Comment by jahewson
7 months ago
I don't like the word “stupid”. It carries a moral judgement and in the context of this post is never defined. I don’t see any falsifiable claims made here.
The author seems to be projecting their own above average intelligence onto other people. He’s imaging their inner world to be somewhat like his when it’s anything but.
> but they’re intelligent when it comes to their own lives and the areas they work and spend time in. We should expect the average person to struggle with factual questions about abstract ideas and far-off events, but not so much about what’s right in front of them day to day.
This is cosmically untrue. My cleaners can’t work my vacuum. I’ve spent a year constantly re-explaining it. They can’t put the oven racks back the way they found them, just force them in the wrong way around every time. No number of reminders seems to help. My landscaper could not work out he had our landscape wiring crossed, spent days coming back replacing bulbs, digging up wires and replacing them, randomly rewiring sections. 5 minutes with a multi-meter and I had it solved. I know a nurse who thinks deoxygenated blood is blue.
The average person tries to memorize a handful of things from someone smarter and then stays in their lane. That’s fine, I don’t think we should call them “stupid” but capable thinkers and problem solvers they are not.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who had a similar disagreement with the article.
I try to frame it in my head that people aren't generally stupid, but that we do a lot of stupid things. Or we don't do things (eg. read, or think critically) that adds to our level of stupidity.
It's perhaps a privilege of being above-average intelligence, but these days I try to focus less on being smarter and more on being less stupid. I seem to get more bang for the buck.
I'm still pretty stupid, though.
My own anecdote:
I worked with a guy on military aircraft. He was a radar technician. He went to school for it. I also went to school for it. The school was pretty hard with a decently high washout rate, including a lot of 2 year EE graduates, for some reason.
One day, we're working on the flight line on a radar issue and he says something pretty stupid, but we're kind of buddies, so I ask him to elaborate.
Long story short, his belief was that radar tracked other (jet) aircraft airspeed by reading the reflections bounced off of the other jets' turning pistons and calculating airspeed by how fast their piston assembly rotated.
I was completely taken aback by the multiple levels of stupidity. If you think through it a little, there are multiple levels of fail there. I then had to explain how this particular system actually worked and work him through the ludicrousness of each step of his beliefs.
How he 1.) fabricated this elaborate theory from the relatively simple section of training ("measure latency of returned energy transmissions"), and 2.) made it through tech school without washing out, I'll never know.
> his belief was that radar tracked other (jet) aircraft airspeed by reading the reflections bounced off of the other jets' turning pistons and calculating airspeed by how fast their piston assembly rotated.
TBH this sounds a lot like something I would say just to fuck with a buddy to see a reaction. Oh and I could sell it with a straight face pretty damn good too. Although I wouldn’t let the ruse last long term. Not saying that’s the case here, but that would be my first assumption if I heard something so off the wall that defies belief from someone who should know better.
Of course you have had folks seriously arguing Q Anon, lizard popes, shape shifting Obama family members and all that mess too…so there are definitely those among us that have probably heard “what is you, stupid or something?” more than once in their lives.
Stupid is an insult, but there is a clinical equivalent that all of the people you mentioned would meet (unfortunately).
The author seems to be pretending these people don't exist, and I think you made a good guess as to why.
> I know a nurse who thinks deoxygenated blood is blue.
That's hard to believe. Any nurse has drawn blood from veins and seen deoxygenated blood with their own eyes.
Nurses still believe all sorts of medical myths, unfortunately.