Comment by SirFatty
6 days ago
"The average person is bad at literally almost everything."
Wow... that's quite a generalization. And not my experience at all.
6 days ago
"The average person is bad at literally almost everything."
Wow... that's quite a generalization. And not my experience at all.
The average person can’t play 99% of all musical instruments, speak 99% of all languages, do 99% of surgeries, recite 99% of all poems from memory etc.
We don’t ask the average person to do most things, either finding a specialist or providing training beforehand.
One cannot be bad at the things one doesn't even do. None of this demonstrates that humans are bad at "literally almost everything."
You and the parent poster seem to be conflating the ideas of:
- Does not have the requisite skills and experiences to do X successfully
- Inherently does not have the capacity to do X
I think the former is a reasonable standard to apply in this context. I'd definitely say I would be bad if I tried to play the guitar, but I'm not inherently incapable of doing it. It's just not very useful to say "I could be good at it if I put 1000 hours of practice in."
That's why there's the qualifier of "average person". If one learns to play the guitar well, they are no longer the average person in the context of guitar playing.
> One cannot be bad at the things one doesn't even do.
??? If you don’t know how to do something you’re really bad at it. I’m not sure what that sentence is even trying to convey.
6 replies →
It's obvious that 'bad at' in this context means 'incapable of doing well'.
Nitpicking language doesn't help to move the conversation. One thing most humans are good at is understanding meaning even when the speaker wasn't absolutely precise.
More than 50% of people cannot write a 'hello world' program in any programming language.
More than 50% of people employed as software engineers cannot read an academic paper in a field like education, and explain whether the conclusions are sound, based on the experiment description and included data.
More than 50% of people cannot interpret an X-ray.
> More than 50% of people employed as software engineers cannot read an academic paper in a field like education, and explain whether the conclusions are sound, based on the experiment description and included data.
I know this was meant as a dig, but I’m actually guessing that software engineers score higher on this task than non-engineers who hold M.Ed. degrees.
Agreed! Probably 3% of software could do it, vs 1% for M.Ed holders.
The only reason I chose software engineers is because I was trying to show that people who can write 'hello world' programs (first example) are not good at all intellectual tasks.