To clarify here, I don’t feel like I’m significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying “facts.”
Keep in mind that you, along with everyone else, know very little all in all.
The things you do know will be important to you, naturally. Their understanding and their importance will also feel obvious, also naturally.
So anyone not knowing these obvious important things will instinctively feel like an absolute idiot to you.
This is a mental trap. Try to avoid it. The less respect you have for others, the less able you will be to really listen to other standpoints and learn from them, leading to a vicious cycle of alienation.
know
Wine is wine, bread is bread. Let us not conflate lack of reasoning (stupidity) with lack of knowledge (ignorance).
Reasoning is based on knowledge. There have to be things you accept as truths first before you can start reasoning, and those truths are not universally shared, nor do they have the same weight for everyone. That includes you and me.
There are things we don’t “know”, and things we don’t know that we don’t know, but we nevertheless think of ourselves as informed and capable of reasoning. To someone who knows more than us, they’d consider us stupid. It’s not about objectivity, it’s about looking down on those that don’t know things you know and declaring them less-than.
The basic point is there are countless factors big and small that influence any individual’s thoughts and ideas at any given moment. Our minds are very complex things, and our lives are messy, absorbing all kinds of information and stimuli that affect it in ways we don’t properly understand or even realize.
When we talk about people being stupid or smart, we’re just reducing that complexity so we can make simplistic insults that make us feel better about ourselves, but ultimately aren’t saying anything meaningful about the human condition.
And there’s a lot of dark history behind this, too. The history of psychology is riffe with falsehoods about quantifying intelligence, and often it was simply about prejudice.
You want to call people stupid for doing stupid things, sure, I get that. I do that. We all do. But the more you try to create these general arguments about human stupidity, the more it unravels, and the more it reveals about you.
I won’t address everything because it’s a lot of text, OK? (I did read it though.)
I think that it’s more accurate to say that reasoning is a “tool” that you use to handle knowledge. And sure, without knowledge you aren’t able to use reasoning, but sometimes even with knowledge you aren’t able to do it either - we brainfart, fall for fallacies, etc.
Another detail is that ignorance is far more specific - a person isn’t just “ignorant”, but “ignorant on a certain matter”. For example it’s perfectly possible to be ignorant on quantum mechanics while being informed on knitting, or vice versa. In the meantime intelligence - and thus stupidity - is split into only a handful of categories (verbal, abstract, social, etc.).
To someone who knows more than us, they’d consider us stupid.
They’d consider us ignorant. At least if following the distinction that I’m emphasising.
When we talk about people being stupid or smart, we’re just reducing that complexity so we can make simplistic insults that make us feel better about ourselves, but ultimately aren’t saying anything meaningful about the human condition.
Not necessarily reducing it but I get your point, given that I think that it’s simply easier to talk about ignorance and stupidity as behaviour than as something inside our “minds” (whatever “mind” means). And in both cases it’s behaviour that we all engage; some more than others, but we all do.
Right, but when these important things are also very basic things everybody needs to know, like how to boil an egg, how to vote, how to dry wet clothes, how to treat people and items carefully and with respect, etc, I don’t have much sympathy for adults who come across as an idiot in these ways, you know?
There’s things that other people don’t know because they’re not as interested in them of course, but that’s not what bothers me, it’s all the stuff they should all know that they’re ignorant of… :-(
I couldn’t boil an egg. I don’t like them, I don’t eat them, and I have no particular need to prepare them for anyone else.
By your standards, I guess I’m an idiot?
So, sure, you may not currently know the procedure. But you could easily boil an egg if you had 60s to google it first.
Some people wouldn’t be able to figure it out. Stupidity isn’t really accurate though in my experience, I think it’s more being overwhelmed and sometimes just having an aversion in general to change and learning. People can often have really bad experiences early in life (ironically, at the hands of people like OP who categorize them as morons for their honest ignorance) that set them up to want to never leave their comfort zone, which is itself again seen as “stupid” by the same people, thus perpetuating the cycle forever.
It even goes beyond this.
Everyone thinks they’re smarter than everyone else. Smarter than doctors, scientists, and engineers. Definitely smarter than whatever the political or ideological “other side” is.
It’s ruining our society. When George Carlin did his bit about “how stupid the average person is”, he forgot to mention how 99% of us assume we skew into the “smarter than average” side.
I can’t have conversations with people I used to respect, relatives, old friends, or even casual acquaintances without everyone blathering on about how stupid these people are or that group is. I hate it.
Yes, but they’re literally being conditioned into it. You and me too. No one is immune to propaganda.
I used to hold people accountable for their (lack of) knowledge, but there’s literally billions being poured into subverting these people daily. You can’t really hold that against (most of) them.
Education is the obvious fix, but at least in America, the idiots are trying to destroy it. If people learned critical thinking, almost everything else would fall into place. If we stopped reinforcing learned helplessness and made people practice logic and learn consequences, society would see a huge benefit. People need to be held accountable for their ignorance. Otherwise, they won’t learn. Those who refuse to learn should rightfully be shunned, because they’re the biggest propaganda weapon out there.
Cognitive dissonance is another major reason for idiocracy. The MAGAts are so blatant about their love for it. “Wokeness” is healing from cognitive dissonance, which they’ve labeled as a virus.
I’m sympathetic and offer to help someone if they’re being a bit stupid (all of us have our moments), but if they refuse, that’s where they should be held accountable.
On the other hand I am pretty confident I am not an idiot, and if IQ tests done when I was 8 count I know I’m not. That does not mean I don’t regularly do something wrong, or learn something completely obvious. I’m sure that in those situations somebody else wonders how I lived this long.
if IQ tests done when I was 8 count
They don’t, unless you’re currently 9.
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.
this is the most reddit post i’ve seen on lemmy
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.
They’re insecure about their intelligence but too prideful to admit when they don’t know something, even to themselves.
I would put more but it would mess up the comedy. anyway go to a public library and look at folks on the computers. If you are old enough you will remember that going to like a 7/11 or such there always seemed to be some crazy guy talking to himself. You never see them now because they are on the internet all day.
Yeah, “stupid” is not defined around average intelligence. This whole panel is an example of a straw man fallacy to undermine someone saying “people are stupid”.
Sure, “stupid” isn’t defined around average intelligence, but “people” is defined around the average person. So, by saying “stupid” is not defined around average intelligence, you’re really criticizing the phrase “people are stupid”…
…which is exactly what this comic is doing
Frankly, that is just a big pile of babble.
but “people” is defined [SIC] around the average person
There’s no “definition” here. The closest to what you said that would make some sense would be “but “people” implies a generalisation around the average person”, but it doesn’t work in your argument because it does not contradict what BananaTrifleViolin said. Nor it justifies your assumption that
by saying “stupid” is not defined around average intelligence, you’re really criticizing the phrase “people are stupid”…
I genuinely think that you did not understand what the other poster said, so I’ll repeat it under different words.
The comic has an implicit definition of stupidity as “lower than average intelligence” (see panel 2).
BananaTrifleViolin is highlighting that this is not the definition that people use for “stupid” when they say “people are stupid”. And that leads to a fallacy called “straw man”, where you misrepresent a position to beat it. Munroe (the cartoonist) is doing this, either by accident or on purpose. (It is not the first time he does this; his comic about free speech also shows the same irrationality.)
What you’re really saying is “other people aren’t as smart as me.”
I like xkcd but I feel like Munroe is being assumptive here, assuming “your expectations are based on you”. Are they?
Agree. When I say “people are stupid” I mean they are living below their potential. The average person may have the intelligence, but consistently refuse to use it.
Yeah, I think that this is part of the deal.
When someone says “people are stupid”, they usually are not conveying “the average person has a lower-than-average intelligence”. And I don’t think that they’re even comparing people with some point of reference (the average, or themself, or someone else); in the context they’re usually criticising some behaviour that they see as stupid. For you this behaviour would be “living below their potential”, for me it’s “showing blatant lack of reasoning”, for @_danny@lemmy.world’s (from another comment) “lack of curiosity, drive to learn and critical thinking”.
