The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity, by Matthijs van Boxsel, trans. Arnold & Erica Pomerans

We live in a reign of error. One of the imperatives of technology is to make systems foolproof. This is very difficult because, unfortunately, human beings are often more stupid than the machines that serve them. Take Murphy's Law.

This expression comes from the fertile literary ground of Edwards Air Force Base, California. Major John Paul Stapp, a biophysicist, was testing the limits of how much deceleration the body could tolerate. His means of doing this was to act as his own crash-dummy atop a rocket-powered sledge (a pretty stupid conceit, if you ask me). One day he exceeded his eye-popping best of minus 31G, but didn't know by how much because a technician had installed the accelerometers incorrectly. Stapp's assistant was Captain Edward Murphy Jnr, whose analysis gave rise to his famous Law: "If there's more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will end in disaster, then someone will do it that way."

In his promising, but Murphily exasperating, new book, Matthijs van Boxsel has a brilliant list of how technology makes us stupid. It includes these gems:

To which I can add a personal favourite. More pilots have been killed learning how to crash-land helicopters than have actually been killed in helicopter crashes.

But Van Boxsel – who lives in Amsterdam and may fancy himself somewhat in the tradition of Erasmus, whose Praise of Folly started this stupid business – is more concerned with the literary and anecdotal culture of stupidity than with hilarious technological backfires. What he has written is not an encyclopaedia, at least not in the sense that The Reader's Digest or Diderot would understand it, but a more anecdotal, eclectic assemblage of observations using fairy tales, cartoons, jokes, garden history and science fiction as source material. Unfortunately (some would say "stupidly"), he does not include an index, and the bibliography is a bit of a poor, thin thing.

Perhaps the best definition of stupidity belongs to Carlo M Cipolla, once professor of economic history at Berkeley and author of a 1988 essay "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity", not apparently known to Van Boxsel. Cipolla says that "a stupid person is one who causes damage to self or others without corresponding advantage". His other four laws are:

1. We always underestimate the number of stupid people (although Walter B Pitkin, whose Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity was published by in 1934, put the figure at 80 per cent of the population).

2. The probability of someone being stupid is independent of other characteristics.

3. The 20 per cent of us who are not stupid tend, stupidly, to underestimate the threat posed by the stupid majority.

4. A stupid person is dangerous.

An awareness of stupidity is a defining characteristic of intelligent life, a survival characteristic. Interestingly, the northern Europeans seem to have something of a monopoly in the subject. A bestseller of the late Middle Ages was Sebastian Brant's Das Narrenschiff. First published in 1494, this went into French as La Nef des Fous and was "Englished" by Alexander Barclay as The Shyp of Folys of the World in 1509. Possibly inspired by Columbus's voyage (debatably the most dangerously stupid adventure in history if current affairs are anything to go by), Brant used the motif of a crowded boat of storm-tossed unfortunates to satirise the variety of human folly and weakness. Today it would be a charter flight.

Rabelais, Cervantes, Pope and Sterne also concerned themselves with stupidity. Pope's "confederacy of dunces" slipped easily into the language, although Jeremy Bentham's "Cacotopia" (the worst of all possible worlds) did not. Van Boxsel does not concern himself with these major figures, although he does treat us to a bit of Dante, some Eliot and The Fable of the Bees. Most oddly he ignores Flaubert, whose posthumous Bouvard et Pécuchet is a brilliant 19th-century satire on human brainlessness.

Flaubert describes two clerks who set out, rather stupidly, to acquire all available knowledge. He read more than 1,500 books to prepare for it and the effort hastened his own death. "My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me," he groaned, "I doubt everything, even my doubt." As an appendix, Flaubert published his wonderful Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues, a spoof on the slack opinions of the bourgeoisie, whose indolent posturing Flaubert, the perpetual adolescent, so detested.

But was Flaubert's self-destructiveness stupid or not? At about the same time that the Oeuvres Complètes edition of Bouvard et Pécuchet was published, Ambrose Bierce wrote his essay "Some Disadvantages of Genius". He complained that geniuses are often not understood, then – perhaps realising this was a stupid thing to say – promptly went to Mexico and was never seen again. Genius and madness are close, but so are stupidity and high intelligence. Neither seems to be well understood.

The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity is a very good idea, but not a terribly good book. Not as academic as James F Welles's The Story of Stupidity (a history of idiocy from the days of Greece), nor is it as witty and imaginative as those other reference books whose genre began with Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary and which also includes Alberto Manguel's Dictionary of Imaginary Places.

But Wittgenstein said that if people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever happen. In this sense, human progress depends on the continuing practice of stupidity. So let's at least be glad that progress is assured.

Stephen Bayley's 'Dictionary of Stupidity' will be published by Gibson Square Books this autumn