Comment by bryanrasmussen
5 days ago
>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.
"Very intelligent" is not simply "a genetic trait" and the extent to which it's genetically determined at all is heavily disputed in at least three mainstream science fields (psychometrics/quantitive psych, molecular genomics, and behavioral genetics).
2 replies →
> 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.
That's resourcefulness and I would argue that being resourceful is not the same thing as being smart. There can be a relationship between resourcefulness and intelligence, but they're inherently different.
About the car example: most middle class folks don't live in places where there's a substantial market for these types of cars. The availability of these types of cars is environmental.
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[flagged]
> 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.