Image
Image description: A screenshot of the main character from the film “Idiocracy” looking very uncomfortable with his circumstances.
It's depressing, man
Submitted 4 days ago by ickplant@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/009ab051-b35a-46fb-965f-1e5b5d645f78.jpeg
Comments
BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world 4 days ago
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
meliaesc@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I haven’t seen this perspective before. What makes you think healthy skepticism needs to be demeaning or rude?
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
AeonFelis@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The conmen whom you question will make the effort to color your skepticism as demeaning and rude.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 days ago
it isn’t.
but people interpret it that way. because it’s not ‘friendly’ to ask questions or be skeptical.
Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk 2 days ago
… it’s about skeptical vs gullible.
Is it, though?
MNByChoice@midwest.social 2 days ago
Yes. Though gullible people are often stupid. Skeptical people are not necessarily smart, but have learned to not believe everything said to them.
Gates9@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
“Think of how stupid the average person is. Now understand that HALF us are even stupider than that!”
Bubbaonthebeach@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
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?
REDACTED@infosec.pub 2 days ago
News cycles are breeding grounds for hate. In return, hate is breeding grounds for ignorance, which is closely linked to either cognitive decline or unintelligence
Decoy321@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Carlin really had some amazing quotes
Dicska@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The difference is not huge, but that is the definition of 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.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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.
Una@europe.pub 4 days ago
I am stupid :3 I will always find a way to outstupid the stupid :3
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 4 days ago
“There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.” - Park Rangers talking about me
Exusia@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Dogiedog64@lemmy.world 2 days ago
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
I know someone that saying Steam Deck sucks because its running linux, 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.
thesohoriots@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Related: “I would never want to be part of a club that would have me as a member.”
gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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
sqgl@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
When I had intense legal problems I found myself being stupid and regretted judging all the kids at school who may have had horrific home lives.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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…
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
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.
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
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
buttnugget@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
blaue_Fledermaus@mstdn.io 4 days ago
A problem is that people are both very stupid and very smart, just not about the same things.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
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.
adchevrier@lemmy.world 1 day ago
🥳💚🏳️🌈🎉♥️📍🇫🇷😓❤️❤️🩶🤡💄⛄
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
God damn this is too real
sqgl@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Yes because almost everyone agreed with the sentiment, even the people we consider stupid (who use a different metric).
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Not true, because a fuckton of those stupid people erroneously believe they’re smarter than everyone. 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.
the_q@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
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.
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
My very rough very compressed minimal definition is something like:
“Ability to determine truths from falsehoods within the confines of available information”
brown567@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
You only need to be of average intelligence to have 4 billion people dumber than you
spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
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.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
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.
waldo_was_here@piefed.social 4 days ago
Thank you for this wisdom
Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 days ago
Growing up being called “gifted” only to grow up and discover the bar is simply really low.
Serinus@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It’s also kind of surprising how my 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.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
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 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.
LavaPlanet@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Yeah, emotional intelligence is hugely overlooked, 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, and to look inside and heal, or self care, if those emotional messages are extreme. It’s not iq, it’s eq 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.
axEl7fB5@lemmy.cafe 3 days ago
I used to wonder that as a kid as well. Was I smart or were others just stupid?
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 3 days ago
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.