Related: “I would never want to be part of a club that would have me as a member.”
🇫🇷📍♥️🎉🏳️🌈💚
ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
A problem is that people are both very stupid and very smart, just not about the same things.
Yeah maybe, but that’s more to do with knowledge rather than intelligence.
IMO, for successful reasoning you need two things:
- Correct assumptions - what you think
- Correct reasoning - how you think
The former is tough, even scientific consensus changes often due to new better studies, sometimes due to externalities and the human element etc etc. It’s understandably impossible to know everything about everything.
But the latter is about how you think, whether you’re able to reason properly, your conclusions and steps actually logically flow from your premises which are based on your assumptions.
I think a lot of perceived stupidity isn’t misinformation, but the lack of this second ability to reason properly, and even an unwillingness to do so because the conclusions are unpleasant. It’s like people became (or always were) too comfortable with lying to themselves to avoid discomfort.
I suppose intellectual honesty should be a civic duty. I always believed it was a personal one anyway.
🥳💚🏳️🌈🎉♥️📍🇫🇷😓❤️❤️🩶🤡💄⛄
I get the idea and have said similar things in the past, but defining intelligence is where I get hung up. Socially speaking it makes a lot of sense though.
My very rough very compressed minimal definition is something like:
“Ability to distinguish truths from falsehoods within the confines of available information”
it’s not about smart vs stupid. it’s about skeptical vs gullible.
plenty of very smart people are gullible. and most people are gullible because it’s ‘nice’.
most of us who are skeptical are see as cold, mean, and anti-social. hence to be pro-social you have to be ‘stupid’ and believe in the nonsense everyone else is going on about.
I haven’t seen this perspective before. What makes you think healthy skepticism needs to be demeaning or rude?
They’re saying skeptics are perceived that way, not that they necessarily are acting that way. Just that other people clock you as “not nice” when you don’t always take what they say at face value.
yep. they don’t like being questioned or doubted. especially so if they are spouting bullshit and lies.
Learning can be uncomfortable, and one persons sources of motivation could be another persons’s trigger points for mis-associated signals for impending stress or injury.
The conmen whom you question will make the effort to color your skepticism as demeaning and rude.
it isn’t.
but people interpret it that way. because it’s not ‘friendly’ to ask questions or be skeptical. people typically get angry if you ask them why they do something… and they regard your blind acceptance of them as positive.
… it’s about skeptical vs gullible.
Is it, though?
Yes. Though gullible people are often stupid. Skeptical people are not necessarily smart, but have learned to not believe everything said to them.
Thank you for this wisdom
Image description: A screenshot of the main character from the film “Idiocracy” looking very uncomfortable with his circumstances.“Think of how stupid the average person is. Now understand that HALF us are even stupider than that!”
Carlin really had some amazing quotes
So has average intelligence fallen that much or has the distribution changed so much that the median and the average are quite different? Maybe our graph is now u shaped with a huge number at very low intelligence and equal a very high and not much middle ground? What is it about the internet and 24hour news that has collectively dumbed down the population?
News cycles are breeding grounds for hate. In return, hate is breeding grounds for ignorance, which is closely linked to either cognitive decline or unintelligence
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering
- Abraham Lincoln
Removed by mod
This may be a bot, post history is the same thing over and over.
Pretty sure they got hacked, their comment history was fairly normal before.
EDIT: somewhat normal, at least. idk, I’m not sure what’s been vandalized at this point.
The difference is not huge, but that is the definition of the median.
Example: There are five kids in the class: Alicia (4’), Beth (4’), Charles (5’), Dan (7’) and Emma (3 miles). The average height of the class is 1060 feet. Are half of the kids taller/shorter than that? Nah. However, the median is Charles’ height, 5 feet. ~Half of the students are above that, and ~half of them are below. If it’s an even number of students, the median is between the two middle ones.
Also, I’m slightly worried about Emma.
Emma is just a young ancient norse wyrm. Honestly she’s kinda small for her age. You should see her dad he’s huge and has a really important job I hear. Something to do with a protected woodland or some such.
A lot of “stupidity” you see in the world is a result of anxiety and exhaustion proximately caused by individual poverty and bad infrastructure* imo
*Infrastructure includes hard systems like transit and housing and soft systems like community organizations and government agencies imo
When I had intense legal problems I found myself being stupid and then regretted decades ago judging all the kids at school who may have had horrific home lives.
I hope so. I really don’t know anymore though, at a certain point it’s a choice. Maybe it’s what they’d like me to think to betray my fellow workers to the man, but it’s harder and harder to justify people falling over and over for obvious corporate traps when alternatives are extremely available and it would take just the tiniest bit of agency on their behalf to go for that and information is more available than ever.
Probably true, but I don’t think that warrants the stupidity being put in scare quotes like that. Regardless of whether it is intrinsic or extrinsic stupidity, stupidity by nature or by nurture, the result is genuine stupidity all the same
speak for yourself.
I live in Cambridge MA. one of the smartest/richest places on the planet. Lots of people are stupid here and anxious and exhausted even making 300-400K a year and living lives of luxury and privilege.
the crux of it is they are just selfish jerks who don’t care about anyone else and are supremely overconfident about how genius they are… and that arrogance makes them incredibly gullible and stupid when a charming personality tries to convince them that vaccines cause autism. and their biggest complaint about their lives is that they don’t have more luxury and privledge and that they are actually ‘struggling’ in life because they can’t afford to charter jets and have to ‘suffer’ first class plane travel.
I feel like it’s pretty common for kids to see the actions of adults and think they’re all stupid until they themselves become adults and finally see what motivated those actions in the first place.
The few adults I’ve run into who maintained the whole “everyone else is such a moron” both overestimated their own intelligence by an order of magnitude and were cripplingly narcissistic.
You only need to be of average intelligence to have 4 billion people dumber than you
The problem presents when the average goes down.
I’m not appreciably smarter than I was a decade ago, but the average person appears to have been collecting head injuries in that time it would seem.
Think of how stupid the average person is, then realise half of them are stupider than that - George Carlin
I always kinda hate this quote because that’s not really how averages work.
Think of how stupid the median person is, then realise half of them are stupider than that - Not George Carlin
Half the population: Who’s Median?
That bitch from biology class?
Average can be Median, Mean, Mode or even other measures.
Averages don’t always* work like that. In a lot of real world cases, that statement is accurate enough. When we are doing average wealth then yea, the numbers will be skewed a lot, but something like height would likely have similar mean and median.
Average ≠ mean necessarily
But it does in this context no? We are talking arithmetic here
No. There are various ways to calculate the average: mean, median, mode etc
Interesting, but the way the average function works in something like excel is mean?
Yes. They didn’t use the word mean because it confuses non technical users.
I mean, it is intended to be how averages work for sufficiently large sample sizes. That’s the intent of a bell curve. For 800 people, maybe not, but for 8 billion? Probably extremely close.
I guess my point is really just that it’s a curve and not a triangle.
The joke works because intelligence tests follow a normal bell curve. Therefore, approximately half of the population would actually fall below average.
yeah i dont like it either. i always thought that most people were supposed to be of average intelligence. so half of people are average, with the remaining half being split between the dumb dumbs and the geniuses
It is if the distribution is symmetric and there are enough samples.
God damn this is too real
Yes because almost everyone in the planet agrees with the sentiment, even the people we consider stupid (who use a different metric).
Not true, because a fuckton of those stupid people erroneously believe they’re smarter than everyone else in the world. The number of times I have heard “if I were in charge, everything would be straightened out” from these troglodytes is too damn high. I’m actually smart enough to know how insanely demanding “being in charge” and “doing things right” actually fucking is so I god damned know I am not up for the challenge so, yeah, actually they’re still actually fucking stupid. Sorry, not sorry.
Yeah I know: Dunning-Kruger effect.
