It's depressing, man
It's depressing, man
75 comments
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Think of how stupid the average person is, then realise half of them are stupider than that - George Carlin
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I always kinda hate this quote because that's not really how averages work.
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Think of how stupid the median person is, then realise half of them are stupider than that - Not George Carlin
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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.
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The joke works because intelligence tests follow a normal bell curve. Therefore, approximately half of the population would actually fall below average.
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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.
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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
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It is if the distribution is symmetric and there are enough samples.
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Image description: A screenshot of the main character from the film “Idiocracy” looking very uncomfortable with his circumstances. -
I am stupid :3 I will always find a way to outstupid the stupid :3
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"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." - Park Rangers talking about me
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Related: “I would never want to be part of a club that would have me as a member.”
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I know someone that saying Steam Deck sucks because its running linux, that a Lenovo Legion is superior, because its running Windows, but also complain about Windows updates and disabled all updates. Like dude gets a new device and the first thing he does is turn off updates, and then stays on the stock rom. Well good luck running the 5 year old OS while you do online banking, dumbass, surely the cybercriminals would be nice to you.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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A problem is that people are both very stupid and very smart, just not about the same things.
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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.
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God damn this is too real
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Yes because almost everyone in the planet agrees with the sentiment, even the people we consider stupid (who use a different metric).
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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.
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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.
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I haven't seen this perspective before. What makes you think healthy skepticism needs to be demeaning or rude?
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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.
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The conmen whom you question will make the effort to color your skepticism as demeaning and rude.
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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.
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... it’s about skeptical vs gullible.
Is it, though?
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Yes. Though gullible people are often stupid. Skeptical people are not necessarily smart, but have learned to not believe everything said to them.
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“Think of how stupid the average person is. Now understand that HALF us are even stupider than that!”
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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?
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Carlin really had some amazing quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My very rough very compressed minimal definition is something like:
"Ability to distinguish truths from falsehoods within the confines of available information"
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You only need to be of average intelligence to have 4 billion people dumber than you
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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.
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I totally get that. I routinely remind the dumbest people online that I am orders of magnitude intellectually superior to them, and they immediately assume I’m calling myself smart. Nope. I’m not that smart.
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Thank you for this wisdom
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🇫🇷📍♥️🎉🏳️🌈💚ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ -
I sometimes see from the other side. I'm pretty impressed that even the most stupid of us (mental disorders notwithstanding) can still get dressed, work basic electronics, understand road traffic well enough not to die immediately etc.
Compared to every other animal on the planet we'renot doing too bad.
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🥳💚🏳️🌈🎉♥️📍🇫🇷😓❤️❤️🩶🤡💄⛄
75 comments
Growing up being called "gifted" only to reach adulthood and discover the bar is simply really low.
It's also kind of surprising how much education mattered. When you're going through it a lot of it doesn't feel useful.
But then you meet people who really can't read or write effectively or understand simple concepts.
Even people here on Lemmy are more likely to take the feeling of each word than to understand the sentences as a whole.
Yeah, I was always shocked by the popsci factoid stats about communication happening primarily via tone and such, it seemed crazy to me that some people use that as primary meaning and not in addition to fully understanding the semantics of what was being said, or that they could even be influenced by the actual choice of words even if the meaning is unchanged, but I guess I was just lucky.
What's really shocking above all for me lately is how few people care about intellectual honesty, and will blatantly go for the most self-serving falsehood no matter how blatant.
I wouldn't claim something I couldn't back up in some way not because I'm just inherently a saint - on a purely selfish animalistic superego esque way - I wouldn't do it because it would hurt my self-esteem to blatantly lie in a self-serving manner because it's just kinda pathetic to have to resort to that.
Yeah, emotional intelligence is hugely overlooked, too, when interpreting what others say, and to also not be swept up by every little thing, and that low eq breeds for resentment, which is rife for the brainwashing that propaganda is. We all need to be focusing on teaching the next Gen how to step outside their emotions, as an observer, and reflect on the message they are for oneself, not a cue for how to treat others, or define oneself by, and to look inside and heal, or self care, if those emotional messages are extreme. That's your own little tamagotchi to care for. It's not even iq, it's eq (and eq can always be built as high as you want to go) , and the world would be a different place. It's easy not to care, when you feel like you have been thrown out with the trash, and knee jerk to all your emotions, rather than be an entity that observes your emotions.
ETA, added words, because distraction.
I used to wonder that as a kid as well. Was I smart or were others just stupid?
For me it was mostly just that I have really good reading comprehension and read ahead in the textbooks when I was bored in class. Basically I ADDed myself into studying.