In addition to the many other fine comments here, I will add that when you think someone is so stupid there is often something missing. You may not understand what information they are acting on or you might be interpreting the context according to different values than theirs. As an observer, not understanding someone else’s choice can feel exactly like “damn what a stupid choice.” I try as much as I can to take these as opportunities to dig further and use my imagination to figure out what they must be thinking. Occasionally I come up with something.
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
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My mom worked as a university professor, then advisor, and what she said about college was "it just shows a prospective employer that you can follow rules and commit to doing something for a few years and follow through on it. That's why they want the degree. Also cuts down on applicants, fewer to sort through."
So, from someone on the inside, she didn't think the main reason was education, in terms of specific jobs. I know in accounting I don't use so much of what I learned and that's a pretty specific degree. Anyone with a mind for numbers & systems could be trained on the job to do what I do.
It's worth noting that college degrees are often not hard to get, assuming you have ample finances. Colleges are businesses, and they care more about cashflow than education.
I have a bachelor of science in electrical engineering. Of my graduating class, probably only about a quarter of us actually understood anything. And now working in the industry, it seems like that's a pretty reasonable average for other institutions in my field (there are exceptions, a few colleges have higher standards).
assuming you have ample finances. Colleges are businesses, and they care more about cashflow than education.
No, in most places not.
Depends on the place, I guess. In the US and Canada, it's pretty common. I've attended four different institutions and taught at one, and they've all been pretty money-focused.
People can cheat or learn to just memorize and repeat information without really accepting or retaining it. As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make a drink.
Intelligence and Wisdom are two separate stats.
education doesn't fix stupidity Education can however help with ignorance.
To put it simply, there is a difference between "intelligent" and "smart".
i'm a mechanical engineer. i know something about electricity and physics. i also have a degree in international trade.
until 2 yrs ago i didn't know how eggs get fertilized and yesterday my wife had to show me how to remove olive pits while preparing ouur cooking.
by all accounts i'm a dumbass with 2 degrees in specific fields that i don't encounter in day-to-day life. i have no idea how to survive in this world. i am sure others feel the same.
This is the best answer.
Why do billionaires/oligarchs do it?
Principle of Least Effort.
It isn't particular to the "lower class" or to the "less educated" or to any particular faction of the population.
That's normal.
Some people, no matter how you "slice" the population up, still act so fucking stupid.
'Tis a fact of life, is all.
_ /\ _
Depends on what you mean by that.
Stupid as in not grasping some concepts quickly?
Education is just a narrow overview of a particular field. Once you're out the narrow scope of what you're taught - it's all about your general knowledge. I know a world-class physicist who does not comprehend basic things about society, economy, relationships etc. And, working in a scientific field, I see plenty of such examples.
Stupid as in unable to aggregate data and synthesize understanding?
The state of modern tech and media more broadly eats heavily into people's attention span. People have harder time concentrating, and it gets so much worse when they need to aggregate all the sources they have. They just don't have enough short-term memory to keep it all together.
Stupid as in making weird life decisions?
Everyone's life experience is drastically different than yours, and, seeing only the surface, people often downplay what others went through and how it shaped their thinking. Sometimes it introduces genuine logical errors into the behavior, and sometimes it just comes from a much different perspective than you can imagine. In their world, the decisions they make makes sense. In your world, you also normally make sense for yourself, even if you're actually irrational in one thing or another. This does, by the way, include all the typical political rants - high-ranking politicians and their numerous advisors are unlikely to all be stupid. More likely, these people pursue different interests from what you imagine.
Overall, the word "stupid" is heavily overused and applied to a lot of different things. So, it always makes sense to clarify, or else it looks more like a rant rather than a genuine question.
Complaining about people being stupid is as old as the world itself, yet it's not very productive or done in good faith. Before claiming anyone stupid, try to ask them for their perspective and the way they look at a problem. And if you're able, unpack what you think is wrong.
Certification is given to anyone with the money for it
There's no major correlation between IQ and wealth
Cause education is not equal to intelligence.
To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.
-Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Simpler & clearer:
Intelligence is solving-the-problem-efficiently/quickly..
Wisdom is realizing we'd been solving the wrong problem, & working-out what the right-problem is..
Wisdom's meta-intelligence.
_ /\ _
Work at a university; try telling that to the academics. Some of them are phenomenally simple. They may be convinced of intellectual superiority because they're a world expert in frog genders, but they struggle to solve simple problems or absorb reasoning without having it dumbed down.
A university is like a daycare for those adults. And the trantrums and toy throwing they have with each other, oh my god. Daily I wonder how some of these people would survive if they ever had to leave school.
Reminds me of a joke from Ghostbusters, when Ray and Peter are kicked out of the university:
"You don't know what it's like in the private sector. They expect results!"
Academia is a good walled garden for those hyper specialized researchers. They progress research and the institution acts as a patron and sanctuary from the world. Perhaps we should reward continued general education though
It also seems that the more specific a person's education gets, it replaces general knowledge and thinking. For many it seems their entire thought process changes to focus on that specific thing, to the detriment of anything else. Doctorates seem to be less capable of working outside their specific focused niche compared to those with lower degrees. They've spent so much time focusing that they can't unfocus very well.
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I went to school for business like a dumbass, so I didn't learn shit about shit. That and genetics made for one dumb bitch.
It’s kind of interesting that most people here seem to assume that attending college is synonymous with education or knowledge. It would be nice if that were the case.
However, there are also quite a few people who went to college but didn’t learn a thing there - especially in countries like the U.S. or England, where a college degree costs an absurd amount of money, this happens all the time. It’s especially common there to find children of wealthy people who are as dumb as a box of rocks, yet still manage to buy their way into high society with a college degree - they’re guaranteed to get it, regardless of whether they learn even the slightest thing at university.
The current U.S. president is a good example...
"book smarts" and "street smarts" are two completely different things. My sister is book smart. skipped a couple grades, went to university twice, once for her degree and again for her masters. She's by all means well educated.
She's dumb as a bag of rocks. She's really good at studying. she's a pro at it. but none of that knowledge is ever retained for extended periods of time. Once its "useful" i.e. for a test/exam/SAT/etc then it's tossed out of her head. I can't recall what she earned her masters in but if you challenge her to talk about it today she can't. that's the primary reason I can't remember is because she literally is unable to talk about it.
what is her profession in?, like her current career?
she's a teacher...that's what scares me more. she's teaching kids. And the even MORE scary thing is she hates kids. she refuses to have her own because, and I quote, she "can't stand children". Essentially she's good at cramming/studying the lesson plans and then info dumping it on the kids. Now trying to get her to actually understand or teach you what's she's actually dumped onto the kids well after the fact? good luck. I tried that once. One week she taught the kids some subject on earth science, tectonic plates I believe, I asked her a week later at a family dinner about it because she brought it up. she couldn't explain it. it was out of her mind already.
Sounds like she's good at cramming, not studying.
Her brain is a cassette tape😆
I am an expert in my field. Because I devote all my time and brain to being so. I am average to terrible at everything else. So many of us like to think otherwise. I don’t get why. I’m tired at the end of the day and I just wanna be bad at shit lol. Ego?
As much as it might seem like it, education doesn't make a person intelligent.
People keep saying that, but it's bullshit. In many countries outside the US, people can only do a degree if they've proven that they're intelligent.
But intelligent people can be really stupid too.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
The difference is the conclusions drawn from the knowledge obtained. Dumb people can survey knowledge and come to wrong conclusions, it happens all the time.
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Yeah some of them are.
Having rich parents makes it pretty easy to get a higher education. And you can pay people to do your homework.
A lot of rich kids cheat. Like. A lot of them.
Masters and PhDs is where it starts to get harder to fake it but occasionally you still get a few that make it through who are nepo babies.
PHD is probably the hardest , MA is probably the easiest one to still fake it, since its not an MS.
Nothing to do with rich people. Good education is free in Germany and people who have a higher education can be just as stupid.
I heard that after the Vietnam war with most the protesters being college students they made an effort to remove lessons that teach critical thinking and problem solving to make people more compliant and less likely to do that again.
So current education is more about regurgitating information unless you go for your doctorate I would think. Dont know in that one, just a guess.
maybe for public k-12 yea,theres definite attack on that. but private instituition have thier own curriculum, and its not the same at each school, some schools have better teachers than others, and better resoruces for experience in stem field. the more elite ones though have a different mentality, it breeds elitist/entitled graduates.
This is conspiracy nutjob thinking.
The federal government does not control university curricula. It doesn't control what professors teach or how they teach it. Professors often have tenure, and can barely be fired by their own university for being subversive.
I thought education was standardized across all levels, didnt know universities had the leeway to do whatever with that curriculum. Thats interesting.
Certainly not. At least not in the US. Afaik, what is taught in public schools is defined by various levels of government. For example, the federal government sets standards for levels kids should achieve in reading at various ages, and mandates testing for this. The states define what should be taught in history classes in broad strokes (should be taught US history, world history, etc) but typically don't get into the details (you must teach the battle of Gettysburg). Then school boards, or sometimes the schools themselves, choose textbooks to teach the topics. The textbooks are written by private publishers - information from one book to another will be largely the same, since it is mostly well established facts, but emphasis might change between books as much as the authors want. For classes like English, teachers can typically assign whatever books they want - though for classes with standardized tests (like AP classes), teachers must stick to a (fairly large) list of approved books so that test graders will be familiar with them when evaluating essays.
At the university level, the government typically has even less influence. Really, anyone can claim to be a university - hence Devry and Pheonix. But if you want to be a university anyone gives a shit about, you need to be accredited as a university, and accreditation happens via a non-government organization which exists to maintain the standards of university education. Core classes at the undergraduate level tend to be fairly standardized - not by any central planning, but simply because the knowledge is fairly standardized in any given field and universities often must transfer credits for students from other universities. Professors - especially tenured professors - can teach more or less whatever they want in their classes, but class curricula are typically set by department committies to ensure continuity in students' education. And professors typically stick to the curriculum that has been set, since (1) it is probably a decent definition of what the students need to learn, (2) they don't want to catch flack from their collegues next semester when the students dont know something they should, and (3) cranking through the syllabus is faster and easier than being subversive, and they have grants they need to write.
C's get degrees.
It absolutely astounds me that all the idiots currently running America went to Ivy League schools and have degrees. I thought for sure they all went to clown college. What exactly to they teach at Harvard and Vasser?
Ivy League schools are just places to make connections with other rich people, so they can land a seven figure job right out of college and think they’ve earned it
they also tend to produce elitist graduates too, some professors from my CC went to one of the ivy league schools and his attitude reflects upriging fromt he schools, pretty arrogant towards the student, and why they are not passing gen chem.
I had a manager once. Very talented electrical engineer. Completely and totally refused to believe that anything about space, rockets, etc. was real.
wow, im not surprised. i was in a forum where these people had MS/MA degrees in stem. but refuse to follow proper research, and believe in a pseudoscience like chronic lyme(they all convinced they had lyme permanently), most of symptoms sounds like a mental illness, psycosomatic disease. there seems to be a correlation in believing pseudoscience(flat earther, fake diseases) and undiagonised mental illnesses.
College tutor here. Held a 4.0 GPA and graduated with honors on an academic scholarship. And I am very much the stoooopid type of person. I would be your worst nightmare as a co-worker. Well, maybe not "worst" but definately on the wrong end of that particular bell curve.
Now let's dive into the question!
There's a lot of different kinds of stupid. Some stupid people can be taught. Others just don't get certain concepts but other times, they pick up things very quickly. Some can learn, but if the knowledge sits dormant for too long, it disappears. Some people just don't care - if something isn't interesting to them, they don't pay attention.
I think what we're seeing is a HUGE rise in ADHD. All of the above can be signs of a hyperactive mind. We know, of course, that screen time - especially doom scrolling - increases ADHD. People who practice meditation and/or exercise and get the fuck off their screens aren't as susceptible.
I speak as someone who daily watches with horror as my social skills, wits and mental acuity slowly but surely move left on the x-axis of that bell curve we talked about earlier. My attention span wanes with a constant bombardment of information. I ingest a meme, but before it's thoroughly digested, I'm on to the next. I read a comment and jump to a conclusion, imagining my clever response but fast losing interest and deleting paragraphs of wordsmithy in a single stroke.
WE ARE NOT STUPID! WE ARE ADDICTED! AND IT'S KILLING US!
Also, this is a contagious condition, so get the fuck off Lemmy and hug a tree. Lemmy will still be here when you return. Thank you I love you good night!
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