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.”
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What is wokeness?
Getting out of bed in the morning. Stupid. Huge mistake. Cannot recommend.
Coming down from the trees was the real mistake. Dumb monke
I think coming down from trees was fine but the whole human migration better have had a damn good reason
Praise ba jeebus!
Can you rephrase this with better grammar and punctuation? (If you are more proficient in another language feel free to use that language.)
There’s always a grammar groupie waiting to suck off the band. Here you go ,;!:?.
Guys, I think we found the 90%
90% of people feel like that
I mean if it is a bell curve, even an average person is smarter than half the world. There’s a selection bias on social media because those heated and ignorant threads get memed and shared either by people who believe the nonsense or by outrage.
Do you think it is a bell curve?
Most tests of intelligence lands close to a bell curve. With how many different factors that can influence intelligence it seems quite likely (the average of many different distributions each with a peak in the center is likely to look like a bell curve)
More precisely: If you repeatedly draw values from a probability distribution and sum them up, the sum tends towards a Gaussian (central limit theorem).
I dunno. I’m pretty smart in some things, but I’ve also made some real bone-headed mistakes. Sometimes I’m rushing, sometimes I just truly don’t think about it. Sometimes while talking through what I think is the best solution, I figure out I’m wrong.
two things I’ve done.
-gotten a 3.9 GPA with honors through two years of medical school
-didn’t realize “Penn State” was in Pennsylvania until I stopped and thought about it
like, sometimes we don’t think about things enough. Sometimes we have a brain fart. Sometimes we’ve just never been introduced to a particular concept or factoid (being ignorant).
I think the only true stupidity is when people don’t learn from their mistakes, when people refuse to update their ideas to fit new facts, and when people remain willfully, maliciously ignorant as a point of pride.
-didn’t realize “Penn State” was in Pennsylvania until I stopped and thought about it
if it makes you feel any better I’m PA born and bred and I didn’t realize that Penn State and UPenn were different schools until I was in my 30s
Wait until you find out where Indiana University is
i thought it was Bicachusetts, don’t feel bad
I don’t think those are the things OP is talking about. I’m the same as you, but those are just things that never really clicked, happens to everyone. Hell, I’m like a neon light sometimes too, takes time to light up 😂.
Yes, myself included.
there’s a general degradation in the perceived value of things like thoughtfulness and humility… people think being loud and seeming not to care is the way to be… it’s all very tribal and childish…
Idiocracy was a prophecy
I feel like 20% of people are stupid but they cause 80% of the annoyances in my life.
The Pareto principle is everywhere in life.
And now I’ve learned what that rule is called. Cheers.
Everyone is stupid some of the time and after we’ve noticed all that it feels like we’re surrounded by idiots.
Truth is we’re just not seeing the competence.
The feeling of the intelligence or stupidity in others is all relative.
For example an IQ around 170 or above makes somebody have a 1-in-a-million level of intelligence, so for such a person 99.9999% of the population feels less intelligent, with the level felt as “stupid” being a lot higher than average intelligence, to the point that for such a person “entry level” geniouses - those people with an IQ just above 120 - often feel “stupid”.
And then there is the whole non-IQ factor to the feeling that somebody is “stupid” - for example, intelligence (even the 170 IQ level) can be “stupid” (more broadly “fool”, “gullible”, “weird” and so on) because of lack of wisdom, life experience (in the sense of having lived, as age by itself means little for those who don’t do much living) or even just social awkwardness. (The Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, though a stereotypical portrait, is quite a good example of that difference between “intelligence” and “smarts” or “wisdom”)
You could say that IQ is computing power but with the wrong software or bad data, it’s still going to underperform.
Personally, I think it’s best not to go around passing judgment in such absolutist terms as “stupid” since we’re all “stupid” in some domains and often one’s “I’m so much smarter than these people” feeling is nothing more than a case of the Dunning-Krugger Effect.
High intelligence people, especially, need to learn that IQ by itself is not enough and take to hearth Socrate’s dictum: “All I know is that I know nothing” (or, as I read it: “The more I learn, the more find out I have yet to learn”)
There’s also what another comment pointed out. It’s not so much that most of us are stupid but that we’re not really equipped for the internet as a species. We get bombarded with too much crap from all directions, get stuck on echo-chambers, and don’t really fact-check, even when we do, because you can’t just fact-check everything that’s thrown at you 24/7. It’s a lot easier to not care, or care too much without substantiating your beliefs.
For example, Covid wasn’t the first time the anti-mask, anti-Vax, conspiracy theorist, all-around crazy movement popped out their head. It wasn’t the first time money beat forethought. It wasn’t the first for much of the negative shit we saw, and yet for me it marked the moment I lost hope for the future of our species, after all, how can we hope to deal with stuff as huge and hard to see as climate change if we can’t even believe the existence of a virus that’s actively killing us? Are they all stupid for not putting in some effort to prevent this virus from spreading and killing millions? Am I stupid for thinking they would? Am I stupid for losing hope due to listening to all these stories of people fighting masks and vaccines? How many people worldwide actually fought back and resisted? You see it in my own words, I’m sort of convinced the crazies got riled up, and for sure in some parts of the world they did, but the scope of the internet spreads all sentiments on the matter to every corner of our interconnectedness, before we’re even aware it’s happening. All of a sudden we’re seeing conclusions from all sides without checking for how they all got where they did nor how many people actually believe it, we pick one side, maybe skim over another, and decry the rest as insane and sometimes even malevolent. These republicans sure want their voters dead or at the very least are too stupid to understand the dangers of the virus, this bill gates guy sure wants everyone microchipped or at the very least wants the medical world in his hands, these Chinese fellows for sure developed and released the virus or at the very least had it slip from their fingers. How am I supposed to know, or care, for all of it? How is any of us? Is it our personal responsibility to know and clear every fact we can? Spread awareness and fact-check everything? Just shut up and don’t get involved? What the fuck do we do, what can we do? Do we fight dissenting voices online? Do we march on the streets over beliefs we might not fully grasp nor could we?
We’re just a bit too overloaded with everything to make a good job as a species about anything. At least that’s what I think, at least for the individuals that make up our species. Whatever you choose to believe, whatever actions you choose to take in response, someone somewhere will see you and think you’re an absolute idiot… And, I think, there’s not much to do about it.
That stuff was mainly an US phenomenon and, IMHO, was quite a good display of how easy it is to tickle people’s emotions so that they override reason: mask-wearing and vaccination was turned into a kind of tribalist signal by manipulative politicians and for the vast majority of people the need to fit in (an other emotional aspects of tribalism) easilly override rationalism (which isn’t even practiced in any sistematic way by most people) so you ended up with people treating the whole thing in the most irrational way and denialism being almost entirelly a phenomenon of just one political and social tribe in the American society.
In countries were tribes are less adversarial (for example, places with voting systems that do not mathematically favour a power duopoly) or were none of the dominant tribes turned Covid denialism into a tribal thing, vaccination takes were much higher and refusal to wear a mask near non-existent (especially because the kicking out of the handful of mask-wearing refusers from places like supermarkets was approved by an overwhelming majority of people).
Mind you, had some local tribe taken that up as a tribal flag, you would see the same phenomenon as the US, maybe not as much because almost no other Democracy has such a rigged voting system and hence the power split into two sides with a wide chasm in between when it comes to social and moral issues.
In my opinion as a species we might have came up with quite a lot of fancy tech in the last handfull of millenia but we haven’t evolved that much as intelligent beings, both individually and in our social structures.
You, of course, are firmly in that 10%, I assume.
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.
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 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
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.
To sum up everything you said.
Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
I think a lot of it is that we all have topics which we are knowledgeable about. Common discourse then takes different topics, and some people will contribute to the discussion who don’t understand the underlying stuff so much, they have different interests.
The problem is when you read a tech article as a tech worker, you laugh at how stupid the journalist and the commenters are. Then you read an article on some geopolitical event, or some natural phenomenon, and you take what is written as gospel, and even comment on it on forums, despite not having the same level of understanding as in your favourite topic. And you don’t feel you’re part of the stupid 90% then and there.
Only when I’m driving
That’s a significant insight. It’s only once you’ve been in a car with someone driving that you really become aware of how “awake”(?) They are. Observance and prediction seem to come with higher intelligence, and some people do not have it.
Let’s be honest, it’s because the yanks dominate Lemmy and Reddit and I’ve had custard that’s less thick than most of them 😂😂
And the lettuce was less thick than the PM it outlasted.
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.
