Comment by ElProlactin
5 days ago
> ...but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
This is a reasonable assumption if you've spent your life in places where the average person is well-educated, but, if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated. Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
I do think there's a distinction to be made between "stupid" and "uneducated" but in terms of how you experience interactions, it's a distinction without a difference.
I actually was thinking on the following example, from my personal life: I have two masters, however I was doing summer jobs in my local town, as handyman, and was humbled very quickly.
The others colleagues all stopped school very early, got the same irrational political views that the ones you mentioned, etc.
However, they were beating us totally, students coming from fancy universities, for everything else related to machinery, gardening, repair, etc... Even on new problems, they were able to quickly make these logical connections, that we would miss.
>if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated.
poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education.
these attributes are not the divider between smart and stupid.
> poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education.
What does this mean? That they're able to scratch through existence on a minimum wage salary (or whatever) may be "quite smart" or it may be "meager survival". I don't think there's any inherent connection to anything, here, and it feels hand-wavy.
It means you can be very intelligent (a genetic trait) and poor/uneducated (a life circumstance).
Even some of the most intelligent people by IQ had "Mac jobs" and/or died poor. William James Sidis for example died in poverty working some desk jobs. Hey, even Ramanujan did manual labor at some port, and if he wasn't "adopted" by Hardy he'd had continued to.
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> poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education
Care to elaborate?
I read an article along these lines with a title like "how would you go about buying a car for $500." The gist is that folks in poorer rural areas would have the experience and contacts to buy the car. In contrast, most middle class folks would have no idea how to by such a car.
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> Care to elaborate?
That poor people know how to survive on much less money, whereas a lot of educated people get deep into debt when they lose their source of income making stupid mistakes such as not giving up restaurant visits or an apartment they now can't afford. Sometimes this goes as far as making plans to avoid debt collection as long as possible (which, of course, makes things worse afterwards).
And, especially, that poor people understand and expect the basic mechanism companies use: cheap or even free up front price for a million different things with lots of expensive traps that come a little bit later, and they're ready for it. Whereas people who have fallen out of their income fall for 10 of these traps at the same time.
Read some articles about charitable organizations that help people get out of debt and you'll see this everywhere.
They're not the divider, but they are unsurprisingly correlates.
A vlogger I sometimes follow has generated many fascinating stories for me. They were getting by driving for instacart for a period, and they would do stuff like get home at the end of the day and... order instacart. They then proceed to say how they tip their driver well because they know how much it sucks to not be tipped. I honestly was confused about how these ecosystems even have a large enough market of rich people to be viable until I saw this; it did not cross my mind that poor people used it.
Or they got a small inheritance and went out and bought 2 brand new cars on finance. Basically never drove one of them. A year later and one of them has been repossessed, and they're complaining that their landlord is taking too long to change a smoke alarm battery, and that they can't afford to go buy a stool to change it themselves.
As far as I can tell, most of the luxury fashion industry exists to sell to people who can't afford to buy it. Like no rich person is spending $5k on an ostentatious bag covered in LV logos. But poor people do, thinking it will make them look rich (they have no idea that rich people know this, but I suppose if other poor people don't, maybe it works).
If you don't think stupid people exist, you are in a fortunate bubble. It can feel like you're an alien studying humanity watching some of the things they do. It's often baffling, and they have no idea when they do something stupid, so they don't try to hide it. Some people will instantly squander any way out of their situation, and then complain about it. It's like the parable of the drowning man.
>This is a reasonable assumption if you've spent your life in places where the average person is well-educated, but, if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated. Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
That's just your political biases expressed as classism bigotry.
I really doubt there's any correlation between left Vs right voting tendencies and intelligence.
I might have disagreed at one point. But then people on the left started spitting on my electric car. "Let's fight climate change by intimidating people who drive emission-free cars!" Progressives who use the word 'libtard' were suddenly born. Circular firing squads are not a sign of intelligence.
Yet one could argue that your perspective isn't very intelligent
> it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated
But being poor or uneducated is not an innate property of a person. Everyone can become poor or rich, educated or uneducated at any time.
> Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
That's exactly something where I think "Smart people don't think others are stupid" applies. Just because people don't vote in ways that would follow your logic means they are dumb. They maybe have different priorities, incentives or moral than you.
You can't really relativise an absolute stupidity. Well, I guess you can up to a certain point, but then reality catches up.
I'm not sure I can imagine an example that refers to what you mean. Can you give one? But keep in mind I never claimed that there are no stupid actions.