1d ago

What does it take for you to determine someone has low intelligence?

For me, it's a matter of how little they know the world around them and how things affect other things. Case and point, when voters thought that voting Trump in, that he would magically make egg prices go down. They're going down now, from what I saw shopping earlier today, but they weren't because of him.

Another example is how when shop lifters, when they shoplift, always think that they're harming who they call 'The Man' aka corporate operating the stores, directly. That's not entirely true and I know this having worked retail several times and currently.

Who you're hurting, really, is the store itself and those that work in it. The store pulls its own profits in by how many people shop there and part of that profit, is distributing to those who work there. When you're stealing from that store, you are actively harming that store's profits and in turn, harming those that work there.

The CEOs and executives are still raking in millions and they aren't above having to shut down stores over dipshit thieves which in turn, costs a lot of jobs in that store to absorb the profits to make up whatever costs.

43 comments

First of all, I don't think trying to gauge something as amorphous and multi-faceted as intelligence is particularly useful. Most people aren't stupid or smart, even people in traditionally difficult or easy fields. People instead license themselves to believe narratives that justify what they believe benefits them. Everyone does this, we aren't immune to it.
Secondly, profits are not distributed to employees. Workers are paid wages based on the customary cost of labor in society, pressed downward by a capitalist's desire to pay workers as little as possible and upwards by worker organizing and necessity of sustaining themselves as workers. The capital advanced in wages usually is paid before the commodities are sold, and after the labor has been performed, meaning the capitalist already had the capital to advance initially.
Shoplifting targets profits, wages aren't impacted, at most and at scale the capitalist takes reduced profits. They can cut jobs, but that hurts profits as well, meaning in the end they must eat the reduced profits or spend more on security.

One's willingness to say, "I don't know" and a general ability to think critically.
Just today, a friend was yammering on about a situation he clearly had limited information on (Canada Post strike). We've aptly described him as confidentially incorrect. Don't be this person.
- confidentially incorrect
  Exactly the term I use for ChatGPT and co.

Usually when they start ranking IQ, especially across broad groups

It's 'case in point', by the way.
- This post hits several of my indicators for the question they're asking.

Kindness and empathy
Whenever I see or hear someone disregard or debase another person they don't know or understand without even trying to get to know anyone .... I immediately just think they are dumb
Whenever I see or hear someone treat someone else kindly without ever more knowing the other person .... then that person is smart in my books ..... all that can change if the receiver of kindness starts acting like an ass though.
It's the first impression .... if all I see is kindness and empathy at the beginning, I know I'm dealing with a bright person.
- I mean, that's emotional intelligence. You're dead right to value empathy highly, imo.
  There's many types of intelligence. Many of them are useless to society if you don't also posess one or more of the others.
  
  Kindness and empathy is a sign that a person is able to think about the world more widely and intelligently ... it means they see past the terrible person or terrible things to try to understand why people, populations or things are they way they are. If you have an understanding or patience to try to honestly and objectively understand why things are the way they are ... the more likely you will have the tools and ideas to do something about those problems or those issues.
  Someone without kindness or empathy impatiently makes simple assumptions of everything and everyone and immediately jumps to the easiest, simplest "solutions" that usually don't require any of their responsibility or inconvenience. They don't care about the source of the problem, they just want to get rid of the problem as quickly and as trouble free as possible, no matter the history, background or circumstances that caused the original problem. It's a great way of solving problems quickly ... but more often than not, this kind of mentality just repeats the same problems over and over again.
- Sure "in your book," but then you're alienating yourself from other people by having an entirely different set of definitions for intelligence.
  Or perhaps you're inadvertently conflating ethical values with cognitive ability
  
  Empathy tends to be a byproduct of considering another person's point of view and not immediately assuming the worst. There is definitely intelligence there, if you are considering all angles

The store pulls its own profits in by how many people shop there and part of that profit, is distributing to those who work there.
May I ask where this incredible society is? Sounds like a dream. Here in E*rope they milk every second of your shift. Bonuses barely exist in my experience, usually being vehicles for keeping people on minimum wage and telling them to "work hard". Usually they're rigged so even if you do bite, only the company profits.
- Distributing as in being paid as in paycheck as in you getting money into bank account for the hours you've worked. Fucking duh.
  
  So you are impliciting saying that this behavior will damage the profit share of shop and nothing else, because almost nothing will be reverted into the workers.
  And only once the share profit is not enough, excuse me, decided to be insuficiente by the ceo to fulfill the gross margin of the full multinational company, those workers will suffer the consequences even if there were not any stealing.
  It is ironic that this appears in a post about understanding difficult and not obvious relationships between complex concepts :)
  And no, I am not justifying anything, this post in only for the sake of understanding a complex pattern
  
  As a wage laborer, I trade time for a fixed amount of money to be deposited to my bank account.
  As an employer, I agree to pay employees a wage based on some existing contract.
  As a wage laborer, I can work harder to sell more product making more profits for the company.
  As an employer, a productive wage laborer increases my profits since ((gross profit) - (fixed labor cost)) = (net profit).
  The kicker is the productive wage laborer could keep the net profits, or split them with other workers, if not for the employer. The employer has trapped land, capital (building, tools, ect) and a favorable agreement with labor in the form of wages to fix costs. The employer then lives off the work of others.
  Employers are parasites. The struggle between wage laborers and employers is a class struggle. Class solidarity is an acknowledgement of the parasitic relationship. Class solidarity, friend!
  
  On a post about judging people’s intelligence, you said that employees are paid off of the pool of profit left over at the end of the day. That’s so fucking untrue that no one has the time to even START explaining it to you. That is not at all how that flow works.
  If the ENTIRE store is ransacked and all products are stolen, everyone that works at that store still gets paid because they all work for contracts that have no stipulations about whether or not the store is robbed. We are talking about big box stores and not mom and pop shops.
  I think you may have low intelligence, per your own standards.
  
  For me, it’s a matter of how little they know the world around them
  doesn't know what profit is or how wage labor works
  peak redditor
  
  Fucking duh.
  You got me there. For that's his words work.

The store pulls its own profits in by how many people shop there and part of that profit, is distributing to those who work there.
No, profit by definition is what's left after all the expenses, including wages. Your wages are completely independent of profit and only dependent on the market value of your laborforce. The store could be raking in huge amounts of profits, if the competition among the laborers is fierce, wages will be minimal. Or the other way around, profit margins could already be razor thin, but if the competiton among the laborers is minimal then wages have to be high if they want to attract laborers.
Please read "wage labor & capital" where it's all spelled out if you want to learn more. (It's a short read)
Shoplifting only hurts corporate since it eats into the profits which are independent of the wage.

Well, going after low hanging fruit, people that think shoplifting is a major expense for most retail stores that would cause locations to shut down. Obviously self checkout and how it makes abuses and shoplifting easier shows that that is a much smaller cost than just the labor of paying a cashier. It is always advantageous for PR reasons to blame crime and shoplifting rather than a lack of profitability or demand for shutting down locations.
But on a more serious note, it is a lack of curiosity or unwillingness to challenge really simplified narratives about common facets of daily living. A more original answer might be the lack of ability to pick up on jokes or sarcasm. I was always shocked about some people's inability to pick up on sarcasm, even when the statements would make no sense or be obviously wrong, if they were done sincerely. There is an awareness of context and meta-awareness that is what I usually identify with intelligence, as opposed to expertise in a specific domain.
- Autistic people are famously known for not getting sarcasm. Usually they assume you're not intelligent when you sincerely make statements that are nonsensical or obviously wrong. Who is "low intelligence" there?
- I heard that in some Asian countries sarcasm is a foreign concept. I kid you not. Hilarious if you ask me
  
  I've actually heard this in a more egregious form. I once heard someone claim that sarcasm is an anglosphere phenomenon and someone that isn't a native English speaker would never be able to understand sarcasm.

People who are overly concerned with their level of intelligence, especially when that concern is measured relative to other people's intelligence.
In other words, if you spend a lot of time anxious about whether or not you're the smartest person in the room, then you're not the smartest person in the room.
- 🫳
  🎤

Anyone older than me without class consciousness

Your post. It showcases your bootlickery. The bourgies play you like a fiddle.
- 0 reason to be this rude to the uneducated
  
  It wasn't meant sincerely, but in a "you're evil so I'll insult you" way, and projection makes for an easy setup.

For me, a general lack of curiosity how things work, from human behavior, to technology, to economy, and everything else. And how you inform yourself.
Of course you can't always be interested in everything and can't know how everything works in detail, no one has time for that. Also you might be wrongly informed in certain instances. But if you're so uninterested that you don't know how almost anything works even in basic ways, or you for example only get your information from "my parents told me" or "I only believe what I have seen" or similar, I'm seriously questioning your general intelligence.
Otherwise, their reaction when their beliefs are challenged. I don't necessarily mean when they're told they're wrong, but when they do something and reality gives them an unfavourable result, idk, like a magnet not sticking to a surface, if they keep trying to stick it on instead of maybe evaluating that the surface (or "magnet") is not magnetic.

They believe the bosses lies. Lies about the nature of profit for example.

Wage Labor and Capital

That's not something I go out of my way to do. Some people are undereducated, and some if those are harder to educate than others, but there's rarely a reason to write someone off. Most people are willing to learn if you approach them with patience and empathy.

Intelligence is a difficult thing to measure, especially merely by interacting with a person for a little while.
Many of the answers in this thread amount to privileged assumptions that fail to account for the fact that what they describe as signs of lacking intelligence could also be symptoms of exhaustion and alienation inherent to conditions such as living under a capitalist system and/or neurodiversity and/or disability and/or sickness and/or...
For example, when someone works 16 hours a day for 5/6 days a week, they are far less likely to have the energy for using their little free time away from work to ponder deep questions at the same level as someone privileged enough to have a less demanding existence. This is not correlated with their intelligence in any way.

Black white thinking without self reflection.

Generally speaking, a lack of autonomy and inquisitiveness.
If it seems like someone is just saying/doing something to fit in with their peers, I think less of their intelligence as a result.

When they use idioms and expressions incorrectly.

I was talking to my wife about how is ethical yet moral steal clothes that have the brand logo printed on them, since you are walking wearing them, you are a walking ad, even if you paid for the clothes, you still are a walking ad. You actually paid for being an ad. Then, she asked me if in the process will somebody be affected, like, the manager of a store. That is when we both got to the conclussion that the best is not buying that kind of clothes and go and buy to little business or flea markets for cheap but good clothes (with no brand logos prints over).

I have several flags:
when people is not able to focus a discussion in the specific thema and tend to divage
when somebody is reassuring that two things are same/not same but they can explain why they are the same or not
when they are not able to identify a contradiction in their own arguments, and once you point on that still negates the contradiction
when don't know how to explain difficult / advance concepts they should master in easy terms / vocabulary
And a few more, but not so strong like these ones

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