This may seem like a trivial article, so it probably won't survive on the front page, but it's actually one of the hardest points to get across. We certainly see it on HN, where drive-by dismissals are an art form (I'm as guilty as everyone). Often, our main interest in an article is the possibility that the author is an idiot and we can quickly correct them for internet points. Maybe with "correlation isn't causation" or some other perennial quip that isn't as clever as it seems.
I guess the internet tests you because it exposes you to more stupidity than you might have thought existed, and indeed, some of it is engineered to keep you outraged or bemused. But I think we have a choice between fewer more meaningful engagements and higher numbers of drive-by quips, and we should probably be choosing the former.
It looks trivial because it is. Overuse of stupid as a label does not mean that there are no stupid people and noticing their existence does not make you automatically join their group.
What about the alternative possibility - the author is a rather intelligent being, but what they've written in this instance is idiotic?
Just because I like to think of myself as a non-idiot, doesn't mean I haven't brought strings of words into existence that were ill-conceived. In those cases, having someone come along and say something like "eh mate - you're confusing correlation with causation here!" is valuable feedback.
> What about the alternative possibility - the author is a rather intelligent being, but what they've written in this instance is idiotic?
With respect, I think you're doing the same thing. You picked a word to squabble about while ignoring the context of the sentence. If you take the sentence and replace "is an idiot" with "has an idiotic point", my argument isn't weakened.
With respect - I believe you’re correct. I mentally reacted to a minor phrasing nit, jumped to a response in my head, dashed it and went on my way before really digesting the entirety of what you were saying.
Which illustrates your very point, right? In an environment where we have a firehose of information pointed at us, our natural reaction is to fast filter/summarize and then discard or react. You’re saying we need to slow down and engage with each other (real people) on more than that superficial level. I agree. Thank you for taking the time to write this.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrounded_by_Idiots for the case that people generally aren't stupid, they're just different - personality, upbringing, culture, etc. Being smart is knowing how to spot those fundamental differences, interpreting them for what they are and adapting your behaviour.
100% and there are a large groups of people who just don't care/motivated about the things you do and that doesn't make them stupid. The trick is not getting caught trying to spend all your time with people who don't care about similar things unless you need them to care.
Also agree with your statement that there is a huge cross-section of intellectual capability as well.
more related to the term "surrounded by idiots": my spouse and i go on a big trip every year and in the few weeks leading up to it we both find ourselves feeling like were "surrounded by idiots" in work and life. noticed the pattern so well tell one other "ive entered the surrounded by idiots phase" once were close to vacation time
>While Surrounded by Idiots was generally well-received by readers, many critics, psychologists, and psychotherapists have labeled the book as nonsense due to the pseudoscientific nature of the DISC assessment, which the book is based on. In 2018, the book's author, Thomas Erikson, was awarded the title "Fraudster of the Year" by the Swedish organization Föreningen Vetenskap och Folkbildning.[1]
Indeed. Based, largely, on synthesizing the opinions of experts in the field. And, since they're smart, they naturally realize that there are few fields where their own opinion is an expert one.
I am smart enough to realize the smartest people I ever met indeed did not think others were stupid, they considered them to be complete imbeciles instead.
"If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole." -Raylan Givens, Justified
I believe the same applies to stupid. Yes, you will occasionally run into stupid people (or as the OP states "people being stupid"). But if it happens more often than not, look in the mirror.
This is a strong anti-signal for me. When you work for someone who thinks every other team / counterparty we interact with is stupid / we could do their jobs / blah blah blah.. hugely demotivating behavior.
This line of thinking is common but it’s only a self serving implicit bias.
Yes, everyone around you could very well be more stupid or the bigger asshole. This is a perception issue void of evidence either way. The people most prone to poor perception analysis are those least capable of perceiving, which is the foundation of Dunning-Kruger.
For everyone else there are things like measures and accomplishments.
Just an FYI but the foundation of Dunning-Kruger is bad math/charting. The data from the experiment shows that generally people understand how good they are at things. But they charted the data on a bad variable.
> The worst test-takers would also overestimate their performance the most because they are simply the furthest from getting a perfect score.
No. Earlier the article correctly states that all result quadrants more or less guess their raw performance with a similar degree of precision, but fail to guess their performance relative to each other with the same level of precision. These are two entirely unrelated measures that the article attempts to correlate in an invented relationship. The actual Dunning-Kruger results also indicate the highest scoring quadrant tend to understand their performance relative to their testing peers, but they are off by much less than the lowest score quadrant.
I am not saying Dunning-Kruger is necessarily correct or valid, and it has been challenged repeatedly. Still it is necessary to know what Dunning-Kruger actually concludes before challenging it.
Secondly, regardless of agreement on the conclusions provided by Dunning-Kruger it does identify something more important than relative bias. People are generally better at guessing from a known, or at least determinable, objective measure than they are at guessing from perceptive qualities that includes themselves as a data point. This is the basis of social intelligence. Social intelligence is the ability to perceive the communications of other people and to introspect. Both, are required for the definition of social intelligence. Social intelligence has a weak correlation to academic intelligence as it is primarily a perceptive skill (conscientiousness) but it also requires the proper motivation (openness). People with low general intelligence are more likely to score lower in social intelligence and people with lower perceptive skills in any regard are less motivated/capable to measure things for any reason, and that motivation discrepancy is dramatically elevated a person places themselves a data point of measure.
It’s actually that the quadrants are meaningless and are the result of bad charting - you can see the publication linked in the article. You get the same results from random data as DK got because they are charting a data relationship not results.
While not wrong, this quote assumes a healthy self-regulating society that isn't being actively driven off a cliff by algorithms optimizing everything for short-term benefits.
Meaning that it might actually be that the assholes one runs into all day are in fact assholes.
Even more so when we consider that one during a normal day does not run into a representative sample of society, but tiny tiny bubbles. We made sure to atomize everyone into that and separate the social classes from each other.
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We can of course not expect our quotes like that to serialize all the assumed preconditions into their writing, but we should remember that those exist when replicating them.
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Or, phrased more bluntly, if I wake up in SF, there is a surprisingly high chance (and, remember, anything > 0 is a surprise given the proverb ruling that out) that I could go for a whole day where I run into nothing but actual genuine scientifically proven assholes.
That's not me then. That's the environment being radioactive.
there are plenty of places in the world in which most people are assholes about some particular thing.
For example if you are a young black man or a gay person living in Utah you might encounter pretty much assholes all day, depending on what you are trying to do that day and depending on if you are unlucky. If you are a good Mormon person in Utah you will probably meet nothing but good people when you go out, even if you meet people who are not good Mormons.
If you are living in Denmark and taking care of a severely autistic child of about 6 years old with learning disabilities, if you meet nothing but unknown Danes during the day you are probably meeting nothing but assholes.
This really clever quote, like most really clever quotes, is somewhat insulting when it reaches its limitations.
I knew a good number of gay people, and I don't think they had it particularly easy.
As a punk rocker I was always having to fight because of how I looked, but I guess that is just for being an asshole who did not look enough like other people. Again, if you fit into Utah, it is probably a really nice place. This is probably the case about almost anywhere though.
Please don't bismirch Utah. It's one of the few high-trust societies left in this country. It's a beautiful, safe, peaceful haven and I literally never had a bad interaction there in years. And I'm not white.
Well, maybe it has changed since I lived there. Nonetheless, about 11 years ago at my daughter's kindergarten I met a black guy he grew up in New York and I said I'd lived in Utah and he said he passed through there once and he remembered walking down the street, he had big dreadlocks and I guess looked alternative (the street must have been South Temple given his description) and he was freaked out about all the weird stares he got from people and how people were locking doors as he walked by, because, and I quote, he had "never experienced anything like that place" and perhaps my own feelings about Utah affected my opinion that yes, that was very like Utah.
I can imagine that happening. It's kind of required to keep a high trust society that everyone try to share culture. That doesn't mean mormonism but it does mean dressing generally within certain bounds. That guy was basically signalling, intentionally, "I do not adhere to your norms!!" which is not going to go over well or engender trust. Not because he was black. Minorities acting and dressing in a traditional manner are respected there.
It's probably axiomatic that a high trust society and a fully liberal one where everyone does whatever they feel like are incompatible. But we've got endless places for the latter and SLC is one of the few of the former.
It may be lovely, and it does seem to be beautiful and tranquil, and I can imagine it works well.
However, my views on it of late are informed by seeing the local police being at the beck and call of a dodgy businessman and making up shit to try and scare off an investigative Youtuber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxZPfj8AlmY
The police were also so stupid, they accidentally released all their unredacted bodycam footage in their own press release, which revealed a pile of damning evidence against them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih2XwNN0aVY
It's only one incident, but it doesn't scream "high-trust society". It makes me think of other corrupt small-town police forces with a bias towards residents over outsiders.
(Oh, and I also remember another Utah resident, the guy in the Cybertruck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0Dl0TnnK0E - he has deep-seated issues and that is such a goofy vehicle. He should sell it and spend the money on therapy)
Basing your opinion about a state from two YouTube videos is a very Internet thing to do. I am quite sure I can find two YouTube videos of stupid police and people in every state and country on earth.
But I think it's a good argument against GP's point. You may find the area you live is high-trust, kindly to neighbours, etc. But you can find stupid police and people everywhere, likely including your area. How can you be sure that visitors, neighbours, etc. agree with your experience?
> or a gay person living in Utah you might encounter pretty much assholes all day, depending on what you are trying to do that day and depending on if you are unlucky.
Are frequent encounters with assholes the lucky case or the unlucky case in this instance?
The primary argument of this article can be simplified and rephrased as “Only stupid people call other people stupid” which really points the finger back at them.
Exactly because calling out someones intelligence, whether it is strong or weak, is the equivalent of trying to be-little someone. And that is a complete a-hole move.
There are lots of smart people on all "sides" of the political spectrum, but in online forums (especially Reddit in my experience) people on dismiss the other side as stupid or evil, rather than trying to see the issue from a different perspective and understand the other persons point of view
I think the anonymity of being online brings out the worst in people. Having a discussion in person tends to be much more civil, even if you completely disagree with the other person
> So if you decide someone is stupid, it means you’re not thinking, which is not being smart.
What if, according to the author's definition, after thinking through, one has decided someone really is stupid. Then one's decision that the person is stupid is just true. Isn't it being smart according to author's own definition.
It appears the author didn't think it through essentially making the author "stupid" according to author's own definition.
It's fascinating to see this in things as life-or-death-to-millions-important like global politics, and the you-know-who. And his team of this kind of people...
Fascinating in the sense of "How did you get here!? And can't you see this move will blow up in your face in the near future!?".
I guess if you have 50-60 years of adulthood where you made dumb moves but got away with it...
He doesn't acknowledge it explicitly, but my reading is that the author will acknowledge that he himself sometimes jumps to conclusion. This is his definition of stupid, so he likely does agree that he's stupid sometimes. He's trying to do it less, but it's impossible to get through life without making assumptions -- we don't have the time or energy to thoroughly analyze every little thing.
I don't think this is a good marker for intelligence, but I think if you avoid dismissing issues because other people are dumb you will generally think harder and in the end will have a better understanding of the issue.
I have a personal rule that goes along the lines of "If I can't explain why a smart and kind person thinks the opposite of me it means I don't really understand the issue". It doesn't mean that I have to agree with them, but I always try to understand where they came from.
"There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid."
I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.
Although perhaps the terminology is a bit dichotomous - smart vs. stupid, which could be misleading also. I mean it's a bit ridiculous to condense ability and wisdom along many dimensions into this single dimension. And it further seems that in common parlance, stupid can mean a variety of things based on context...
Although I get the spirit of the article, I think it's just too much of a simplification to be useful.
I feel like the ability of making connections is relative to the domain, and more learned by exposure rather than innate.
For example, someone doing system engineering will be able to understand how the networking of a system works, while someone being a movie critics will find the hidden meanings and connections in the movies they watch. Similar for a musician.
Probably indeed the semantic is important. Someone can say something stupid in a specific occasion or all the time in a specific domain, but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
> ...but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
This is a reasonable assumption if you've spent your life in places where the average person is well-educated, but, if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated. Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
I do think there's a distinction to be made between "stupid" and "uneducated" but in terms of how you experience interactions, it's a distinction without a difference.
I read an article along these lines with a title like "how would you go about buying a car for $500." The gist is that folks in poorer rural areas would have the experience and contacts to buy the car. In contrast, most middle class folks would have no idea how to by such a car.
My wife’s family is from a poor rural area. There are a minority of poor people who are smart like that. But more often than not what happens is that these people will come into some money, and immediately blow it on a car way behind their budget because they can “afford the payment.”
That's resourcefulness and I would argue that being resourceful is not the same thing as being smart. There can be a relationship between resourcefulness and intelligence, but they're inherently different.
About the car example: most middle class folks don't live in places where there's a substantial market for these types of cars. The availability of these types of cars is environmental.
I would put resourcefulness as a form of intelligence. So it may be that I have a more expansive definition of what can be smart, and what can be stupid, than you do.
Intelligence is about acquiring and processing information; resourcefulness is about adaptation to deal with limited resources. There is a relationship, obviously, but these are not the same things.
Humans have a high baseline intelligence (as compared to other animals) and are an inherently adaptable species. This is what has allowed us to survive and thrive despite the fact that we're pretty vulnerable physically.
People in wealthy countries are often more impressed with the resourcefulness of people in poor countries than they have legitimate reason to be. That's because, again, humans are an inherently resourceful species. We are literally hard-wired to be able to survive in resource-constrained environments.
The conveniences of being wealthy significantly reduces the need to be resourceful in the ways poor people have to be, so people in wealthy countries are often amazed by resourcefulness that is fundamentally human.
That poor people know how to survive on much less money, whereas a lot of educated people get deep into debt when they lose their source of income making stupid mistakes such as not giving up restaurant visits or an apartment they now can't afford. Sometimes this goes as far as making plans to avoid debt collection as long as possible (which, of course, makes things worse afterwards).
And, especially, that poor people understand and expect the basic mechanism companies use: cheap or even free up front price for a million different things with lots of expensive traps that come a little bit later, and they're ready for it. Whereas people who have fallen out of their income fall for 10 of these traps at the same time.
They're not the divider, but they are unsurprisingly correlates.
A vlogger I sometimes follow has generated many fascinating stories for me. They were getting by driving for instacart for a period, and they would do stuff like get home at the end of the day and... order instacart. They then proceed to say how they tip their driver well because they know how much it sucks to not be tipped. I honestly was confused about how these companies even have a large enough market of rich people to be viable until I saw this; it did not cross my mind that poor people used it.
Or they got a small inheritance and went out and bought 2 brand new cars on finance. Basically never drove one of them. A year later and one of them has been repossessed, and they're complaining that their landlord is taking too long to change a smoke alarm battery, and that they can't afford to go buy a stool to change it themselves.
If you don't think stupid people exist, you are in a fortunate bubble. It can feel like you're an alien studying humanity watching some of the things they do.
> poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education.
What does this mean? That they're able to scratch through existence on a minimum wage salary (or whatever) may be "quite smart" or it may be "meager survival". I don't think there's any inherent connection to anything, here, and it feels hand-wavy.
It means you can be very intelligent (a genetic trait) and poor/uneducated (a life circumstance).
Even some of the most intelligent people by IQ had "Mac jobs" and/or died poor. William James Sidis for example died in poverty working some desk jobs. Hey, even Ramanujan did manual labor at some port, and if he wasn't "adopted" by Hardy he'd had continued to.
"Very intelligent" is not simply "a genetic trait" and the extent to which it's genetically determined at all is heavily disputed in at least three mainstream science fields (psychometrics/quantitive psych, molecular genomics, and behavioral genetics).
Probably false. Twin studies had it pegged as high as 80+%, but they were methodologically flawed; you see estimates as high as 50% now and as low as the mid-teens.
I actually was thinking on the following example, from my personal life: I have two masters, however I was doing summer jobs in my local town, as handyman, and was humbled very quickly.
The others colleagues all stopped school very early, got the same irrational political views that the ones you mentioned, etc.
However, they were beating us totally, students coming from fancy universities, for everything else related to machinery, gardening, repair, etc... Even on new problems, they were able to quickly make these logical connections, that we would miss.
> it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated
But being poor or uneducated is not an innate property of a person. Everyone can become poor or rich, educated or uneducated at any time.
> Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
That's exactly something where I think "Smart people don't think others are stupid" applies. Just because people don't vote in ways that would follow your logic means they are dumb. They maybe have different priorities, incentives or moral than you.
I'm not sure I can imagine an example that refers to what you mean. Can you give one? But keep in mind I never claimed that there are no stupid actions.
>This is a reasonable assumption if you've spent your life in places where the average person is well-educated, but, if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated. Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
That's just your political biases expressed as classism bigotry.
I might have disagreed at one point. But then people on the left started spitting on my electric car. "Let's fight climate change by intimidating people who drive emission-free cars!" Progressives who use the word 'libtard' were suddenly born. Circular firing squads are not a sign of intelligence.
I think it is very difficult to discern innate ability because it can be so easily masked by effort. Lack of effort registers as lack of ability. Sometimes it's hard to keep making an effort when you lack ability. So are you slacking because you are lazy, or are you slacking because it's exhausting?
Sometimes you can help somebody find their smart by sparking their interest. Their smart was there all along. They just needed the right motivation to find it. They can learn all sorts of smart things as long as you relate it to kites, or Napolean, or horses, or whatever they find interesting.
Sure, there are some people with specific intellectual disabilities, brain injuries and the like.
But beyond that it gets woolly - how do you separate aptitude, interest, effort, and opportunity? And even if it were possible, would the work needed to identify a (presumably small) set of 'truly stupid' people really be worth the effort?
> "There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid."
> I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.
Even if it's not technically true, IMHO it's better to strike "stupid" from your conceptual vocabulary, because it just gets you into a better mindset to live with others.
That's especially true for software engineers and other people who've often built an identity around being "smart." That mindset usually leads to arrogance and "smart people being stupid."
The fact that some people are smart and some people are stupid is obvious to everyone. Every single human quality (strength, hair color, endurance, patience, height, immunity to diseases, penis size, etc.) follows some form of smooth distribution and we all agree on that. The claim that intelligence somehow doesn't because reasons is so blatantly false I don't understand why would we be discussing it in the first place. If you're a woman you ain't going to compete with men in MMA no matter how hard you train. It's extremely evident with children who innately display different skills. Also mentally disabled people exist and they prove that "everyone is equally innately smart" is false as fuck unless you don't consider mentally disabled people to be people - controversial position, but not exactly useless.
The issue here is that the society simply isn't ready for the logical implications of the fact that different people have different innate intelligence.
What’s very funny about this is that most people who aren’t very smart know they aren’t. They’re not too smart to think that there’s no difference between smart people and not smart people.
Are there clusters of people with high/low intelligence, just like there are clusters of people with other traits? Like, Asians tend to be short, Africans are mostly black, men are usually stronger than women, Irish are redheads, etc. If we identify groups of people that are indeed stupid, what do we do about them as a society? We've tried mass murder and it backfired, we've tried other eugenics programs and it backfired too.
And what exactly is intelligence. Because there are many aspects to usual understanding of it and ability in each of them can vary quite a bit, even though there is some transfer (and it even has a name).
And then the issue of innateness, there is so much interplay with education both formal and informal, socioeconomic status, diet, emotional state, and myriad other things that it turns out pretty quickly that it's hard to say how kuch each part contributes.
It gets pretty murky fast once you start being careful when reasoning about this.
If you feel the need to quote that, just remember that it was from something written back in 2012. That was a time so beautiful, even the light reflected from a raw sewerage tank could create a full spectrum rainbow with twinkling stars if you capture and bring it to today's world.
Now days, the world has grown much bigger, and people are accustomed to unfamiliarity (the world of strangers), with no need to understand and love, with no need to bring people together. So the check is much straight forward and quick: if someone thinks stupid, acts stupid, then maybe they are stupid. Brutal and useful, high utilitarian efficiency.
With some life experience one finds that innate incredibly high IQ doesn't stop people from doing extremely stupid things - both generally in life and also in their own field/profession.
True. I wasn't referring to high IQ. But innate ability to have some wisdom or learn easily from life's mistakes, which IMO is much different than high IQ.
This has the smell of enterprise corporate positivity. In a corporate setting, you have to keep the peace.
But no, there are absolutely maliciously intentionally stupid people out there.
The other fallacy is the author who says "smart people don't think others are stupid", makes an assumption that this Derek Severs is a " smart person".
Though, there's also plenty of completely innocent, decent, but stupid people. Be it innately or just as a result of a terrible set of environmental factors
Albert Einstein, who was accused of being stupid in his youth, once stated "We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us."
I guess I’m stupid, then, because I think a lot of other people are stupid. Like holy crap, so stupid. Have you seen people? They are by and large not smart.
As I am sure many HN type people are familiar with, growing up and into my adulthood, people have often commented on me being "the smart one". It confused me, because I honestly have never felt particularly smart. I have always felt like I have been playing catch up.
I have been a member of a local makerspace for the past couple of years, and one thing that being a member has crystallized for me is that pretty much everyone is smart in their own way. It feels obvious to say, but being a member there really made that click for me. People just think I'm smart because I have interests often associated with smart people, not because my capacity for learning or the size of the set of things that I know are all that different from other people.
The other big thing that I think makes people think I'm smart is that I have absolutely no issue saying "I don't know", or just asking questions about something, like the article says. I think people don't really weigh statements or questions like that into their understanding of the knowledge you actually have nearly as much as if you do something like guess incorrectly. I have a habit of shutting up and letting people talk, and people just assume that I know more than I do :P
There is not really that much deviation in intelligence among most adults. People just have different experiences, and therefore different knowledge sets. The way those sets intersect, and the way that non-overlapping sections are treated during interactions seem far more influential for how "smart" someone is perceived, than the actual size of those sets, or even the rate at which one can change that set (how fast they can learn).
> There is not really that much deviation in intelligence among most adults.
I cannot think that you have a lot of experience with all social classes if you think this. I have extremely disordered family members with mental disabilities and I regularly come into contact with their friends and service-industry coworkers. A lot of adults struggle with memory, comprehension, logic, speed, and reasoning, which I would call "large deviations in intelligence".
It's one of those luxury and insular beliefs that could only possibly arise from a sheltered existence. Just for example, anyone who both went to a decent university and grew up in a not-decent public school could not possibly have this opinion.
> I cannot think that you have a lot of experience with all social classes if you think this.
Yeah I really can't take this share by OP seriously and can't help but wonder if the post is on some level clickbait. I keep my circle pretty diverse and have had a few jobs where I interact with people outside of my norm... I've met some people that truly lack in areas that are clearly identifiers of "intelligence": critical thinking, problem solving, memory, communication and social skills... Intelligence can be defined as a lot and yet I still have met some people who are clearly an idiot - and I don't really consider myself to be super intelligent either. After getting into the workforce, I would maybe describe myself as above average but that's only because of the people I've met bringing down the average to below my level.
They wrote "I have been a member of a local makerspace for the past couple of years, and one thing that being a member has crystallized for me is that pretty much everyone is smart in their own way." which is tipping their hand. That's an incredibly selective environment where curiosity and getting into things and figuring it out are almost prerequisites.
> There is not really that much deviation in intelligence among most adults.
Have you ever spent any time with anyone that makes less than $100,000 a year or didn’t graduate college?
I’ve spent time (both by choice and not by choice) talking to homeless people, mentally ill people, addicts and alcoholics, recipients of Section 8 housing vouchers, adults that aren’t fully literate, service industry workers, immigrant laborers, and other marginalized groups. Some of the issues these groups face are due to mental health or impulse control problems, but there is a wide range of intelligence in adult humans.
The line of thinking progresses like this - it starts at ignorance, then it comes to the showcased "there are no stupid people" partially because of the still remaining ignorance in the "unimportant" humanities areas usually "STEM and economics is all that's needed to be smart!". And partially because of the combination of self-censoring and social virtue signalling "Look, I'm super duper extremely tolerant and avoid even a slight mention of the "bad words", please praise me!". And then, rarely, a person understands that a) there are no "bad words" and opinion of others is more or less worthless with the exception of friends and family, and b) a lot of people are actually stupid in a clear biological or medical sense. Like for example, the oft incorrectly remembered IQ score. It is quite openly in the definition of that score, that score 100 is around the median. And word median implies that there are not only higher scores than 100. but also lower too. It's really obvious, and after virtue signalling is no longer in the picture, it is very easy to explain.
Smart people do not default to thinking that others are stupid.
They go through the answer space, exhausting the other options and then settle on "that guy must be an idiot" with a confidence level somewhere in the high 90%.
It has to be this way, because stupid people do in fact exist.
So there must be a process of which the outcome is thinking that someone might be stupid.
And smart people suffer [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] exactly because they, first, think that others can have the same scrutiny about things and get surprised/disappointed when they find out how other people reach conclusions. Loneliness is the most common.
The more I look into philosophy the more it seems the "enlightened" thing to do is instead pity the people we perceive as stupid because (unless they have a clinical pathology) they are simply misinformed and unaware of that fact (plus the dangers of such confidence).
This also makes it harder and harder to hold grudges against people in general, which I'm on the fence about, because I've had people close to me do some really horrible shit in my time.
I'm not religious, but there is a bible passage that I feel just happens to sum this up nicely:
For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief. - Ecclesiastes 1:18
You can (and should!) start pitying the people as soon as they stop making your life worse. Which also means that to pity them, you need to be doing not just well, but so well as to absorb some of their nonsense and still come out fine.
Pity alone just gives people free reign to set the world on fire. Stupidity needs friction to be stopped.
i forget where i heard it first, but people may still forgive you after burning down their house, killing their parents, kidnapping their daughters, but will never for calling them stupid.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 39.9 ms ] threadI guess the internet tests you because it exposes you to more stupidity than you might have thought existed, and indeed, some of it is engineered to keep you outraged or bemused. But I think we have a choice between fewer more meaningful engagements and higher numbers of drive-by quips, and we should probably be choosing the former.
What about the alternative possibility - the author is a rather intelligent being, but what they've written in this instance is idiotic?
Just because I like to think of myself as a non-idiot, doesn't mean I haven't brought strings of words into existence that were ill-conceived. In those cases, having someone come along and say something like "eh mate - you're confusing correlation with causation here!" is valuable feedback.
With respect, I think you're doing the same thing. You picked a word to squabble about while ignoring the context of the sentence. If you take the sentence and replace "is an idiot" with "has an idiotic point", my argument isn't weakened.
Which illustrates your very point, right? In an environment where we have a firehose of information pointed at us, our natural reaction is to fast filter/summarize and then discard or react. You’re saying we need to slow down and engage with each other (real people) on more than that superficial level. I agree. Thank you for taking the time to write this.
But there are also proper idiots.
Also agree with your statement that there is a huge cross-section of intellectual capability as well.
more related to the term "surrounded by idiots": my spouse and i go on a big trip every year and in the few weeks leading up to it we both find ourselves feeling like were "surrounded by idiots" in work and life. noticed the pattern so well tell one other "ive entered the surrounded by idiots phase" once were close to vacation time
Does a smart person discount this book or not?
I believe the same applies to stupid. Yes, you will occasionally run into stupid people (or as the OP states "people being stupid"). But if it happens more often than not, look in the mirror.
Yes, everyone around you could very well be more stupid or the bigger asshole. This is a perception issue void of evidence either way. The people most prone to poor perception analysis are those least capable of perceiving, which is the foundation of Dunning-Kruger.
For everyone else there are things like measures and accomplishments.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruge...
> The worst test-takers would also overestimate their performance the most because they are simply the furthest from getting a perfect score.
No. Earlier the article correctly states that all result quadrants more or less guess their raw performance with a similar degree of precision, but fail to guess their performance relative to each other with the same level of precision. These are two entirely unrelated measures that the article attempts to correlate in an invented relationship. The actual Dunning-Kruger results also indicate the highest scoring quadrant tend to understand their performance relative to their testing peers, but they are off by much less than the lowest score quadrant.
I am not saying Dunning-Kruger is necessarily correct or valid, and it has been challenged repeatedly. Still it is necessary to know what Dunning-Kruger actually concludes before challenging it.
Secondly, regardless of agreement on the conclusions provided by Dunning-Kruger it does identify something more important than relative bias. People are generally better at guessing from a known, or at least determinable, objective measure than they are at guessing from perceptive qualities that includes themselves as a data point. This is the basis of social intelligence. Social intelligence is the ability to perceive the communications of other people and to introspect. Both, are required for the definition of social intelligence. Social intelligence has a weak correlation to academic intelligence as it is primarily a perceptive skill (conscientiousness) but it also requires the proper motivation (openness). People with low general intelligence are more likely to score lower in social intelligence and people with lower perceptive skills in any regard are less motivated/capable to measure things for any reason, and that motivation discrepancy is dramatically elevated a person places themselves a data point of measure.
Meaning that it might actually be that the assholes one runs into all day are in fact assholes.
Even more so when we consider that one during a normal day does not run into a representative sample of society, but tiny tiny bubbles. We made sure to atomize everyone into that and separate the social classes from each other.
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We can of course not expect our quotes like that to serialize all the assumed preconditions into their writing, but we should remember that those exist when replicating them.
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Or, phrased more bluntly, if I wake up in SF, there is a surprisingly high chance (and, remember, anything > 0 is a surprise given the proverb ruling that out) that I could go for a whole day where I run into nothing but actual genuine scientifically proven assholes.
That's not me then. That's the environment being radioactive.
If however the baseline already moved into chaos, the quote just leads to tying your own hands and complacency.
It is the right prescription for the wrong disease, essentially. We need chemotherapy/surgery and not mild cough syrup.
For example if you are a young black man or a gay person living in Utah you might encounter pretty much assholes all day, depending on what you are trying to do that day and depending on if you are unlucky. If you are a good Mormon person in Utah you will probably meet nothing but good people when you go out, even if you meet people who are not good Mormons.
If you are living in Denmark and taking care of a severely autistic child of about 6 years old with learning disabilities, if you meet nothing but unknown Danes during the day you are probably meeting nothing but assholes.
This really clever quote, like most really clever quotes, is somewhat insulting when it reaches its limitations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50100397
I knew a good number of gay people, and I don't think they had it particularly easy.
As a punk rocker I was always having to fight because of how I looked, but I guess that is just for being an asshole who did not look enough like other people. Again, if you fit into Utah, it is probably a really nice place. This is probably the case about almost anywhere though.
The point of quotes like this are just to get people to examine their own behavior. They're not some kind of proposition to be proven.
It's probably axiomatic that a high trust society and a fully liberal one where everyone does whatever they feel like are incompatible. But we've got endless places for the latter and SLC is one of the few of the former.
However, my views on it of late are informed by seeing the local police being at the beck and call of a dodgy businessman and making up shit to try and scare off an investigative Youtuber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxZPfj8AlmY
The police were also so stupid, they accidentally released all their unredacted bodycam footage in their own press release, which revealed a pile of damning evidence against them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih2XwNN0aVY
It's only one incident, but it doesn't scream "high-trust society". It makes me think of other corrupt small-town police forces with a bias towards residents over outsiders.
(Oh, and I also remember another Utah resident, the guy in the Cybertruck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0Dl0TnnK0E - he has deep-seated issues and that is such a goofy vehicle. He should sell it and spend the money on therapy)
But I think it's a good argument against GP's point. You may find the area you live is high-trust, kindly to neighbours, etc. But you can find stupid police and people everywhere, likely including your area. How can you be sure that visitors, neighbours, etc. agree with your experience?
It _can_ be wielded as such, yes, but saying that each usage of that must be of the petty kind is not fitting the data known to us as reality.
There are lots of smart people on all "sides" of the political spectrum, but in online forums (especially Reddit in my experience) people on dismiss the other side as stupid or evil, rather than trying to see the issue from a different perspective and understand the other persons point of view
I think the anonymity of being online brings out the worst in people. Having a discussion in person tends to be much more civil, even if you completely disagree with the other person
It took time for me to mature and see others this way.
What if, according to the author's definition, after thinking through, one has decided someone really is stupid. Then one's decision that the person is stupid is just true. Isn't it being smart according to author's own definition.
It appears the author didn't think it through essentially making the author "stupid" according to author's own definition.
Fascinating in the sense of "How did you get here!? And can't you see this move will blow up in your face in the near future!?".
I guess if you have 50-60 years of adulthood where you made dumb moves but got away with it...
I have a personal rule that goes along the lines of "If I can't explain why a smart and kind person thinks the opposite of me it means I don't really understand the issue". It doesn't mean that I have to agree with them, but I always try to understand where they came from.
I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.
Although perhaps the terminology is a bit dichotomous - smart vs. stupid, which could be misleading also. I mean it's a bit ridiculous to condense ability and wisdom along many dimensions into this single dimension. And it further seems that in common parlance, stupid can mean a variety of things based on context...
Although I get the spirit of the article, I think it's just too much of a simplification to be useful.
For example, someone doing system engineering will be able to understand how the networking of a system works, while someone being a movie critics will find the hidden meanings and connections in the movies they watch. Similar for a musician.
Probably indeed the semantic is important. Someone can say something stupid in a specific occasion or all the time in a specific domain, but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
This is a reasonable assumption if you've spent your life in places where the average person is well-educated, but, if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated. Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
I do think there's a distinction to be made between "stupid" and "uneducated" but in terms of how you experience interactions, it's a distinction without a difference.
poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education.
these attributes are not the divider between smart and stupid.
Care to elaborate?
About the car example: most middle class folks don't live in places where there's a substantial market for these types of cars. The availability of these types of cars is environmental.
You could argue that but you'd be wrong. Resourcesfulness is highly correlated with intelligence.
Also, what's the idea we're discussing here? That poor people can't be extremely intelligent?
Humans have a high baseline intelligence (as compared to other animals) and are an inherently adaptable species. This is what has allowed us to survive and thrive despite the fact that we're pretty vulnerable physically.
People in wealthy countries are often more impressed with the resourcefulness of people in poor countries than they have legitimate reason to be. That's because, again, humans are an inherently resourceful species. We are literally hard-wired to be able to survive in resource-constrained environments.
The conveniences of being wealthy significantly reduces the need to be resourceful in the ways poor people have to be, so people in wealthy countries are often amazed by resourcefulness that is fundamentally human.
That poor people know how to survive on much less money, whereas a lot of educated people get deep into debt when they lose their source of income making stupid mistakes such as not giving up restaurant visits or an apartment they now can't afford. Sometimes this goes as far as making plans to avoid debt collection as long as possible (which, of course, makes things worse afterwards).
And, especially, that poor people understand and expect the basic mechanism companies use: cheap or even free up front price for a million different things with lots of expensive traps that come a little bit later, and they're ready for it. Whereas people who have fallen out of their income fall for 10 of these traps at the same time.
A vlogger I sometimes follow has generated many fascinating stories for me. They were getting by driving for instacart for a period, and they would do stuff like get home at the end of the day and... order instacart. They then proceed to say how they tip their driver well because they know how much it sucks to not be tipped. I honestly was confused about how these companies even have a large enough market of rich people to be viable until I saw this; it did not cross my mind that poor people used it.
Or they got a small inheritance and went out and bought 2 brand new cars on finance. Basically never drove one of them. A year later and one of them has been repossessed, and they're complaining that their landlord is taking too long to change a smoke alarm battery, and that they can't afford to go buy a stool to change it themselves.
If you don't think stupid people exist, you are in a fortunate bubble. It can feel like you're an alien studying humanity watching some of the things they do.
What does this mean? That they're able to scratch through existence on a minimum wage salary (or whatever) may be "quite smart" or it may be "meager survival". I don't think there's any inherent connection to anything, here, and it feels hand-wavy.
Even some of the most intelligent people by IQ had "Mac jobs" and/or died poor. William James Sidis for example died in poverty working some desk jobs. Hey, even Ramanujan did manual labor at some port, and if he wasn't "adopted" by Hardy he'd had continued to.
The others colleagues all stopped school very early, got the same irrational political views that the ones you mentioned, etc.
However, they were beating us totally, students coming from fancy universities, for everything else related to machinery, gardening, repair, etc... Even on new problems, they were able to quickly make these logical connections, that we would miss.
But being poor or uneducated is not an innate property of a person. Everyone can become poor or rich, educated or uneducated at any time.
> Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
That's exactly something where I think "Smart people don't think others are stupid" applies. Just because people don't vote in ways that would follow your logic means they are dumb. They maybe have different priorities, incentives or moral than you.
That's just your political biases expressed as classism bigotry.
Sometimes you can help somebody find their smart by sparking their interest. Their smart was there all along. They just needed the right motivation to find it. They can learn all sorts of smart things as long as you relate it to kites, or Napolean, or horses, or whatever they find interesting.
But beyond that it gets woolly - how do you separate aptitude, interest, effort, and opportunity? And even if it were possible, would the work needed to identify a (presumably small) set of 'truly stupid' people really be worth the effort?
> I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.
Even if it's not technically true, IMHO it's better to strike "stupid" from your conceptual vocabulary, because it just gets you into a better mindset to live with others.
That's especially true for software engineers and other people who've often built an identity around being "smart." That mindset usually leads to arrogance and "smart people being stupid."
The issue here is that the society simply isn't ready for the logical implications of the fact that different people have different innate intelligence.
What are the logical implications?
> what do we do about them as a society?
Same thing we do now - some are on welfare, some are homeless and some are in prisons.
Ideally we can be more compassionate towards these people without also placing a huge tax burden on everyone else.
> We've tried mass murder and it backfired, we've tried other eugenics programs and it backfired too.
Why do you think we need to do or eliminate anything/anyone? Do you think we need to eliminate people due to the other properties you listed too?
If you want to do something, then give people the opportunity to become better, but whether they want or not is still their decision.
And then the issue of innateness, there is so much interplay with education both formal and informal, socioeconomic status, diet, emotional state, and myriad other things that it turns out pretty quickly that it's hard to say how kuch each part contributes.
It gets pretty murky fast once you start being careful when reasoning about this.
Now days, the world has grown much bigger, and people are accustomed to unfamiliarity (the world of strangers), with no need to understand and love, with no need to bring people together. So the check is much straight forward and quick: if someone thinks stupid, acts stupid, then maybe they are stupid. Brutal and useful, high utilitarian efficiency.
With some life experience one finds that innate incredibly high IQ doesn't stop people from doing extremely stupid things - both generally in life and also in their own field/profession.
But no, there are absolutely maliciously intentionally stupid people out there.
The other fallacy is the author who says "smart people don't think others are stupid", makes an assumption that this Derek Severs is a " smart person".
I have been contributing to its success too and continue doing so while typing the next character right now.
Though, there's also plenty of completely innocent, decent, but stupid people. Be it innately or just as a result of a terrible set of environmental factors
It seems there is indeed room for some humility.
I have been a member of a local makerspace for the past couple of years, and one thing that being a member has crystallized for me is that pretty much everyone is smart in their own way. It feels obvious to say, but being a member there really made that click for me. People just think I'm smart because I have interests often associated with smart people, not because my capacity for learning or the size of the set of things that I know are all that different from other people.
The other big thing that I think makes people think I'm smart is that I have absolutely no issue saying "I don't know", or just asking questions about something, like the article says. I think people don't really weigh statements or questions like that into their understanding of the knowledge you actually have nearly as much as if you do something like guess incorrectly. I have a habit of shutting up and letting people talk, and people just assume that I know more than I do :P
There is not really that much deviation in intelligence among most adults. People just have different experiences, and therefore different knowledge sets. The way those sets intersect, and the way that non-overlapping sections are treated during interactions seem far more influential for how "smart" someone is perceived, than the actual size of those sets, or even the rate at which one can change that set (how fast they can learn).
I cannot think that you have a lot of experience with all social classes if you think this. I have extremely disordered family members with mental disabilities and I regularly come into contact with their friends and service-industry coworkers. A lot of adults struggle with memory, comprehension, logic, speed, and reasoning, which I would call "large deviations in intelligence".
Yeah I really can't take this share by OP seriously and can't help but wonder if the post is on some level clickbait. I keep my circle pretty diverse and have had a few jobs where I interact with people outside of my norm... I've met some people that truly lack in areas that are clearly identifiers of "intelligence": critical thinking, problem solving, memory, communication and social skills... Intelligence can be defined as a lot and yet I still have met some people who are clearly an idiot - and I don't really consider myself to be super intelligent either. After getting into the workforce, I would maybe describe myself as above average but that's only because of the people I've met bringing down the average to below my level.
Have you ever spent any time with anyone that makes less than $100,000 a year or didn’t graduate college?
I’ve spent time (both by choice and not by choice) talking to homeless people, mentally ill people, addicts and alcoholics, recipients of Section 8 housing vouchers, adults that aren’t fully literate, service industry workers, immigrant laborers, and other marginalized groups. Some of the issues these groups face are due to mental health or impulse control problems, but there is a wide range of intelligence in adult humans.
They go through the answer space, exhausting the other options and then settle on "that guy must be an idiot" with a confidence level somewhere in the high 90%.
It has to be this way, because stupid people do in fact exist. So there must be a process of which the outcome is thinking that someone might be stupid.
[0] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00328.x
[1] https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12181
[2] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2020.101465
[3] https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/28009
[4] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43076-023-00313-8
This also makes it harder and harder to hold grudges against people in general, which I'm on the fence about, because I've had people close to me do some really horrible shit in my time.
I'm not religious, but there is a bible passage that I feel just happens to sum this up nicely:
For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief. - Ecclesiastes 1:18
You can (and should!) start pitying the people as soon as they stop making your life worse. Which also means that to pity them, you need to be doing not just well, but so well as to absorb some of their nonsense and still come out fine.
Pity alone just gives people free reign to set the world on fire. Stupidity needs friction to be stopped.