I was thinking about this. I went to university, and I worked in tech for decades. I met many assholes but I didn’t meet anyone that would fit on the left half of the bell curve (less than 100 iq).
Since I’ve been living in that bubble my entire life, I’m curious of your stories. Have you met someone who was actually quite dumb (not just having opinions you don’t agree with) and do you have an example situation you remember you can share?
Hopefully this becomes more funny than hateful since intelligence is not the value of a person, but it can be funny to read the stories.
Met one? I am one
Yes bro. I work a customer facing job and drive in traffic. I encounter morons every day.
Yeah, every customer service worker has met loads. 😬
Usually management/CEO’s if you’ve tried to talk to them
I don’t think we’ve met yet.
No, I’ve only heard about them, usually at least three degrees of separation from me. There are levels of stupidity out there that are truly alien to me. I had the same realization you did… What I thought a stupid person looked like was not nearly as stupid as they can get. The fact that I usually need to go about three hops from myself to find them really goes to show how socially stratified they become. It’s very unfortunate because it seems to imply that people don’t really get exposure to people that are very much smarter than them, and the same goes for me.
the vast majority of is are in social bubbles our entire live where we are mostly around people who are mostly like us.
and it’s jarring and scary and painful when we are around people who aren’t like us. and won’t like you either.
and yeah, most aspects of ourselves, like intelligent or health, are deeply died to our social strata. sure, people do fall and rise, but it’s not that common, especially anymore.
I’m someone who got to spend time in a few different bubbles in my lifetime, and sometimes that ‘exposure’ really did not benefit me in any way and I think I might have been better off had I not had it. at least, life would have been simpler/easier.
Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of bubbles that I want no part of. But it would be nice if I felt like I knew some people who were dramatically smarter than myself. I’ve been able to help other people with problems. And they thank me and tell me how nice it is to be able to go to me and get help. But honestly, I don’t have many people like that myself. I guess even if I did, then all that would happen is they would just solve my problems… And then I would be up at their level and have whatever their level of problems are. 🧐 I’m talking purely about intelligence here, not like “social level” (ew), to be clear
Being dumb and being lazy is a fine line. I meet a lot of dumbasses that I think just don’t care enough to try.
Also I see myself in the mirror everyday
Yeah, what people mean by “smart” is to a great extent really “attentive.” Raw IQ (to the extent that it’s measurable) has to be significantly different before it matters more than attention. And the thing about attention is that it can wain, be captured, be exhausted. The act of maintaining/directing it changes tenor from moment to moment, decade to decade.
yeah, and when people think you are smart, it’s that you are attentive to the thinks they value or think you should be attentive too. otherwise, they think you are dumb, if you are attentive to things they don’t value.
hence the idea that smart people are socially stupid, because they are not socially attentive to the thinks that are socially acceptable, they attend to the ‘wrong’ things.
Not every low IQ person is the same, but generally they are just frustrating to deal with and need a lot of slow, extra handholding. If you give them a paper with directions/explanations, they’re not going to read it and try to understand it. They’re going to ask you to explain it, and they may just give up on trying to understand it. If you need them to look something up and figure it out for themselves, they just won’t. If there’s a consequence, they don’t modify their behavior or seem to care. They’ll do what they’ll do, and whatever happens after will happen after. They operate through the world with really poor understandings of everything that goes on around them, and it doesn’t bother them. Someone else will tell them what to do.
Honestly I think intelligence is a vector, not a scalar. There are lots of things that contribute to it. If you have to boil it down to a single thing, I’d say the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated facts or ideas. In fact I seem to remember there was a show called Connections with this as its premise, tracing cause and effect between historical events that seemed otherwise unrelated. I remember watching it and feeling very dumb.
I’ve hit what I think are the limits of my cognition on a few occasions, and it’s always a scary experience. First was probably failing calculus II in college for the second time. I had this distinct feeling that no amount of studying or sheer willpower was going to make me understand it. The latest was when I kept failing a certification exam. I had been trying over and over, but my score was actually getting worse. I still maintain that I could have passed the test if it were presented differently, like if there was more time, or if I were given better tools than just a bunch of unsearchable JPGs of log output scattered around the screen.
This doesn’t answer your question, but I thought I’d put it out there.
EDIT: my spatial reasoning is nonexistent, so I have a hard time comparing the sizes of two objects if they’re not directly in front of me. This comes up most often in the kitchen. I can’t deduce the most appropriate size pot or bowl for a given task, so I default to the largest, which is of course hardest to clean and takes up more room in the fridge. And I don’t think it’s down to inexperience either. The only way I can figure out if a leftover container will fit said leftovers is by actually placing them in the container, which of course dirties it, so if it doesn’t fit I have to get another one. So again I just use the largest one I can find. I’m sure there’s a visual comedy routine in there somewhere.
I have met people who were confidently wrong, and no I don’t mean people who’s worldview differed from mine. When I was in 5th grade, I had an argument with a grown man who thought ants weren’t animals. I think he just thought “animal” meant terrestrial vertebrate. Pretty sure he had gone to college, too.
That is a good analogy, esp as because intelligence changes over time. It is not a fixed value.
It’s more like a physical ability. The more you practice it, the easier and stronger it becomes. The less you do, the more it atrophies. And just like our bodies, it’s growth and it’s decline are largely linked to our aging processes.
I don’t understand why people are so insistent intelligence is this fixed property that is innate. If is, however, limited. Some folks have the gift of a life and environment which lets their intelligence flourish, others, do not. Same with athletics.
Not just aging, I would say intelligence is highly variable just on an individual level due to all sorts of factors. How much rest you get, the quality of said rest, current physical comfort level, distractions, stress, whether you’re hungry or have eaten recently, time of day, whether there’s a time constraint, etc etc etc. I wonder how many “stupid” people are genuinely that way even in the best conditions, or if the majority are just suffering from any of multiple detractors on them. Because of this I try not to judge, because I don’t know their lives.
Anyone here thinking that they’ve never met a dumb person probably IS the dumb person lol
I got that comment a few times in this thread. :) Yeah maybe!
It’s just a variation on the old saying: if you run into one asshole, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day long…
Not calling you dumb OP
Well, but that is natural if everyone, really everyone around you is smarter…
Certainly. Probably not enough because this time period still threw me for a loop. So although I have met them they did not seem predominant. Honestly how smart a dumb a person is not such a big deal as much as how smart they are vs how much they think they are. Like there are folks who realize they were not the head of the class and sorta keep quite and identify folks to get advice from and then there are some who completely do not realize how little they understand things and will be insistive of all sorts of crap. Honestly one mark of intelligence I often see is a massive realization of how much they don’t know.
I hear there were some intelligent people on my dad’s side of the family. But my mom’s side is kinda dumb.
My wife’s family has some dumbos as well, dunno how you got away from all that.
Now, my immediate bubble is full of professors, engineers, etc. So, I dunno. It’s a mixed bag, and i kinda assumed everyone had that experience given that i have a few data points of that.
¯\(ツ)/¯
What makes someone an ‘actually dumb’ person? Because everyone has a different definition of 'dumb.
An atheist might call religious people ‘dumb’ for believing in a ‘Sky Daddy,’ while a pro-vax person and an anti-vax person might accuse each other of being ‘dumb’ for not subscribing to their beliefs.
Ive known several MAGA people.
One in particular stands out, she was in charge of processing bills for our company, and she basically got all her propaganda from fox news. The company is/was a civil engineering firm (I no longer work there), we specialized partly in large municipal water projects, dams, water infrastructure, injection wells, large scale stormwater percolation, reservoirs etc.
During the big California wildfires (when firefighters kept not getting water out of the hydrants), the head engineer and the lead technical engineer held one of their once-a-month training lunches, and they decided to go over the California wildfires and the effects on the water infrastructure.
This lady stands up, and interrupts the lead technical engineer (who was going over flow/pressure/friction equations to show why hydrants ran dry when there was so much demand), to insist that the reason California is running out of water is that “Newsom drained the reservoir to protect some stupid fish” and other fox news idiocy. Spent a solid 5 minutes trying to tell a bunch of civil engineers a bunch of “information” about water systems that was so hilariously wrong that it was actually impressive.
That was a very awkward few minutes while HR tried to tell this lady that she needs to let the engineers actually learn how to do the job.
Yeah I have seen examples of this behavior on YouTube. People become very convinced about something and it warps their entire view of reality. And yeah, some people don’t realize that other people can be much, much better at something than they are, and they should listen, not talk in that situation. :)
Wait haven’t you ever had to go to like, the DMV or a Walmart, or a CVS at 11pm? I’m not saying the professions are filled with dummies but the cross section of public you encounter there is sure to have a few dummies.
Plenty
