Does anyone else feel like 90% of the population is stupid?
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.
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... :-(
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
But my blood needs Teflon in it to be nonstick
Keeps the arteries clean
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.
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.
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.
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.
90% of people feel like that
If you define "stupid" as "lacking critical thinking skills", then I agree.
I work in customer service. I wouldn't say that 90% of ALL people are stupid, but an astounding number of the people I have to deal with have ... unique ways of thinking, so to speak.
The most recent example was an olderly man who was absolutely furious because a box of candy he bought for his wife "tasted absolutely disgusting". We're talking about something similar to this but I won't link our actual product as I don't feel comfortable sharing that information.
Either way, those are friggin' bath bombs. It says so on the effing package. Just because they're labeled "vegan" doesn't mean that they're edible FFS!
So I have a story for this, one I'm not proud of mind you, but it happened. One time in a lush store they had these bath bombs that were literally modeled to look like cupcakes, I remarked that they almost looked edible. A STORE EMPLOYEE replied with this.
SE: They are edible.
Me: what? No they're not
SE: oh yeah they're totally edible go ahead and take a bite
Me: wait really?
SE: yeah!
So I take a bite of the cupcake looking thing and immediately the bitter ass taste of soap fills my senses, my eyes are watering and I spit it out into the trash. I kid you not this was like a punch in the face, I was sweating, I felt a huge headache coming on and my nose was on fire. Again I'm not really proud of this but in my defence, I was a dumbass teenager and someone who I reasonably thought I could trust told me something to mess with me and I took the bait.
The employee was nowhere to be seen after that, obviously he saw my gullible ass actually did it and got out of there with a pep in his step and a smile on his face. As for me, I had a pounding headache and slightly lavender scented breath for the rest of that day.
Honestly not the most egregious mistake I've seen, my local candy shop uses those exact bags and the font + color + shape of objects + "vegan" label suggest they're edible. Were they sold near the candy or near the bathroom products?
Bathroom products. In fact, they're currently located between the TP/paper towel section and the liquid soap dispensers & refill bags.
Granted, they DO look like white chocolate or something similar, but the product placement, package and the fact that it did not taste like food should have been rather obvious hints to maybe check the package again instead of driving all the way back to the store to yell at the employees. At least he had the decency to be embarrassed about it instead of starting the usual "you lost a customer, I'll never shop here again" shouting match, which is a big plus.
PS: he got a refund, but only because he was polite as soon as he realized his mistake. Normally, any sort of hygiene product is excluded from refunds, especially when it has bite marks.
to be fair I can't read bath bomb from the photo but I can read fruity and older folks tend to have worse eyesight to the point they just don't read small print.
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.
To paraphrase George Carlin, by definition half of the population is below average intelligence. But nobody thinks they're in that bottom half.
This is interesting to me though. Didn't most people (at least in developed countries) take tests in school? Get grades? I would think if you did below average on those you kind of....should know that you're in the bottom half?
I get that it's possible to make changes after schooling, and grades are only somewhat reliable (in that they also rely on effort) but still.
IQ tests were first developped because it seemed obvious not all students performed equally. On average a student that is good in a given discipline will also tend to do well in other unrelated disciplines. On average is the keyword here, outliers exist.
I think gifted students can easily tell what side of the curve they're on, even though they might not want to acknowledge it. It is not even avout the grades, because gifted students also often learn early on that they can get away by doing the minimum amount of work and still get passing grades. So they're not necessarily top of classes.
Gifted students get told they're fast learner all the time, and they notice how everyone else seem to be progressing in slow motion. They know.
I think it gets harder to self-evaluate the closer you are to the average, since most of your peers will be more or less just as intelligent as you. Then, the dullest you are, and the less you can identify competense and the more likely you are to be over-confident.
I think in the end, most people will end up believing they're above average because we tend to notice dumb people a lot. Ironically it is probably students who are just slightly above average who will have the most self-doubts, because they feel different from their peers, yet they can probably tell more gifted students are around.
Source: 50% my ass, 50% being surrounded by incredibly smart people who shared their personal experiences with me.
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.
Stupid? Maybe if verifying "facts" is your sole metric. I know people who aren't very media savvy who fall for some stupid propaganda, but they could empty my car's engine bay and put it back together again and have it cranking the same day. Or you can drop them in any body of water in a 250km radius and they'll know what fish can be caught there and be able to hook an edible-sized one in half an hour or less. We don't all have the same skill sets, but we ain't all "stupid".
I'd argue given enough time and effort almost anyone can become a domain expert in specific things and do incredible stuff. What distinguishes smart people from simpler folks usually boils down to them having a very easy time processing new stuff, which includes the ability to filter noise and fact check.
I don't like the term "stupid", but there hasn't been a whole lot of evidence supporting the idea that human intelligence is compartimented. Humans with high IQs tend to outperform in average at most of what they try. Low IQ probably means you will work harder and have to specialize to achieve the same degree of competency. This just my hot take, I've fallen into this rabbit hole before and read a lot on the origin of IQs tests. In the end, intelligence alone does not determine a person's worth anyway.
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.
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
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 😂.
i thought it was Bicachusetts, don't feel bad
Wait until you find out where Indiana University is
Realize that when you are in a group of people, the (set-theoretic) intersection of knowledge only decreases as you add members. But you are likely to assign individual ignorances to the group as whole. "He doesn't know this; she doesn't know that" equates to "these people don't know anything".
It also works in the opposite direction (well, up to a point, with too many people communication overheads become too much) - the more people with the more varied expertises and experiences you add, the more complete the group knowledge becomes.
PS: And that both things increase simultaneously with group size actually brings an interesting side to it - people seeking the "flaws" of others will find more "ignorant" people as the group size grows whilst those seeking the knowledge of others will find more total knowlegde as the size grows, or in other words, the spirit of those in the group or interacting with it matters can produce almost opposite conclusions and results.
I think we live in an age where advertisements are literally gaslighting, and also where large portions of the population are bombarded with advertisements on a daily basis. I'm not surprised if people's grip on reality gets a little wobbly, resisting all that propaganda is a lot of effort.
I think adblocking is the best thing I've done for my children.
Think about all those poor youtubers and the platform itself.
Lol obvious sarcasm, fuck 'm and the insane amount of ads that are nowadays considered normal.
That's a lot more complex than people are stupid. Occam's razor.
I would like to believe this is sarcasm, but it's impossible to distinguish fake stupidity from real stupidity; Poe's law.
I dunno your country or your premise, but I can state pretty confidently that the American school system is completely and utterly failing to prepare Gen Z. Working adjacent to the schools, even amongst the best and brightest the country has to offer are thousands upon thousands of students who fundamentally do not know how to think for themselves about anything.
All this to say, depending on if you're in the U.S., things might just keep getting worse. Especially if you're living in a deeply conservative state, I would not be surprised if the number really was 90%. It's really sad, but that's what happens when you attack public schools for decades.
fundamentally do not know how to think for themselves about anything.
What's sad is, that's the point. That's how they get prepared for the future.
A future where they work for their rulers and don't cause controversy.
Saddest part is, their teachers who should be encouraging intrigue and free thought are usually the first ones to fight back against it in their classroom. All to make their job easier, lol.
All to make their job easier, lol.
Not a teacher, but what I keep reading is that they're trying not to get pilloried by students' screaming MAGA parents.
It's not necessarily the teachers' fault. Most of the teachers I've talked to legitimately want to help students. The issue is the administrations. I have school counselors who are refusing to write letters of recommendation for full-ride scholarships. Principals who don't know what a pdf is. Testing coordinators who literally cannot read.
It infuriates me that most of the money that goes to schools ends up in the pockets of these administrative bureaucrats that do not care about children in the slightest. At best they are grossly incompetent, at worst they are actively malicious.
See I don't buy into this. To me, this is getting into seriously conspiracy theory stuff. I don't think that there is some grand plan to keep people stupid so that they don't cause trouble.
I think the system just fails at educating students well due to a variety of factors.
They've just had the intellectual curiosity beaten out of them. All part of the design. Now shut up and get back to work wage slave!
I don’t think most people are stupid if stupid means lacking reasoning skills or knowledge or curiosity. You can find all sorts of people who you’d think sound stupid but know tons about one subject. But even if they don’t, they likely have a working knowledge base and only know what they need to know.
What I consider stupid or problematic is that most people, probably 75% or more of the overall population, are not skeptical or analytical and have a fundamentally busted epistemology. Even if your information filter works, if you don’t understand why it works, I’m going to struggle in conversation with you. So yes I think the general population has a hard time thinking critically because they don’t know how to analyze their own beliefs or knowledge.
Your description fits my brother perfectly.
He has very little curiosity, hasn't read more than 3 books in his entire life, strongly dislikes all forms of art (except shitty movies and TV-shows), isn't capable of analytical or critical thinking and hasn't got a clue how the political system works.
He apes the attitudes of his spouse and friends, so much that I'm not sure he even has any opinions of his own.
Yet this doesn't bother him at all. He's very happy being oblivious and he makes more than twice as much money per month than I do with my master's degree. He is very good at what he does and I'm happy for him.
It would still be nice to be able to have a real conversation with him, instead of just stating the factual matters or laughing at some dumb jokes. If we both didn't share such a strong resemblance of our dad I'd assume that my mom had an affair, beyond our appearance we have almost nothing else in common.
I feel like I personally make up for a lot of other people's skepticism
There's an old proverb I like about this: a person is smart but people are dumb.
People en masse tend to be dumber than they are apart. I think you're comparing yourself to the faceless masses. It's much more humbling to try comparing yourself to someone you respect (but don't do it as a "I'm not as good as them" thing, only do it as a "goals to maybe achieve one day" thing to avoid accidentally trashing your self esteem)
Side note: old proverb here means I think my dad said it once but I have no idea where it actually came from
Tommy Lee Jones says this in Men in Black, no idea if it was coined before that though.
I choose to believe Agent K came up with it.
"The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its dumbest member divided by the number of mobsters." (attributed to Terry Pratchett)
None of us is as dumb as all of us.
a person is smart but people are dumb.
Whoever says that pretty much qualifies as dumb in my book.
Collective deision-making is superior.
Just linking to an article about collective decision making isn't really that helpful without quoting the article for your points.
So that article you posted talks about animal behavior, and that an economic view on collective decision making is a good approach for animal behavior.
As motivated in the Introduction, our review has focused primarily on an economic view on collective decision-making. The economic view is a staple of behavioural ecology, and motivates the tools of optimal decision theory for the study of animal behaviour.
Nowhere did they make the conclusion that collecting decision making is superior, especially in the context of humans.
The fact that this post has more up- than downvotes is already an indication, that the majority seems to agree with you.
Everybody thinks that everybody else is stupid.
This exactly. Everyone also thinks they're the best driver on the road and everyone else is an idiot. It's good to humble yourself everyone now n' then.
Just once I wanna see a dude do a removedin' flip on the highway (without it being an accident that results in a crash) and humble me. Is that so much to ask?
I usually feel like most people I talk to are smarter than me.
What you are observing is birds with clipped wings...
...now ask yourself, who would want a birds wings to be clipped in the first place? right. It's those who seek to keep the chickens from regaining their freedom, and who seek to hurt them (slaughtering them/steeling their eggs/offspring).
TPTB don't want an educated, sophisticated, thinking on their feet type of populace. Those would be impossible to rule and to exploit for your own selfish ends. TPTB carefully orchestrated the so called failure of our education.
Here is an example: "Ted Cruz vs Education"
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
Is someone stupid because they don't know how to change a light bulb? A tire? How to do laundry? How to cook a meal? Review a book? Write an essay? Manage a task?
It's just skills people dont have that often make them look stupid to most people who have that skill. Especially when those tasks seem very trivial once you have that skill.
Being ignorant of something doesnt make someone stupid. But i do think being stupid often prevents you for fixing your ignorance
Just 2 cents of thought
Edit: forgot to say every single person on the planet us stupid at something or about something but we may never have the opportunity to find out
They're stupid if they don't know those things and refuse to learn them.
People are allowed to call others stupid and be right about it.
People aren't committing some great sin by doing so.
The idea we are is the idea the willfully ignorant use to manipulate everyone else into accepting their selfish indolence and it needs to stop.
My friend just moved into a new house, and there are no light bulbs anymore. So changing light bulbs is on a trajectory to be like shoeing a horse.
I never did change a tire, but I have changed a wheel. However most new cars don't even have a spare wheel.
A lot of older folks are actually less likely to know how to do laundry with modern textiles and dyes. The only complicated thing is sorting and that can actually be largely skipped now.
Anyway, 90% of people will agree that 90% of people are dumb, they just won't agree on which 90%
Anyway, 90% of people will agree that 90% of people are dumb, they just won't agree on which 90%
Wholeheartedly agree with this
I think the issue here is that we're all genetically just apes and we live in a world where we're expected to know about geopolitics, outrageous technologies, all kinds of cultural artifacts, and a bazillion other complexities of modern life, in addition to the basics of feeding ourselves, finding a mate, and child rearing. At the same time, we have behemoth corporations in control of all media with a strong interest in keeping people dumb, angry and discontent. And education is... not what it should be.
No, humans aren't inherently evil or stupid or whatever. We've just inherited a world situation that we are not adapted for, and few people are able to learn and grow sufficiently to really understand and handle it all properly.
100% agree, society is so radically different today from even 200 years ago.
Most discernable minor changes from evolution are from 10+ thousand years ago. Major changes are more on the order of 100k-millions of years.
We're 100% not "made for" the world we've created.
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.
I wouldn't say that high, but yeah I think the majority of average people are dumb. Even people that are well educated and considered smart, will just believe stupid things they're told without spending a few seconds to think it through or verify it.
You see it on reddit/lemmy a lot when an obviously fake post gets taken seriously by most commentors, or people just assume that the context someone gives in a title is true, because they literally believe whatever they see on the internet ESPECIALLY if its something that reinforces a strongly held belief.
And that's lemmy users who I generally consider to be on average a fair but smarter and more critical than you're average bloke.
So if we were to talk about you're average middle aged man that's been a trade for 20 years, spends every night down the boozer and his only hobby is getting into fights at football matches..... yeah.
"Think of the average American and realize that 50% are dumber than that" - George Carlin
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.
I wouldn't necessarily say 'stupid'. But lacking in sufficient empathy? Fearful of different people (to the point of being irrationally hostile to them)? Feel entitled? Are smug and sanctimonious about their beliefs? Get to caught up on what other people do with their lives and want you control them?...
Then yes. Definitely.
I feel like 90% of people don't put in the mental effort to resolve cognitive dissonance, not that they are incapable of feeling it.
If that counts as stupid, then I fully agree 90%+ of people are "stupid".
I do wonder how widespread Astro-turfing is. I just came from a discussion of EVs and some of the anti people were really obtuse in their claims. Just making wild claims that are completely against any actual real life data. There was similar for climate change, and smoking ….. sure I’m biased but people want to support the status quo against all reason. Is it some sort of stubborn stupidity? Are they malicious/trolls? Is it corporate propaganda?
I know, I think this a lot when I'm on here. Especially the whole "don't vote for Biden because Israel" thing. I just saw some comments saying that Trump would be better to have as president because he's just dumber and wouldn't be able to carry out any kind of war. I honestly can't tell anymore whether a real person would actually say that.
I mean I'm sure someone honestly believes that. But to be fair, people believe the earth is flat.
Yes. But the 90/10 varies by topic.
And never assume you're in the 10%. Arguably, everyone thinking they are is the problem
Everyone says that to try to make themselves appear humble, but most of the ones who genuinely say stuff like 90% of the population is stupid tend to be unequivocally not part of the problem.
It's kind of a socratic wisdom situation lol, humble brag time
I get told by a lot of people in my life that I'm smart, I don't FEEL very smart though, I just tend to catch on to things quicker then others and will dive deeper in subjects I find interesting. I'm well aware that there is an insane amount of depth to many things I'm interested in that I just can't bother to get into due to various factors. I also have imposter syndrome so idk.
I think ignorant might be more accurate than stupid. That crosses into stupidity if the ignorance is wilful eg they refuse to accept facts or refuse to even investigate if someone tries to present evidence.
People these days seem exhausted and angry and for some there's comfort in the 'certainty' of their wrong beliefs. I read a piece recently about an ex qanon guy who said a large part of the appeal was being part of a community and encouraged to be angry about everything.
You’re probably as stupid as the rest. I expect there’s loads of stuff you’ve just taken at face value that is completely wrong.
Agreed
Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.
People suck.
More like 90% of human actions are stupid, as I'm not sure if there's an even split of "the stupid" and "the smart", and plenty people mix both. (E.g. being oddly competent at something specific, only to vomit assumptions on something else.)
In special I feel like four types of stupidity became a bit too common, too harmful, too egregious. They're the failure to handle:
They're intertwined, I think. And perhaps there's something more important than those, but those four are the ones that I notice the most.
90% of the population think that 90% of the population are stupid.
The math ain't mathin'
Why not? Please elaborate.
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.
There's a lot of things that can go into being "stupid", and it's important to remember that these are largely conditions that are debuffing them rather than inherent features of who they are. Most specifically, huge deaths of the population (61% as of Oct 2023) are living paycheck-to-paycheck in the US and have little to fall back on - that kind of perpetual, hopeless stress can greatly fatigue you and occupy your higher reasoning. Moreover, a number of people have become "locked in" to certain kinds of facts - for example the belief that America is inherently good or that God actively relieves suffering; they would have to put their axioms through substantial reevaluation and fresh information to be able to cross through uncertainty and then accept contrary facts, and their living conditions make that difficult.
It’s more of a mixture of stupidity, distraction, and willful ignorance
Sometimes, though I think it’s easier for anybody to be duped by things they’re already pre-disposed to believing in. Show me a fake article about Trump doing something stupid or evil and I’ll probably be like, “How is he still free?” without really double-checking the source, unless it’s blatantly questionable.
Meanwhile, somebody of the opposite political persuasion will similarly soak in anything that confirms that Biden is the worst president we’ve ever had in history, but their range of “trusted” news sources is completely different than mine. I’m not sure how we can even bridge that gap, since our definition of reality and accepted facts isn’t really even the same anymore. There’s just so many propaganda engines active in the US right now, it’s hard to imagine anything being done about it. If anything, it’ll get worse.
What a refreshing comment. No one is immune to propaganda, but I feel like I'm going insane seeing all of this binary, red vs blue rhetoric. One thing is for certain, we are all being fucked. We need to stop looking left and right, I just don't see it happening, as the propaganda has gotten scary good in this day and age.
A lot of people feel the ways you do at one point or another in their lives, and that means you probably end up in their 90%.
No, it just means that he's smart enough to notice.
If you meet people every day that can't do simple math, yeah, that gets under your skin really fast... and then you start to notice other things, like their attitude towards life and problems, their lack of logical reasoning, etc. And then you realize that, yes, most people are stupid. You yourself are not very smart, but smart enough to notice.
My guess is, in most cases, people just lack good education. Sure, there are simpletones, but most people are not like that, they just never had proper education and guidance. And the problem seems to perpetuate. They don't see anything wrong with the way they were raised, so they raise their children the same way. An oddball might break the cycle every now and then, but their number is far too low to make an impact, so they usually just move when they become of age.
The under 25 crowd seems to be a bit.....off. I'm just an old guy now, so I'll be here yelling at my clouds.
I'm not so sure, I saw this short the other day of this Gen z woman with a caption that said something like "you can tell gen z from millennial by the rise of their jeans" with her wearing mid rise (labeled low) and high rise jeans, and the comments were full of millennial women pointing out that in the 90s the low rise was like way way way low (which they were) or that millennial wore low rise first, or that it was a bad style or whatever input they felt they needed to give
And I realized this Gen z girl doesn't care about any of this, and is actually quite clever, she's just effectively gotten an insane amount of engagement and is positioning herself as an influencer because much of my generation are idiots and are commenting and reacting on her stuff over the rise of pants
One thing that seems to be true for so long as we have been writing stuff: people 35 and older have always always complained about how hopelessly stupid/lazy/off the people under 25 are and how society is doomed when those folks take over. I take comfort that we seem to have consistently gotten this wrong for hundreds of years.
Ya, I don't think they're lazy or stupid but I'm clearly seeing enormous swaths of people being herded by social media and it's quite fascinating to see. Prior to this generation, the ability to influence wasn't nearly as easy to do and attention spans weren't quite as easy to capture. Now we're all captured by the device we're holding and influenced by one thing or another.
A major difference is they can get information whenever they want.
It used to be sort of hard to find academic knowledge outside of an institution. Now you can download it all for free on libgen and have youtubers walk you through it.
That kind of accessibility causes people to take it for granted.
A bunch of us recently gained access to global platforms.
A bunch of global platforms recently gained access to us.
