To clarify here, I don’t feel like I’m significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying “facts.”
Keep in mind that you, along with everyone else, know very little all in all.
The things you do know will be important to you, naturally. Their understanding and their importance will also feel obvious, also naturally.
So anyone not knowing these obvious important things will instinctively feel like an absolute idiot to you.
This is a mental trap. Try to avoid it. The less respect you have for others, the less able you will be to really listen to other standpoints and learn from them, leading to a vicious cycle of alienation.
know
Wine is wine, bread is bread. Let us not conflate lack of reasoning (stupidity) with lack of knowledge (ignorance).
this is the most reddit post i’ve seen on lemmy
Yeah, “stupid” is not defined around average intelligence. This whole panel is an example of a straw man fallacy to undermine someone saying “people are stupid”.
Sure, “stupid” isn’t defined around average intelligence, but “people” is defined around the average person. So, by saying “stupid” is not defined around average intelligence, you’re really criticizing the phrase “people are stupid”…
…which is exactly what this comic is doing
Saying “people are stupid” is the same as saying “the average person is stupid”. What’s hard to understand here?
Frankly, that is just a big pile of babble.
but “people” is defined [SIC] around the average person
There’s no “definition” here. The closest to what you said that would make some sense would be “but “people” implies a generalisation around the average person”, but it doesn’t work in your argument because it does not contradict what BananaTrifleViolin said. Nor it justifies your assumption that
by saying “stupid” is not defined around average intelligence, you’re really criticizing the phrase “people are stupid”…
I genuinely think that you did not understand what the other poster said, so I’ll repeat it under different words.
The comic has an implicit definition of stupidity as “lower than average intelligence” (see panel 2).
BananaTrifleViolin is highlighting that this is not the definition that people use for “stupid” when they say “people are stupid”. And that leads to a fallacy called “straw man”, where you misrepresent a position to beat it. Munroe (the cartoonist) is doing this, either by accident or on purpose. (It is not the first time he does this; his comic about free speech also shows the same irrationality.)
What you’re really saying is “other people aren’t as smart as me.”
I like xkcd but I feel like Munroe is being assumptive here, assuming “your expectations are based on you”. Are they?
Yes, but they’re literally being conditioned into it. You and me too. No one is immune to propaganda.
I used to hold people accountable for their (lack of) knowledge, but there’s literally billions being poured into subverting these people daily. You can’t really hold that against (most of) them.
In my experience, I have found the least intelligent people to also be the most vocal, which makes it look like they are overrepresented in the population.
this.
I would put more but it would mess up the comedy. anyway go to a public library and look at folks on the computers. If you are old enough you will remember that going to like a 7/11 or such there always seemed to be some crazy guy talking to himself. You never see them now because they are on the internet all day.
They’re insecure about their intelligence but too prideful to admit when they don’t know something, even to themselves.
the only cure for that condition is showing them how stupid they are, so that everyone can see
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” - George Carlin
On average people think they are a lot smarter than the average person
There seems to be a shortage of critical thinking and problem solving skills, that’s for sure.
What I see that makes it worse now than in the past is the Internet. It’s easy now to find a group that agrees with your delusions and live in an echo chamber where mistaken beliefs are not challenged.
Reminds me of:
(Sorry, not sure why this has weird artifacts after I uploaded it. The copy on my phone looks fine.)
proud to be the majority 💪💪
You’re probably as stupid as the rest. I expect there’s loads of stuff you’ve just taken at face value that is completely wrong.
Most people just don’t care enough in my opinion. When it comes to politics, all they want is to be left alone. They just look for the first piece of media that confirms their biases and be content with that. I think that’s why conservative fearmongering works so well. All they have to do is to convince those persons that the left wants to tell them how to live and that is enough for those people to trust that conservative media.
Covid showed me we are living in a asylum.
I mean, a lot of people have a tendency to do “stupid” things, and maybe even say stupid things - but I wouldn’t classify 90% of the population as stupid. First problem is that “stupid” isn’t a very quantifiable quality - and “smarter” really depends on the perspective of the way you’re looking at it. I’ll use what someone else mentioned here as an example: I would like to say that I’m at least a decent software developer (or so I hope), but I know absolutely nothing about cars (I don’t even have one). While I’m pretty well rounded on the software side of computers, I’m terrible at the hardware side. I am also terrible at math aside from the very basics (and even then… eh) - hence, I’d never have a good shot at even getting into game development if that were something I wanted to pursue.
So not only can I not comment on whether other people are “stupid”, I can’t even account for myself, because there’s no metric for it. Are we going off of IQ (I have zero clue what my IQ is, nor do I really have an interest in finding out what it might be)? Are we going off of being able to answer Jeopardy questions?
Excuse me! I resemble that remark!
By what standards do you rank us? Half of us are stupider than average. We’re all of very limited intelligence - the best we can do is to team together to function as one gigantic brain of humanity, drawing from the strongest qualities of all of us. That way the world can be brought forward by brilliant scientists who are completely stupid in their own way, and who would never survive a week on their own.
Politics are tricky, but I think it’s more fruitful to think of people as brainwashed than stupid. The amount of propaganda we’re subject to these days is unprecedented.
As for general stupidity, be charitable; judge people by what they’re best at. Most people have one thing or another they are great at, and our differences is what makes humanity occasionally great.
If you judge a fish by his ability to climb a tree, he will live his entire life thinking he is a failure.
