Terri! Thanks for the visit. Yes, indeed!
And thank you for reading right through. It was uncharacteristically long, oops!

LOL!

Good idea with the Don’t Do list. Though it will be pretty long I somehow don’t think I’ll forget not to do what’s on it.

Okay then, “homo imperfectus” not “homo stupidus.”

I always pack from a list, or I would leave vital things out. Amazing how things not on my list get forgotten, often new “necessities,” like the mobile wireless printer, or the charging box for my iPhone.

The passport story is something we could easily do. My husband has arrived at the airport without tickets (£75 per person fine), but never without his passport–so far!

Thanks for the very interesting comment, Ron!

Lol. I was trying to think of what Latin phrase I had used, and actually burst out laughing when I remembered. Homo stupidus, indeed!
Thanks, Steve!

On the preliminary issues of stupidity:

We’re not stupid. We are simply not perfect. Our significant error is not that we forget stuff and don’t think of stuff, it’s remonstrating with ourselves for doing so.

We cannot account for everything. Our brains are not magically enabled to anticipate, plan for, and then remember, everything necessary to perform some task. What makes us think of something necessary for a task? There has to be some prompt that comes from somewhere. Often this is memory, or assisted memory with to-do lists, or with lists of things needed for some deadline (such as the departure time of a light, or for a meeting).

Sometimes we make lists and intentionally, sometimes lazily, of sometimes for efficiency of the list, we leave things off – “Of course I won’t forget my passport. That’s so obvious it needn’t go on the list.” The, as the flight time gets nearer the passport is not only not on the list of active prompts, it’s pushed so far back as an assumption, not really forgotten, but it’s location isn’t triggering any concern.

I got a call from a friend heading down from Manchester in the UK to the Channel Tunnel. They’d forgotten their passports. They were in the bedroom drawer at home, and since I had the key to their house, if I got the passports and drove down to meet them half-way they could still make the trip in time. I searched their house, and made frequent update calls to them while they were heading back. No passports. Eventually thy missed their trip and arrived home. They searched the house and couldn’t find them. Eventually they realised what had happened. Their last trip was in their previous car, and my friend has hidden their passports in the boot (trunk) of the car – always the paranoid type he worried they might be stolen. Coming home from a trip he’d inexplicably tucked them back into the same spot after passing through customs. There they stayed. And the car was sold some time later, without a thought of trips abroad and the need for passports, without a thought, when emptying the car, for checking nooks and crannies where passports might be hidden (why would you think of that?)

If humans are stupid then other animals are stupid too. Look on youtube at the stupid things animals do. It’s rather stupid of an albatross to get caught and made to look stupid by waddling on deck.

We don’t notice the stupidity of wild animals, because they don’t do the complex things we do. Making lists, thinking ahead, planning, checking, are all complicated things that stupid animals can’t do, and so they do make mistakes doing those things that make them look even more stupid.

We are all natural animals. It seems unlikely that humans evolved a specific capacity to remember passports, to to even think about the concept of requiring some document to pass through some port. About the most complex animals do is mark their own territory. They may also sniff the rear of similar animals to make sure they are part of the same group, so does that count as a passport? But you can hardly forget to take your own rear along with you.

We are all natural animals and we don natural things. It has become a natural thing of human brains to invent stuff, like passports, since sniffing rears doesn’t work. You might identify a foreigner in that way, but it doesn’t say if their homeland has a mutual agreement with yours to allow them to come into your area. Human brains invent stuff on different scales, thanks to our brains. But they are still animal brains. The intellectual stuff is an add-on; and there’s no reason to think it should be an more reliable than any other capacity.

Since reason and memory, and making lists and checking them twice are complex tasks, we should expect to get them wrong sometimes.

If we were so good at this stuff that we never forgot to put stuff on lists, and never failed anticipated problems, we wouldn’t need lists in the first place.