To clarify here, I don’t feel like I’m significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying “facts.”
Keep in mind that you, along with everyone else, know very little all in all.
The things you do know will be important to you, naturally. Their understanding and their importance will also feel obvious, also naturally.
So anyone not knowing these obvious important things will instinctively feel like an absolute idiot to you.
This is a mental trap. Try to avoid it. The less respect you have for others, the less able you will be to really listen to other standpoints and learn from them, leading to a vicious cycle of alienation.
know
Wine is wine, bread is bread. Let us not conflate lack of reasoning (stupidity) with lack of knowledge (ignorance).
Reasoning is based on knowledge. There have to be things you accept as truths first before you can start reasoning, and those truths are not universally shared, nor do they have the same weight for everyone. That includes you and me.
There are things we don’t “know”, and things we don’t know that we don’t know, but we nevertheless think of ourselves as informed and capable of reasoning. To someone who knows more than us, they’d consider us stupid. It’s not about objectivity, it’s about looking down on those that don’t know things you know and declaring them less-than.
The basic point is there are countless factors big and small that influence any individual’s thoughts and ideas at any given moment. Our minds are very complex things, and our lives are messy, absorbing all kinds of information and stimuli that affect it in ways we don’t properly understand or even realize.
When we talk about people being stupid or smart, we’re just reducing that complexity so we can make simplistic insults that make us feel better about ourselves, but ultimately aren’t saying anything meaningful about the human condition.
And there’s a lot of dark history behind this, too. The history of psychology is riffe with falsehoods about quantifying intelligence, and often it was simply about prejudice.
You want to call people stupid for doing stupid things, sure, I get that. I do that. We all do. But the more you try to create these general arguments about human stupidity, the more it unravels, and the more it reveals about you.
I won’t address everything because it’s a lot of text, OK? (I did read it though.)
I think that it’s more accurate to say that reasoning is a “tool” that you use to handle knowledge. And sure, without knowledge you aren’t able to use reasoning, but sometimes even with knowledge you aren’t able to do it either - we brainfart, fall for fallacies, etc.
Another detail is that ignorance is far more specific - a person isn’t just “ignorant”, but “ignorant on a certain matter”. For example it’s perfectly possible to be ignorant on quantum mechanics while being informed on knitting, or vice versa. In the meantime intelligence - and thus stupidity - is split into only a handful of categories (verbal, abstract, social, etc.).
To someone who knows more than us, they’d consider us stupid.
They’d consider us ignorant. At least if following the distinction that I’m emphasising.
When we talk about people being stupid or smart, we’re just reducing that complexity so we can make simplistic insults that make us feel better about ourselves, but ultimately aren’t saying anything meaningful about the human condition.
Not necessarily reducing it but I get your point, given that I think that it’s simply easier to talk about ignorance and stupidity as behaviour than as something inside our “minds” (whatever “mind” means). And in both cases it’s behaviour that we all engage; some more than others, but we all do.
Right, but when these important things are also very basic things everybody needs to know, like how to boil an egg, how to vote, how to dry wet clothes, how to treat people and items carefully and with respect, etc, I don’t have much sympathy for adults who come across as an idiot in these ways, you know?
There’s things that other people don’t know because they’re not as interested in them of course, but that’s not what bothers me, it’s all the stuff they should all know that they’re ignorant of… :-(
I couldn’t boil an egg. I don’t like them, I don’t eat them, and I have no particular need to prepare them for anyone else.
By your standards, I guess I’m an idiot?
So, sure, you may not currently know the procedure. But you could easily boil an egg if you had 60s to google it first.
Some people wouldn’t be able to figure it out. Stupidity isn’t really accurate though in my experience, I think it’s more being overwhelmed and sometimes just having an aversion in general to change and learning. People can often have really bad experiences early in life (ironically, at the hands of people like OP who categorize them as morons for their honest ignorance) that set them up to want to never leave their comfort zone, which is itself again seen as “stupid” by the same people, thus perpetuating the cycle forever.
It even goes beyond this.
Everyone thinks they’re smarter than everyone else. Smarter than doctors, scientists, and engineers. Definitely smarter than whatever the political or ideological “other side” is.
It’s ruining our society. When George Carlin did his bit about “how stupid the average person is”, he forgot to mention how 99% of us assume we skew into the “smarter than average” side.
I can’t have conversations with people I used to respect, relatives, old friends, or even casual acquaintances without everyone blathering on about how stupid these people are or that group is. I hate it.
Yes, but they’re literally being conditioned into it. You and me too. No one is immune to propaganda.
I used to hold people accountable for their (lack of) knowledge, but there’s literally billions being poured into subverting these people daily. You can’t really hold that against (most of) them.
Education is the obvious fix, but at least in America, the idiots are trying to destroy it. If people learned critical thinking, almost everything else would fall into place. If we stopped reinforcing learned helplessness and made people practice logic and learn consequences, society would see a huge benefit. People need to be held accountable for their ignorance. Otherwise, they won’t learn. Those who refuse to learn should rightfully be shunned, because they’re the biggest propaganda weapon out there.
Cognitive dissonance is another major reason for idiocracy. The MAGAts are so blatant about their love for it. “Wokeness” is healing from cognitive dissonance, which they’ve labeled as a virus.
I’m sympathetic and offer to help someone if they’re being a bit stupid (all of us have our moments), but if they refuse, that’s where they should be held accountable.
On the other hand I am pretty confident I am not an idiot, and if IQ tests done when I was 8 count I know I’m not. That does not mean I don’t regularly do something wrong, or learn something completely obvious. I’m sure that in those situations somebody else wonders how I lived this long.
if IQ tests done when I was 8 count
They don’t, unless you’re currently 9.
They don’t period.
If only… I’ll stick to being pretty confident I’m not an idiot then.
Yeah, I just learned how axolotl is pronounced from SciShow Kids
Teeny tiny axolotl
There is really not a lottle
of you. Not a jot or tittle
So I’ll call you axolitl
See, the fact you think the IQ tests matters in any way means your uniformed about it, which comes back to the topic at hand.
IQ tests are bullshit; it’s been proven many times.
Yet you were told they weren’t. And that informed how you think.
I could call you stupid for bringing up an IQ test.
Or I could accept that people not having all the knowledge in the world is just part of being human, and that there are many things you know that I probably don’t.
Just wait until AI is leveraged into it even more so. 😅
School kids these days saying, “When I grow up”… Yeah, that’s gonna happen.
At this point, Facebook users should qualify as a vulnerable population
“Vulnerable” like those who still believe in a magic sky daddy?
this is the most reddit post i’ve seen on lemmy
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In my experience, I have found the least intelligent people to also be the most vocal, which makes it look like they are overrepresented in the population.
Especially thanks to social media. E.g. there’s a video of the ISS on instagram and the comment section is filled with flat earth people and other crazies.
They’re insecure about their intelligence but too prideful to admit when they don’t know something, even to themselves.
the only cure for that condition is showing them how stupid they are, so that everyone can see
this.
I would put more but it would mess up the comedy. anyway go to a public library and look at folks on the computers. If you are old enough you will remember that going to like a 7/11 or such there always seemed to be some crazy guy talking to himself. You never see them now because they are on the internet all day.
Yeah, “stupid” is not defined around average intelligence. This whole panel is an example of a straw man fallacy to undermine someone saying “people are stupid”.
Sure, “stupid” isn’t defined around average intelligence, but “people” is defined around the average person. So, by saying “stupid” is not defined around average intelligence, you’re really criticizing the phrase “people are stupid”…
…which is exactly what this comic is doing
Saying “people are stupid” is the same as saying “the average person is stupid”. What’s hard to understand here?
Frankly, that is just a big pile of babble.
but “people” is defined [SIC] around the average person
There’s no “definition” here. The closest to what you said that would make some sense would be “but “people” implies a generalisation around the average person”, but it doesn’t work in your argument because it does not contradict what BananaTrifleViolin said. Nor it justifies your assumption that
by saying “stupid” is not defined around average intelligence, you’re really criticizing the phrase “people are stupid”…
I genuinely think that you did not understand what the other poster said, so I’ll repeat it under different words.
The comic has an implicit definition of stupidity as “lower than average intelligence” (see panel 2).
BananaTrifleViolin is highlighting that this is not the definition that people use for “stupid” when they say “people are stupid”. And that leads to a fallacy called “straw man”, where you misrepresent a position to beat it. Munroe (the cartoonist) is doing this, either by accident or on purpose. (It is not the first time he does this; his comic about free speech also shows the same irrationality.)
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What you’re really saying is “other people aren’t as smart as me.”
I like xkcd but I feel like Munroe is being assumptive here, assuming “your expectations are based on you”. Are they?
Agree. When I say “people are stupid” I mean they are living below their potential. The average person may have the intelligence, but consistently refuse to use it.
Yeah, I think that this is part of the deal.
When someone says “people are stupid”, they usually are not conveying “the average person has a lower-than-average intelligence”. And I don’t think that they’re even comparing people with some point of reference (the average, or themself, or someone else); in the context they’re usually criticising some behaviour that they see as stupid. For you this behaviour would be “living below their potential”, for me it’s “showing blatant lack of reasoning”, for @[email protected]’s (from another comment) “lack of curiosity, drive to learn and critical thinking”.
That’s not how you respond to someone saying “people are stupid.”
There seems to be a shortage of critical thinking and problem solving skills, that’s for sure.
What I see that makes it worse now than in the past is the Internet. It’s easy now to find a group that agrees with your delusions and live in an echo chamber where mistaken beliefs are not challenged.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” - George Carlin
On average people think they are a lot smarter than the average person
Bad drivers rarely believe they are bad at driving.
Nothing does quite so good a job revealing how highly they think of themselves as sharing that Carlin quote. It’s the clarian call of the faux intellectual.
I hate Carlin. Mostly because he’s usually got a point.
George Carlin did an incredible job making a certain type of person believe being a nihilistic asshole was the height of wisdom.
I think the average person isn’t very bright. And that’s okay. Most of us don’t need to be discovering new maths or creating new works of art.
But anyone is going to perform worse when they’re stressed, distracted, afraid, hungry, or similar. A lot of people, that’s their daily life. Something like less than half of americans can afford a $1000 surprise bill. You’re not going to see anyone’s best showing when they’re worried about feeding themselves tomorrow.
Incidentally, republican policies suck and make more people scared, angry, and financially insecure.
I’ve seen a $2 and a $100 bill and even had a few, but where’d you get a $1000 bill? I’ve never seen one of those.
I really hope this is an on topic funny.
I might be getting wooshed because this is wordplay, but ‘bill’ in this context is used like ‘invoice’ or ‘expense’
Something like less than half of americans can afford a $1000 surprise expense.
I get it, I was just leaning into the 90%.
Buy 4 new tires for your vehicle. All at once. Take a look at the vimes “boots theory of economic injustice” principal. 1000 seems extreme to you, but getting through the winter in certain parts can be sobering.
The point isnt the dollar figure, it’s the principal.
principle
It’s funny because a principle actually is a dollar figure when talking about finances.
It is old money, and not printed anymore. $1000 bills do exist, however.
They’re basically a collectors item these days. They haven’t been in circulation since the 60s or so. Grover Cleveland is the president on the $1000 bill.
I think it’s important to consider why you think this. Try and explain what makes someone stupid.
I do tend to agree with the general statement that most people are pretty fucking stupid. If IQ were a meaningful number of intelligence, I’d wager that it’s heavily skewed left. Meaning that the common saying of “think of how stupid the average person and realize half of all people are below that” is even worse when you use the median.
For me, what makes someone stupid is lack of curiosity, lack of drive to learn, and lack of critical thinking. I think stupidity is a learned trait, and our modern society is doing its damnedest to make sure children learn it as soon as possible. Never question authority, you only need to memorize so you can pass the test, and you will be spoon fed the information.
Then soon as you get out of school, you have to get a job and occupy most of your time with work or sleep, you’ll likely get only two-three hours of time to yourself each day, meaning you’ll lack the time to break out of the cycle. And the system compounds at most jobs. Your manager is likely stupid, meaning they want you to never question authority, just do what they tell you, and ask them very little questions.
I also think the trillions of dollars that are spent on advertising strongly influences this. And being constantly bombarded with psychological manipulation encourages stupidity.
I also think stupidity is compounding in and of itself. The less you know, the more you can just make hasty assumptions, then use those assumptions as fact for your next set of assumptions.
It’s also contagious. Being around people who are less stupid than yourself makes you feel bad, so you aren’t around them much or encourage them to join you in being stupid.
There is a massive difference between not knowing something, and choosing to not know something. Just about every person in the world has access to the greatest source of information that has ever been created. There are free courses on just about every topic you could ever desire to learn, fingertips away.
There is also a massive difference between knowing something and rote memorization. Being able to follow the logical chain of facts is very important, so is being able to critically think about a topic. I think being “bored” is great at combatting stupidity in this way. Spending time with no stimulation is great for engaging your brain in actual thoughts. Consider dedicating time to just thinking: no audiobooks, music, podcasts, video games, movies, TV shows, social media, books etc. Just sit and be bored for a while. Meditation is a great entry into this.
They’re actively driving the bus off the cliff.
Think about every scientist and official at cop28 desperately working to halt a 1.5c red line. Did the public rally around this effort? Did coal rollers stop intentionally injecting uncombusted fuel into their exhausts to pwn the libs? Did the governments of the world including the US stop subsidizing new extraction?
1.5c is gone; by the time people ‘agree’ it’s fucked and unify to stop pollution at all levels we’re going to be in dire straits.
It’s an easy thing to just assume people are stupid. It makes the world nice and simple and if only people would stop being stupid and start being smart (smart like you, obviously!) All the problems of the world would be solved.
For a lot of people, reality isn’t so simple. The common man is already struggling. Throughout history, the age people get married and have kids has been indicative of the stress civilizations are under, and many people aren’t having kids before they get too old to have kids because that’s the level of stress the common man is under. Global civilization is facing a demographic bomb as every continent except Africa is facing a massive reduction in population in coming decades because nobody is having kids because life is so hard.
As a study in contrasts, just look at wages vs. rent while I’ve been an adult. Minimum wage went from 11/hr to 15/hr. Meanwhile, my first 2 bedroom apartment was 350/mo, and today you can’t get anything for less than 1200. A few years before I rented, there were decent houses available for $50,000 and today the average house price nationwide is $800,000. (Not the US, obviously)
So when a bunch of the business leaders and politicians who magically seem to get richer every time something is done “for our own good” – politicians who make as much as a senior engineer on paper but all of whom seem to become fabulously wealthy regardless (huh wonder where all those extra millions came from) while the common man has suffered – get together to figure out new ways to squeeze the common man, is it really so stupid to be skeptical? “Don’t worry everyone, we’re going to make your life even harder but it’s all for your own good.”
Having the summit in Dubai is fitting – a city of extreme inequality, paid for with oil money, built by slaves, ruled by kings.
You can try to guilt and shame people into not caring about basic biological drives, but you actually can’t. Entire generations of people have been pushed so far that their family lines will end with them. It’s comfortable enough – like being in a pool of comfortably warm water right up to your neck that you can’t escape from, but when you can see people plotting to add more water to your pool the next step is you drown.
In previous eras, common people being this stressed out led to the fall of the Roman empire, the French reign of terror, the end of the Romanov dynasty in Russia or the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. While you call people stupid for not listening to their leaders, historically speaking those same leaders will be lucky to keep their heads on their shoulders.
Exactly my point, there will always be people like you to apologize and say “oh the end of civilization won’t be that bad, stop demonizing the very fucks that got us into this mess.”
Thanks.
Ah, you’re illiterate. I guess it’s easy to think everyone else is stupid if you can’t comprehend the words they say.
A moron would follow this line of thought so I’m not surprised to see you pursuing it. Your grand children will curse your name, if a woman is ever reduced to the state where they have to procreate with you.
You might be surprised, on many fronts.
Empathy for others who are not exactly like you is actually considered a virtue when you’re not in the little bubble that is reddit’s toxic, hateful political disease. Despite what you seem to think, empathy for someone who isn’t exactly like you is a key requirement of a healthy marriage.
Man, I hope I live to see my grandchildren read my book, The Graysonian Ethic: Lessons for my unborn son (He’s born now, and he’s beautiful). I bet parts of it will seem archaic, since it’s directly addressing contemporary issues, but other parts will likely be timeless. It’d be really interesting if I could see them come of age and we’d get to see what they thought of their grandparents. The world will likely be a much different place by then, and not in ways you think.
I’ve always felt like most people lack problem solving skills. Nobody knows how to use Google or just figure things out themselves. Friends often call me for tech support but it’s often very basic things like how to plug in an HDMI cable or how to fix an error that says how to fix it in the error code.
I work tech support too and deal with behavior like this daily. 90% of what I do is simple things that can be found on the first Google result. People open tickets asking how to unmute their microphone in Teams, it’s ridiculous.
I feel the same way but I think I’m just socially stunted and can’t ask for help so I learned to figure it out myself. I don’t have the knowledge, data, or authority to say they’re not troubleshooting differently than I do because they socialize better than me.
Never really thought about it that way, but now that I think about it, me too. Don’t get me wrong I am naturally curious, but I hate asking for help too. I don’t want to bother anyone
For me, it’s not that I don’t want to bother anyone. It’s just that I’m an arrogant pos and I don’t like to admit I don’t know something until I’ve tried to figure it out myself. Kinda toxic, but this forced me to learn a lot of things by myself or via tutorials online.
I think I’ll just share my point of view, if you don’t want to hear it then let me know and I’ll delete this comment.
Projecting the image that you know everything seems kind of brittle to me - once someone sees through once, they’ll never believe you about anything. Besides, it’s okay that you don’t know; if you’re a good learner (you obviously are), then what you know right now is almost a moot point. “I dunno, but give me a few minutes”. That’s my perspective anyway
Nope, you’re absolutely right. But I’m not projecting that I know everything. I just won’t ask for help unless I’ve tried by myself, and can’t do it.
I don’t want to be absolutely clueless about hoe something is done when I ask
error messages thing, man.
I had a user complain that they “didn’t know what to do” with the error message “Your calendar access has expired, please click this button to reconnect. [Big orange button saying “Reconnect”]”
I said “Did you click reconnect?”
“No”
it immediately fixed it.
I know and have dealt with very highly educated and intelligent people who just can’t do proper thorough problem evaluation and solving, and I don’t mean just hands on practical things, I mean obtaining information, thinking a situation through and coming out with an explanation and possible solutions.
I think it’s really a question of practice in Analytical Reasoning, which people in STEM have lots of because that’s what those domains require (try designing a bridge using persuasion techniques from Business Management and see what happens) so they constantly practice it, but most other areas don’t so people there have little practice in that mode or reasoning (but lots of practice in other ways of thinking).
You see it here tons of times: people who clearly are intelligent and educated arguing via semantics, appeals to emotion and just about a ton of falacies, all of which are noticeable as obviously flawed in logical terms with just a tiny bit of analytical thinking.
One thing I learned from my period of contact with the Theatre world some years ago (pretty much the opposite of what I do for a living), is that there are many ways of being highly intelligent (it was quite suprising for me the intelligence required to be a good actor) and maybe is better not to judge or, worse, to presume.
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90% of people feel like that
If you define “stupid” as “lacking critical thinking skills”, then I agree.
I think what upsets me the most is that people refuse to learn from past mistakes.
It’s a lot easier to deny that you’re wrong than to learn something new.
easier to a fool a man, than it is to convince him he’s been fooled.
Yes and you can check how much a state spends per student and see why.
Idiots from Florida come in at $9k per student where students from NY/NJ get $12-$15k and the difference shows. If you’re hiring out of Florida expect them to suck and have less skill than 70% of the country.
Idaho and Montana have got to have some of the dumbest and most held back areas I have ever seen. Even their construction practices come from the dark ages in some cases.
Don’t even get me started on the South and Midwest as a whole.
Geniuses are rare and intelligence scores are bullshit.
Put money into schooling and fund teachers. You will solve your “everyone is stupid” problem for sure.
Gop wants people dumb, it’s by design.
Put money into schooling and fund teachers. You will solve your “everyone is stupid” problem for sure.
Completely agree with this.
Problem is, the goverment doesn’t want smart asses.
Effing US News had an article where they rated Florida as the best for college education. But looking at their criteria, it was because college there is cheap and easy to graduate from. It really seemed a poor choice of criteria and good only for starting online arguments.
