I was thinking about this. I went to university, and I worked in tech for decades. I met many assholes but I didn’t meet anyone that would fit on the left half of the bell curve (less than 100 iq).
Since I’ve been living in that bubble my entire life, I’m curious of your stories. Have you met someone who was actually quite dumb (not just having opinions you don’t agree with) and do you have an example situation you remember you can share?
Hopefully this becomes more funny than hateful since intelligence is not the value of a person, but it can be funny to read the stories.
Not every low IQ person is the same, but generally they are just frustrating to deal with and need a lot of slow, extra handholding. If you give them a paper with directions/explanations, they’re not going to read it and try to understand it. They’re going to ask you to explain it, and they may just give up on trying to understand it. If you need them to look something up and figure it out for themselves, they just won’t. If there’s a consequence, they don’t modify their behavior or seem to care. They’ll do what they’ll do, and whatever happens after will happen after. They operate through the world with really poor understandings of everything that goes on around them, and it doesn’t bother them. Someone else will tell them what to do.
This has to be bait
I promise it’s not! It really is about hearing funny stories.
I just think we tend to hang out with people of the same social class and may actually never encounter someone a bit dumb. Like I said, I really haven’t.
They say if you don’t know who the sucker is at a card table…
Anyway yeah you’ve probably just never ever ever met anyone who was even slightly below average intelligence. Statisticians might want to study your story
As someone who also went to a good university and worked in tech, it boggles my mind that someone with that experience could claim not to have met a dumb person. I have to question OP’s ability to judge intelligence. People from those social environments do at least have to develop the patina of not being a knuckle-dragger which some might be fooled by, but I’ve seen many cases of deep stupidity lurking behind that.
Yeah OP is the dumb one or just terrible at judging people’s level of dumb.
imagine you never went to school and work in septic system maintenance, and spend your entire life in one small suburban town, never really leaving unless you go on vacation once a year or so for a week.
can you imagine this person never meeting a dumb person? or maybe it’s that they wonder why people are so ignorant of septic systems and keep flushing weird shit down their toilets and fucking up their plumbing?
I can’t get away from the idiot. I have to see him in the mirror every morning.
Being dumb and being lazy is a fine line. I meet a lot of dumbasses that I think just don’t care enough to try.
Also I see myself in the mirror everyday
Yeah, what people mean by “smart” is to a great extent really “attentive.” Raw IQ (to the extent that it’s measurable) has to be significantly different before it matters more than attention. And the thing about attention is that it can wain, be captured, be exhausted. The act of maintaining/directing it changes tenor from moment to moment, decade to decade.
yeah, and when people think you are smart, it’s that you are attentive to the thinks they value or think you should be attentive too. otherwise, they think you are dumb, if you are attentive to things they don’t value.
hence the idea that smart people are socially stupid, because they are not socially attentive to the thinks that are socially acceptable, they attend to the ‘wrong’ things.
It’s incredible how easy it is to remain in a bubble. Family, friends, neighbors, college, work colleagues - all are going to be closer to you than the average person.
Anyone who has worked retail, customer service, or otherwise general public-facing jobs will have this put in perspective pretty quickly.
I worked in a call center that involved a lot of repeat calls as a matter of course. Most were elderly, some had mental issues. We had some characters for sure. A lot of people who clearly didn’t have access to a good education growing up, or who burned their brains out on drugs when they were younger, or who were literally high right then and there.
Indeed, contact with the public will do it quickly.
I work with a long list of clients at my work who seem to lack any type of critical thinking skills whatsoever, a significant fraction of them are apparently functionally illiterate, and a shocking number of them are actually incapable of understanding abstract concepts. These people cruise through life just as happy as you please, at least until they run up against some frustration that they can’t understand at which point their default response is typically to get violently angry, and as an outside observer it’s equal parts fascinating and deeply troubling. I can’t imagine existing that way. Being unable even to read, and with every new concept or technology being an inscrutable puzzle box so terrifying that your only recourse is to scream and tantrum and threaten until someone else comes along and makes it go away.
And yet, most of these same stupid people are highly derisive of smart people. This notwithstanding that without these purported nerds, geeks, Poindexters, and wimps they’d be freezing in the dark as they starved to death. Somehow they’ve managed to get jobs, afford cars and mortgages, and they’re allowed to vote, procreate, and even buy guns. It’s enough to make me never want to leave my IT dungeon or, perhaps, never return from the mountains. But I have to, so here I am.
I interact with truly stupid people on a daily basis. I could tell you all some whoppers from my time in the trenches.
I don’t think we’ve met yet.
Yes bro. I work a customer facing job and drive in traffic. I encounter morons every day.
Yeah, every customer service worker has met loads. 😬
Yeah, me neither but someone once told me that If you never met a dumb person, you’re the dumb person. And then I was like “oh”.
are you at least pretty?
nothing wrong with being dumb if you are good-looking!
I guess I had my 15 minutes but not anymore, no. I’m uglier than opening a .pdf in notepad/kate/whatever the mac hunks use.
Haha could be. :)
Usually management/CEO’s if you’ve tried to talk to them
No, I’ve only heard about them, usually at least three degrees of separation from me. There are levels of stupidity out there that are truly alien to me. I had the same realization you did… What I thought a stupid person looked like was not nearly as stupid as they can get. The fact that I usually need to go about three hops from myself to find them really goes to show how socially stratified they become. It’s very unfortunate because it seems to imply that people don’t really get exposure to people that are very much smarter than them, and the same goes for me.
the vast majority of is are in social bubbles our entire live where we are mostly around people who are mostly like us.
and it’s jarring and scary and painful when we are around people who aren’t like us. and won’t like you either.
and yeah, most aspects of ourselves, like intelligent or health, are deeply died to our social strata. sure, people do fall and rise, but it’s not that common, especially anymore.
I’m someone who got to spend time in a few different bubbles in my lifetime, and sometimes that ‘exposure’ really did not benefit me in any way and I think I might have been better off had I not had it. at least, life would have been simpler/easier.
Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of bubbles that I want no part of. But it would be nice if I felt like I knew some people who were dramatically smarter than myself. I’ve been able to help other people with problems. And they thank me and tell me how nice it is to be able to go to me and get help. But honestly, I don’t have many people like that myself. I guess even if I did, then all that would happen is they would just solve my problems… And then I would be up at their level and have whatever their level of problems are. 🧐 I’m talking purely about intelligence here, not like “social level” (ew), to be clear
I think anyone who spends any time in rural areas has seen plenty. Not just under or uneducated, but literally humans who might seem on par with a dog when it comes to understanding things or curiosity in general. I know you’re trying to keep this light-hearted, but truth is, they often run rural areas and it’s kind of dark (to me). I think the closer you are to suburban or urban areas, the less enlightened people are more likely to be forced into obscurity. Society just doesn’t have a lot of use for people who can’t be peers. The inverse is true in rural areas. More intelligent people are suppressed. I knew plenty of farmers who were intelligent or intelligent enough. They didn’t socialize much. It’s better to be under educated, you are more likely to get along. You don’t see much creativity or art in rural areas. Conformity equals comfort and safety. There are, of course, socio-economic factors in rural areas as well, but art finds a way in even the most impoverished areas.
Go visit towns with a population under 1,000 and you’ll find plenty.
Yeah. Because most smart people leave those towns.
They’re just conditioned to not think for themselves
As a person who grew up in a town of 800, this matches my experience. The artists, the creative thinkers, and the smart kids got out as soon as possible.
The people who stayed were the conformists and the people who couldn’t imagine a better life than living in their tiny hometown.
When I go back to visit my family, I see some of them, and they seem happy.
Don’t confuse “intelligence” with conformity. There are lots of farmers’ kids who are intelligent by common standards, but either got conditioned into pretending, or deliberately pretend to fit in. I’ve met someone in college who was very intelligent, had a well-paid job doing ML stuff, and decided to go back to the countryside with their partner because they simply enjoyed life and the people there. As you said, conformity equals comfort and safety. I’ve met at least one guy who could turn the “redneck” on and off at will. One moment, he would enjoy doing complicated engineering shit or talking about politics and philosophy, the other he would enjoy bragging about the dumbest shit while drinking the local liquor.
Yeah ive never experienced that and sure, it would scare me a lot.
Yes, some people are cognitively impaired.
In the US almost 20% of the adult population is functionally illiterate.
literacy isn’t intelligence.
nor is being good at math.
but in our society we seem to think that’s what it is, because those are the primary metrics by which we evaluate children. because they are easy to measure and track scores on the tests for them, and we have been doing that for generations.
someone not being able to read doesn’t mean they are stupid. and many folks, who can read, are stupid. and maybe folks who are genius readers, are stupid/illiterate about many other things. spend some time in a english dept at a world famous uni, you will meet plenty of complete idiots, who are just really good at reading books and analyzing them, and not much else, because well, that’s all that they do really. and it’s easy to be intelligent about something if you put 50,000 hours into doing it.
I agree with this 100%. A lot of people are only booksmart and can’t really think for themselves.
While this can be anecdotally true, higher order thinking does require a mastery of language.
My old roommate. He would make like 20 chicken drumsticks in the night/evening, eat one or two of them, and then leave them to sit out all night only to throw them away in the morning. It did not just happen once, he did it like at least 4 times. Huge waste of food.
He also once cooked [my!] ground beef with 0 seasoning, literally just in a pan. And while he has that plain ground beef sitting in a container in the fridge, he started defrosting another pound of MY beef. What are you going to use it for?? You already have plain ground beef that you cooked literally yesterday!?!?
He also had this ancient and suffering blind & deaf chihuahua who wore diapers, and he would leave the dirty diapers in the most random places including on top of the electricity utility box in front of the house where everybody can see it.I did not even believe in idiots/stupid people until I met this guy. He was also a big fan of Charlie Kirk, by the way.
I was in the navy, and many of the people I went through basic with struggled with the big stuff like “Following clearly defined orders” and “not doing obviously stupid shit”.
Of course I know him! He’s me.
