No Stupid Questions

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.

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.

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.

https://xkcd.com/1386/

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

To paraphrase George Carlin, by definition half of the population is below average intelligence. But nobody thinks they're in that bottom half.

I think what upsets me the most is that people refuse to learn from past mistakes.

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".

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")

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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".

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"

Not that high a number but there are some complete idiots out there.

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

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.

I feel like 20% of people are stupid but they cause 80% of the annoyances in my life.

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 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.

Only when I'm driving

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.

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 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".

Yes. But the 90/10 varies by topic.

And never assume you're in the 10%. Arguably, everyone thinking they are is the problem