Being evil is to being stupid what lying is to being wrong. The difference is purely that of intent. That is to say my definition of evil is making the world worse deliberately while my definition of being stupid is making the world worse by accident ². It can be hard to seperate the stupid people from the evil people since when questioned about it an evil person will plead ignorance rather than evil just as the stupid person will. Perhaps the best way to seperate evil people from stupid people is to see how well they understand their mistake after the fact. If they understand their mistake well it means they were potentially smart enough to not make it in the first place so they might be evil. While if they don't really understand their mistake very well then we can be confident they aren't evil. ¹

Being dumb and being evil has more overlap that you might initially expect since the definition of being dumb means you lack the ability to know the affect your actions will have on the world. But it not as simple as either understanding the consequences or not. It's a matter of degree. I think many evil people understand that their actions are having a negative affect on the world but lack the understanding to know exactly how large that affect is. Meanwhile the benefit of performing the evil action often has a very tangible benefit to them. So there is an imbalance in their understanding. They understand the benefit of their actions better than they understand the harm.

Another cause of evil behaviour is the belief in the world being a zero sum game. These people essentially believe that nothing matters. That wether you do good or bad doesn't matter because there is only a fixed amount of good in the world and that nothing they do will create good, only reallocate it. Though I'm repeating myself somewhat since this is just a manifestation of stupidity. I mention it because it's an extremely common one.

The last cause of evil behaviour is believing oneself to be a victim incorrectly. Though again the root cause is stupidity. But it's worth mentioning because it's common and it's also the one intelligent people are most likely to fall into.

Case studies

Tim Walz

Tim Walz is a good example of someone who lacks the intelligence to evaluate the cost/benefit ratio of his actions. He knows he is hurting America by bribing foreigners to vote in his state election but I doubt he understands the extent of the harm. Meanwhile he understands perfectly the benefit these votes have for his chances of winning the election. He likely imagines some benefits to others that him gaining power might have such as helping the weak. He imagines others to be exploiters of the weak so in his eyes it might be evil not to bribe foreigners. We will never know to what extent he understands to consequences of his actions but anyone that hears him talk will be confident that his understanding is partial at best. Therefore we can't know exactly the evil/stupid ratio behind his actions. But we know the ration is greater than 0 since if he is smart enough to understand how to use tax payer money to buy an election for himself then he must be smart enough to understand some of the negative affects of doing so. If he put as much thought into the downsides as he did into the upsides then he probably wouldn't of done it. If he never helps dismantle the fraud he built, now that his political career is over then we can be confident that his I'll intentions were a bigger component than his stupidity.

Zohran Mamdani

Another interesting case to consider is Zohran Mamdani. He campaigns on policies that appeal to stupid people. We can be confident they are stupid rather than evil because his policies are unlikely to ever benefit any of his voters while they themselves live in the city so presumably they don't simply want to see the city burn. But is he himself just as stupid as his voters. No he isn't. I'm confident this isn't the case because he identified over regulation in certain industries as a major bottle neck for growth. By removing these he will achieve enough economic growth to make his other policies look good. Which implies that he knows his policies are bad and knows the way to achieve real growth. A further giveaway that he is smarter than his voters is how consistently bad the policies he publicises are. If he was just plain dumb the policies he talks about the most would have some good ones just by chance. The deregulation is something he keeps secret from his voters while when he talked to Trump that's all he mentioned. Another sign that Mamdani has a high evil to stupid ratio is that he hired a fat lesbian with no firefighting experience to be the fire chief. Nobody is so dumb as to think that she is the best candidate for the job. There are several reasons he might of chosen to do this. The one I think is most likely given how early into his term he is is that he wanted to test his powers. He wanted to see if he could do something obviously stupid and have his orders followed. The only kind of person interested in knowing if he has that kind of power is someone who intends to abuse that power.

Sam Altman

Sam Altman is a harder case to analyse. He is clearly very intelligent and understands the consequences AI will have on the world. Though it seems he has an inaccurate model of other people. Since his lies are so easily uncovered by them he must underestimate the intelligence of others. He does this consistently over many years so it's a real blind spot for him. He must of noticed that it harms him by now. My guess is that he continues to do it because he thinks everyone does it. I suspect Altman is a natural zero sum thinker or at least a highly competitive person who can't imagine being any other way. It's very unusual for a technologist to be a zero sum thinker though if you think of technology as inevitable then it's possible to think of it as a zero sum game. Who knows what same would do if he won the race to AGI, I'm glad we are unlikely to find out though.

Jeffery Epstein

He presents the outward appearance of intelligence, like Hitler in that regard. But lacks much intelligence beyond what's required to do that. He seems to believe he is intelligent though primarily on the grounds that he is jewish and jews are smart. His capacity for evil seems to be rooted in the belief that other races don't matter, another similarity with Hitler. Combined with sex addiction and the desire to acquire resources for his people made him a generational menace to society.

George Soros

Like Sam Altman, George has demonstrated a high degree of intelligence with his ability to predict currency movements and profit from them. He has since used this money to influence the politics around the world but in the USA in particular. He uses relatively small amounts of money to get weak DAs elected thereby effectively reduce the number of basic laws that get enforced. It's hard to imagine that he does this out of benevolence but based on his background with the Nazi party we might charitably assume he has some deep hatred for government power and believes that it will always devolve into SS like control over the population. If that was really his belief though why is he shy in talking publicly about his actions. And why can't he come up with a better means of achieving his goals. His son Alex doesn't have the trauma of the Nazi period in his mind and yet seems to be wholeheartedly continuing his dads work. I suspect Soros learned to hate America in WW2 not the Nazis and seeks to damage it from within. Naming ones eldest son after the greatest barbarian conquerer of civilised peoples ever to exist is probably not a coincidence.