of that behavior. It's not hard to posit that we need more honest people in the world. It's difficult to posit that honesty and stupidity are the same. And it's almost impossible to posit that we need more stupidity in this world.

There's actually a lot of game theory out there that show that optimizing for short-term benefit by bypassing moral and ethical behavior has tremendous advantages over time. Thus, this child was acting much more "smart" than "dumb" -- and I'm sure that's because her parents helped her understand that.

I hope that you don't really believe we could use more dumb people in this world. I'm a pretty big proponent of education so that we can have fewer...I'm pretty sure you are too.



And you're apparently taking me literally while missing the point which was made figuratively...but you made a nice save by making the same point yourself following. I'm sorry; speaking in fables and allowing the reader to "read between the lines" is another cultural thing I suffer from.

I've read the "there's a lot of game theory" sentence several times and it seems to contradict itself, but if what you really meant to say was that bypassing short-term gains in favor of moral and ethical behavior has tremendous advantages over time, then I couldn't agree more; that was, in fact, my point. That was a lesson my father taught me when I was still very small--that grabbing the quick, obvious short-term benefit without considering the overall effects was truly the "dumb" approach.

The point of the story wasn't about intelligence and stupidity, it was about perspectives. From the perspective of her classmates, who saw the situation only from the narrow perspective of a single and very obvious benefit (having $100 in her pocket to spend on herself and her family) her decision was "dumb." From her perspective and that of her parents, who understood (although they probably couldn't have eloquently put it into words) the ripple effect that any single decision can have, it wasn't "dumb" at all, and she was perfectly willing to be called "dumb" by a group of people who thought they were smarter than she (I'm sure they could have composed a very logical argument for the benefits of taking the $100, vs. the "maybes" and intangibles involved in giving it back) in order to do what she believed was right.

That's the brand of "dumb" I think we can use more of.

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