Comment by runjake

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.