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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
Part of it is because IQ is unscientific and ignores variance in person's abilities in one task over the other.
It takes a person to fail at just about everything for us to declare them dumb.
So you might have been not in much of a bubble to begin with.
I used to date this girl that was beautiful, sex was incredible, but was dumb as a rock. I could and should've been better about not wanting a relationship with her, but it's besides the point now.
I really wondered if she was a functional adult. My favorite and most extreme memory is asking her to heat some water in the kettle, and 5 seconds later thinking "she won't be able". So I silently went to the kitchen, watched her try, fail, and turn around with a wet puppy face saying "I can't do it". There's nothing weird about my stove. Gas, a lighter or a match and that's it. Countless people did it before and afterwards, I don't even have a clue how she failed.
I've met more stupid people, and it normally ranges from "I don't want to hear anything from this guy ever again" to "how the fuck are you still alive?". Most of the time, people aren't actually stupid but simply lack education.
Ive known several MAGA people.
One in particular stands out, she was in charge of processing bills for our company, and she basically got all her propaganda from fox news. The company is/was a civil engineering firm (I no longer work there), we specialized partly in large municipal water projects, dams, water infrastructure, injection wells, large scale stormwater percolation, reservoirs etc.
During the big California wildfires (when firefighters kept not getting water out of the hydrants), the head engineer and the lead technical engineer held one of their once-a-month training lunches, and they decided to go over the California wildfires and the effects on the water infrastructure.
This lady stands up, and interrupts the lead technical engineer (who was going over flow/pressure/friction equations to show why hydrants ran dry when there was so much demand), to insist that the reason California is running out of water is that "Newsom drained the reservoir to protect some stupid fish" and other fox news idiocy. Spent a solid 5 minutes trying to tell a bunch of civil engineers a bunch of "information" about water systems that was so hilariously wrong that it was actually impressive.
That was a very awkward few minutes while HR tried to tell this lady that she needs to let the engineers actually learn how to do the job.
A particular fellow student comes to mind who was slow to understand things, made a comparative lot of programming mistakes and so he took more time, but he also worked hard, stuck to a problem until it was solved, coordinated tasks well, and additionally brought positive spirits to any project group. I assume he'd score under 100 but I'd love to have him on my team if he applied with us today.
It's hard to know for sure though, since 100 is the average by definition and most people will be relatively close to it. Not like 97 or 103 makes a big difference. It's half the people you meet in public, like, (by and large) we all go to the same primary schools and supermarkets etc. Outside of those (so tertiary education, workplaces, online bubbles perhaps, etc.), there's still a substantial fraction who learned a lot and/or have a good work attitude and go very far in life amidst people who didn't have to work hard to get anywhere
It frankly seems strange to assume you basically never met anyone who is slightly below the average. From a statistics point of view, one might wonder if that's a dumb thing to say ;) (jk)
I spent 20 minutes (I timed it) on the phone diagnosing a tech support issue and instructing the user on how to fix it. It took about 10 seconds for me to realise that number lock was turned off.
The rest of the 20 minutes was trying to get the user to find and press "Num lock" on the keyboard.
About 10 minutes in, they actually found and pressed it. Apon noticing that nothing had appeared on the screen, they tried pressing it again, then announced it didn't work.
Somehow, just getting them to press the button one more time was not simple, as they now had to begin their logical left-to-right scan of the keyboard again to find this mysterious new "Num lock" button they'd never heard of before.
This person (on another call) would say the name of each key as they pressed it. They would say "Caps lock, A, Caps lock, Enter" when typing a single "A" on a line, but didn't know what "Caps lock" was and couldn't find it on the keyboard when asked to press it immediately after having said and pressed it.
Man this reminds me. I was helping an engineer support my company remotely and after a month or so of everything working fine, he emails frantically and says "THE SCREEN IS BROKEN!"
After some time, I finally figured out that he means he can't log on to the VPN. Probably two hours of testing in and we didn't figure it out, so we left it. The third fucking day of this I eventually was annoyed and wanted a coffee break, so i told him to reboot again. He actually rebooted this time and it works.
Caps lock had been on for like 3 days. Everything he typed was yelling because he just didn't notice.
I later met someone in IT at his company who said that this is a fairly regular occurrence from him
What makes someone an 'actually dumb' person? Because everyone has a different definition of 'dumb.
An atheist might call religious people 'dumb' for believing in a 'Sky Daddy,' while a pro-vax person and an anti-vax person might accuse each other of being 'dumb' for not subscribing to their beliefs.
Yes, I knew someone when I worked in retail who was quite dumb, she was a super sweet person though.
I realized how dumb she was when we encountered a mouse in the back stocking area. It crawled under the door and out to the back of the building. She turned to me and said “I heard the reason mice can crawl under doors like that is because they don’t have any bones”
Me being a biology major with a big interest in all things animals and insects that loves to educate people tried to correct her. I told her about how all mammals have bones and that mice were just very flexible to be able to fit under the gap in the door. I told her about how we used to dissect owl pellets when I was in 3rd grade and put the little skeletons back together. She did not believe me and still thought mice just don’t have bones.
I do sometimes wonder if she ever finished nursing school.
TIL that dumb is defined as having scored less than 100 IQ.
Anyway, I've worked enough customer service to say with some confidence that I've met at least a few people who truly just exist and let the world happen to them with zero curiosity.
I've worked enough customer service.
I feel this so hard. Nothing like working with the general public to realize how fucking dumb so many are. Critical thinking skills are scarce on this planet.
I did both fast food and big box retail, and holy shit people are dumb. For anyone here who wants to say that's mean or I don't understand, I counter with you've never had a cheeseburger thrown at youbecause apparently they wanted a cheeseburger with no cheese and how dare you not know that.
Whew.
Buddy, @chunes@lemmy.world is right - you have met people that fall below average. I would easily bet money on it. You either don't recognize it, or think you are immune from it for some high and lofty self-centered reason.
This seems like a pretty trite ego post that only demonstrates how unaware you proudly are of your surroundings and a lack of sonder and empathy for many people you meet. Dunning-Kruger effect in action, if this is even real.
Bubble or not, genuinely stupid people are still human enough to recognize some patterns and play along. They fit in well enough to reproduce. Frequently. All throughout history. Meaning that you are not as good as recognizing them as they are at hiding it.
Shout out to @Pudutr0n@lemmy.world for maybe also calling it.
This.
I also would like to point out being unable to learn things quickly isn't the same as being stubborn and incurious about the world. I'd much rather work with someone who is slow on the uptake or unobservant over someone who refuses to engage with new information.
Also, no one is so smart that you can't learn something from someone who is "dumber" than you.
This isn't a video game. There is no IQ stat on your character sheet.
Education and employment level do not preclude stupidity. I too work in stem. I have had antivax colleagues.
I still am amazed at how many engineers I work with came out as anti Vax during 2020-2022.
There are some I have worked for that also believe the earth is 6k years old and that evolution is fake and that dinosaurs weren't real... plenty of idiots in stem fields.
I don't think antivax requires stupidity. Some people just don't trust the health system, and often for good reason. Black people, for example, have faced some horrible things due to the government, in the name of "science".
I think there are two types of antivax. There's the distrusting kind, which I think is pretty reasonable honestly. There's a lot of history behind it. Then there's the "I've done my own research" kind, which are stupid and will buy anything someone else says if it agrees with their preconceived ideas.
I guess it depends on how you define stupidity.
Distrusting governments and distrusting vaccines are totally different things. There is vast scientific consensus that vaccines work, if you're antivax you've made a conscious decision to ignore that, which is stupid in my book. Distrusting government advice on vaccines, depending on where you are, may be totally justified.
Well, again, many groups have has the scientific establishment lie to them in order to experiment on them. I can't really blame people who have that in their cultural memory for being skeptical of the current scientific establishment too. I can't view that as stupid. For example, even if the Nazis have the scientific establishment backing them up (they did in some cases), I don't want people trusting them. I don't think that's wrong. It's often hard to impossible to separate science and the state.
I don't think that's happening today though, at least not to a large extent. I think science is a lot more open now, and there's too many people watching for the same things to happen without us knowing. There are probably some pretty fucked up small experiments happening today, but not on the scale of vaccines. However, I feel it's important to see where people are coming from, especially if you want to convince them of something. If you want to convince marginalized groups to trust the concensus on vaccines, you need to understand why they'd be skeptical so you can overcome that skepticism.
“Of course I know him. He’s me”
I wait tables and deal with the public every day. So, yes.
I literally met someone who called 911 for a broken artificial fingernail.
Spend sometime in the emergency Department and you'll meet plenty.
i had someone assigned under me at work. this person was old enough to have a teenager, yet she could not function. we were painting the halls, she kept setting the paint tray into puddles of paint that she spilled, then kept setting it down on the bare floor. she could not understand how to scrape tape off the tabletops. she could not tell me what her job duties were after 4 months of doing the same shit every day (take trash out, clean bathrooms, sweep, wipe down tables. she could not list that off to me. any time i was giving her direction, she would stare bankly at me slackjawed, like there was no intelligence in her eyes, then 5 minutes later i would find her on her phone because she couldnt remember what she was supposed to do and didnt even think of asking me to remind her.
she lived a couple houses away from where we work and her mother (who she lives with) would walk over to check on her sometimes. weird.
the last straw came when after 2 hours of work, i came out of the bathroom and all the lights were off and alarm code set, and she was gone. i texted her and asked where she went and she said she thought we were done for the day bc she finished her task and couldnt find me (I WAS IN THE BATHROOM.)
when i got management involved, i was told i didnt try hard enough with her. lol
We used to have an employee like that too. You could give him exactly one task at a time. Any more than that, and he would get overloaded and nothing would get done. And even then, the one task usually had to be double-checked, because there was a good chance he would do it wrong. Even when it was something we did every day, and that he had been shown multiple times.
He was the embodiment of “the lights are on but nobody is home.” He was awake and seemingly alert… But holy shit, that is a very big sliding scale. Oftentimes when talking to him, you legitimately got the impression that he was zoned out like a driver turning their brain off during their commute.
He quit to become a middle school teacher. No clue how he is doing now, but we made lots of jokes about his middle schoolers being smarter than him when he left.
I can't get away from the idiot. I have to see him in the mirror every morning.
As far as a funny story: My friends brother isn't very bright sometimes. My friends computer chair broke, one of the 5 metal supports that lead out to the plastic wheels snapped. My friends brother was learning how to weld so he tried to fix the support and in trying to test the strength of the weld he started bashing the seat against the floor and broke every plastic wheel... lol
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.
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.
Yeah, about a decade back. A friend of my roommate was not very bright. She said stuff like "why would anyone do a PhD, didn't we already research all there is?”.
You're gonna give me a small crisis with that one.
I've racked my brain trying to figure out how anyone could be so culturally and politically regressive when the world is chock full of stuff that didn't exist a decade or two ago. And then your post shows a very plausible anecdote that kind of explains it. To think that anyone would observe the outside world and see a fixed and solved existence with no forward trajectory, despite recent history clearly illustrating the opposite, just baffles me. Yet, that really happens.
I had a friend in elementary school that was a little slow sometimes. One day we were walking home from school, and out of nowhere, he asks, "Why don't they just make the Playstation 9?"
It took me a minute to figure out what he even meant by that. The Playstation 2 had just came out. Did he think that companies already have the schematics for all of their products decades into the future, but they're just rolling them out one at a time anyway? Does he think that they already know what the PS 3 through 8 are going to be, and they can just...decide to skip those?
It was only about a year ago, right here in a fedi thread, that someone shared this PS2 commercial and I had a giant AH-HAH! moment that was decades in the making.
Well I'm surrounded by religious magas so, yes.
"Earth is 2000 years old. Gay is wrong and unnatural. Dinosaurs didnt exist. Democrats want to turn the US into Russia. Trump should take over Canada"
All actual things said by real life people to me.
Its baffling how stupid most Americans are.
There's a difference between intelligence and poor upbringing though. 500 years ago even the smartest person alive probably believed the first three of them, because anyone who said otherwise was crazy, and all the authority figures were saying it was objective fact. If you raise someone today from childhood, cut off from a lot of external influence, then regardless of how smart they are they'll probably still lean towards believing them. Brains are weird, and the ability to process information, solve problems, remember things, and question things don't necessarily correlate as well as you'd expect.
democrats want to turn the us into russia??? the us has never been more like the ussr was portrayed in the 80's
Lol thats the funniest part. They obsess over Putin's lapdog like he's Jesus yet he's a literal Russian asset.
@1984 you know, over time i met so many people who were dumb, but I often just try to forget about them because it just depresses me.
Yes, I worked in IT support. And I don't even just mean customers, some of the dumbest people were colleagues. Some of them on higher levels, so they earned way more than me as well. Often I think I am the idiot to my colleagues.
You don't know what's going on with people in their lives. Although I still don't think outright maliciousness should be acceptable
I've met people who work in management, yes.
When I was in high school, I volunteered for a couple of days in a special ed class, which, I guess by definition, contained people with sub-100 IQ (sub-70, even). I guess that fits your specifications. One thing I remember observing was that the girls were more capable of stringing together coherent sentences than the boys.
Also, a couple of years ago, I worked as a school bus driver for 3 months while looking for a tech job. There seemed to be much more variance in intelligence among my colleagues than I was used to: some seemed to be just as smart as most of the ones in my previous tech jobs, but others, while they were generally nice enough, seemed to fail to grasp basic concepts or retain information very well during the training.
I didn't meet anyone that would fit on the left half of the bell curve (less than 100 iq).
I promise you that you have. I don't care what industry you worked in. You were vastly overestimating a lot of people.
Yes bro. I work a customer facing job and drive in traffic. I encounter morons every day.
I once worked with a guy who did not know the sun was a star and didn't know what planets were. This was when I was in the military. I had a an unlabeled world map in my office and whenever someone new(to Germany) came in to be introduced I'd point to the map and say, "I'll buy you a beer if you can point out our location on the map". It was just an icebreaker so pointing at Europe was good enough. It was shocking how many people couldn't locate Germany on a world map and quite a few couldn't locate their home state on that world map.
I worked with another guy(a computer programmer) who thought the earth was 6000 years old. He also once told me that vertigo is when you feel like you're standing still and the earth is spinning and indigo is when it feels like you're spinning and the earth is still.
I work with and interact with professionals and am often reminded of something Richard Feynman said, "Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot."
But of course! One I know well. He's a very friendly and likable person, and never judges anyone. He has a large social circle, a steady job doing manual tasks. He has a delightful longtime girlfriend. But he can't grasp abstract concepts, or any but the simplest logical concepts. He hides any lack of understanding with a quick joke, but is highly susceptible to propaganda.
I don't think we've met yet.
