Are you ever stupid when disc golfing?

After playing a shot with a poor outcome you will often hear players call themselves stupid. You have almost certainly said it to yourself, out loud. Your Inner Asshole is responsible for this outburst, as I have discussed in previous articles. But is it correct? Were you ever stupid? Today you’ll find out.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It is surprising how few people are familiar with Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity. Its inventor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was sadly executed in a Nazi concentration camp in April 1945. His theory defines stupidity and intelligence in very simple terms. Basically:

Stupid actions harm both the actor and others. While Intelligent actions benefit both the actor and others. And so we can now easily define whether an action is truly stupid or not, or whether it is truly intelligent or not. Intelligent actions bring benefits, while stupid ones bring harm. And it is for this reason stupidity is a far more dangerous force than evil. This because it is possible to defend against the harm evil brings, while there is no defense against the harm stupidity can bring. Evil is also defined in the bottom right quadrant of Fig.1

Figure 1. The Bonhoeffer quadrangle

If we look at Figure 1, divided into quadrants above, we can see the losses and benefits represented by five possible outcomes of any action, and how those actions describe their perpetrators. The other categories are; Helpless people whose actions benefit others but harm themselves, and Bandits - those whose actions hurt others while benefitting themselves. In the centre lies Ineffectual People, whose intentional actions don’t produce outcomes. Ouch!

And so it is simplicity itself to understand there is only one situation at a DGC where you could properly be described as behaving stupidly – and that is if you disobey the number one rule of The PDGA’s Disc Golfer’s Code, which is to never throw if there is a chance a person could be hit.

Figure 2. The only three rules disc golfers must follow at all times.

Hitting a person with a disc is truly stupid because it hurts you by interfering with the outcome of your throw, it hurts another person physically, and it hurts the reputation of the game – especially if a non-player is injured. No other throw in disc golf can cause harm to your game as well as harm to other people. In fact making mistakes benefits other players by making you easier to beat. And that squarely places mistakes on the DGC into the category of “Helpless Actions”, or another more appropriately descriptive word; silly.

Most low-quality actions are silly, rather than stupid

Unless you were already familiar with Bonhoeffer and his theory, you probably never had a solid definition of stupid or intelligent. But now that you do, you can easily see that actions you have previously named as stupid were in fact silly, as no one else suffered harm or loss. And now you know intelligence benefits both the actor and others, we also have a definition we can apply to actions, persons, and also computer-based Intelligent systems like Chat-GPT. AI can only truly exist if its actions are consistently beneficial to both itself and humans. If it does not do this, then it is actually AS – Artificial Stupidity. And we already have sufficient Natural Stupidity! Please Note: Some "AI" like the Chinese DeepSeek are actually scams, where the "AI" just makes up stuff, which truly is Artificial Stupidity! This is diametrically opposed to Chat-GPT which sometimes makes mistakes, but does not invent stuff.

Now you know: you’re very seldom stupid!

Today you’ve learned your actions on the DGC (and in life!) are seldom stupid, but that you may be a little silly from time to time. I hope this knowledge will lessen the impact of bad decisions you make on the DGC (and in life!) and help you to forgive yourself more quickly. Wrapping up: You know what your goals are now!

Now you know how to define actions accurately, it should automatically be your goal to be as intelligent as possible (to bring as many benefits to yourself and others) and to be less silly (causing harm to yourself but giving benefit to others) and to never ever be stupid (where everyone loses).

Kia tika te rere – Enjoy the flight!