1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
I can't get away from the idiot. I have to see him in the mirror every morning.
As far as a funny story: My friends brother isn't very bright sometimes. My friends computer chair broke, one of the 5 metal supports that lead out to the plastic wheels snapped. My friends brother was learning how to weld so he tried to fix the support and in trying to test the strength of the weld he started bashing the seat against the floor and broke every plastic wheel... lol
It's incredible how easy it is to remain in a bubble. Family, friends, neighbors, college, work colleagues - all are going to be closer to you than the average person.
Anyone who has worked retail, customer service, or otherwise general public-facing jobs will have this put in perspective pretty quickly.
Indeed, contact with the public will do it quickly.
I work with a long list of clients at my work who seem to lack any type of critical thinking skills whatsoever, a significant fraction of them are apparently functionally illiterate, and a shocking number of them are actually incapable of understanding abstract concepts. These people cruise through life just as happy as you please, at least until they run up against some frustration that they can't understand at which point their default response is typically to get violently angry, and as an outside observer it's equal parts fascinating and deeply troubling. I can't imagine existing that way. Being unable even to read, and with every new concept or technology being an inscrutable puzzle box so terrifying that your only recourse is to scream and tantrum and threaten until someone else comes along and makes it go away.
And yet, most of these same stupid people are highly derisive of smart people. This notwithstanding that without these purported nerds, geeks, Poindexters, and wimps they'd be freezing in the dark as they starved to death. Somehow they've managed to get jobs, afford cars and mortgages, and they're allowed to vote, procreate, and even buy guns. It's enough to make me never want to leave my IT dungeon or, perhaps, never return from the mountains. But I have to, so here I am.
I interact with truly stupid people on a daily basis. I could tell you all some whoppers from my time in the trenches.
I worked in a call center that involved a lot of repeat calls as a matter of course. Most were elderly, some had mental issues. We had some characters for sure. A lot of people who clearly didn't have access to a good education growing up, or who burned their brains out on drugs when they were younger, or who were literally high right then and there.
Education and employment level do not preclude stupidity. I too work in stem. I have had antivax colleagues.
I still am amazed at how many engineers I work with came out as anti Vax during 2020-2022.
I don't think antivax requires stupidity. Some people just don't trust the health system, and often for good reason. Black people, for example, have faced some horrible things due to the government, in the name of "science".
I think there are two types of antivax. There's the distrusting kind, which I think is pretty reasonable honestly. There's a lot of history behind it. Then there's the "I've done my own research" kind, which are stupid and will buy anything someone else says if it agrees with their preconceived ideas.
I didn't meet anyone that would fit on the left half of the bell curve (less than 100 iq).
I promise you that you have. I don't care what industry you worked in. You were vastly overestimating a lot of people.
I’ve mostly moved in the same sort of bubbles as OP (I think) and while it wasn’t super common, I definitely met people in that bubble, who had to be on the other side of the curve. I don’t have many funny stories about it; people struggling to keep up with their peers in competitive environments are more often sad or frustrating.
OK, there was one kinda funny thing where a PM at a household name tech company cornered me (an engineer with a math degree) to emphatically detail his “system” for craps. I tried so hard to explain why it’s impossible to have a “system” for predicting the outcome of dice rolls, he just wouldn’t hear it. I later told a friend about the encounter who replied “that ought to be a fireable offense”.
That wasn’t the dumbest thing that dude ever said nor the reason l flipped the bozo bit but it was the funniest.
To clarify , he was talking about playing in a casino and wasn’t talking about using altered dice or doing slight of hand where you’re not really throwing the dice.
I spent 20 minutes (I timed it) on the phone diagnosing a tech support issue and instructing the user on how to fix it. It took about 10 seconds for me to realise that number lock was turned off.
The rest of the 20 minutes was trying to get the user to find and press "Num lock" on the keyboard.
About 10 minutes in, they actually found and pressed it. Apon noticing that nothing had appeared on the screen, they tried pressing it again, then announced it didn't work.
Somehow, just getting them to press the button one more time was not simple, as they now had to begin their logical left-to-right scan of the keyboard again to find this mysterious new "Num lock" button they'd never heard of before.
This person (on another call) would say the name of each key as they pressed it. They would say "Caps lock, A, Caps lock, Enter" when typing a single "A" on a line, but didn't know what "Caps lock" was and couldn't find it on the keyboard when asked to press it immediately after having said and pressed it.
I don't think we've met yet.
Yes bro. I work a customer facing job and drive in traffic. I encounter morons every day.
Yeah, every customer service worker has met loads. 😬
TIL that dumb is defined as having scored less than 100 IQ.
Anyway, I've worked enough customer service to say with some confidence that I've met at least a few people who truly just exist and let the world happen to them with zero curiosity.
I've worked enough customer service.
I feel this so hard. Nothing like working with the general public to realize how fucking dumb so many are. Critical thinking skills are scarce on this planet.
I did both fast food and big box retail, and holy shit people are dumb. For anyone here who wants to say that's mean or I don't understand, I counter with you've never had a cheeseburger thrown at you because apparently they wanted a cheeseburger with no cheese and how dare you not know that.
Yes, I knew someone when I worked in retail who was quite dumb, she was a super sweet person though.
I realized how dumb she was when we encountered a mouse in the back stocking area. It crawled under the door and out to the back of the building. She turned to me and said “I heard the reason mice can crawl under doors like that is because they don’t have any bones”
Me being a biology major with a big interest in all things animals and insects that loves to educate people tried to correct her. I told her about how all mammals have bones and that mice were just very flexible to be able to fit under the gap in the door. I told her about how we used to dissect owl pellets when I was in 3rd grade and put the little skeletons back together. She did not believe me and still thought mice just don’t have bones.
I do sometimes wonder if she ever finished nursing school.
Ive known several MAGA people.
One in particular stands out, she was in charge of processing bills for our company, and she basically got all her propaganda from fox news. The company is/was a civil engineering firm (I no longer work there), we specialized partly in large municipal water projects, dams, water infrastructure, injection wells, large scale stormwater percolation, reservoirs etc.
During the big California wildfires (when firefighters kept not getting water out of the hydrants), the head engineer and the lead technical engineer held one of their once-a-month training lunches, and they decided to go over the California wildfires and the effects on the water infrastructure.
This lady stands up, and interrupts the lead technical engineer (who was going over flow/pressure/friction equations to show why hydrants ran dry when there was so much demand), to insist that the reason California is running out of water is that "Newsom drained the reservoir to protect some stupid fish" and other fox news idiocy. Spent a solid 5 minutes trying to tell a bunch of civil engineers a bunch of "information" about water systems that was so hilariously wrong that it was actually impressive.
That was a very awkward few minutes while HR tried to tell this lady that she needs to let the engineers actually learn how to do the job.
Not every low IQ person is the same, but generally they are just frustrating to deal with and need a lot of slow, extra handholding. If you give them a paper with directions/explanations, they're not going to read it and try to understand it. They're going to ask you to explain it, and they may just give up on trying to understand it. If you need them to look something up and figure it out for themselves, they just won't. If there's a consequence, they don't modify their behavior or seem to care. They'll do what they'll do, and whatever happens after will happen after. They operate through the world with really poor understandings of everything that goes on around them, and it doesn't bother them. Someone else will tell them what to do.
But of course! One I know well. He's a very friendly and likable person, and never judges anyone. He has a large social circle, a steady job doing manual tasks. He has a delightful longtime girlfriend. But he can't grasp abstract concepts, or any but the simplest logical concepts. He hides any lack of understanding with a quick joke, but is highly susceptible to propaganda.
I once worked with a guy who did not know the sun was a star and didn't know what planets were. This was when I was in the military. I had a an unlabeled world map in my office and whenever someone new(to Germany) came in to be introduced I'd point to the map and say, "I'll buy you a beer if you can point out our location on the map". It was just an icebreaker so pointing at Europe was good enough. It was shocking how many people couldn't locate Germany on a world map and quite a few couldn't locate their home state on that world map.
I worked with another guy(a computer programmer) who thought the earth was 6000 years old. He also once told me that vertigo is when you feel like you're standing still and the earth is spinning and indigo is when it feels like you're spinning and the earth is still.
I work with and interact with professionals and am often reminded of something Richard Feynman said, "Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot."
I got some for you.
I used to work in the computer lab of a public library. I've met so many people carrying such a profound lack of basic understanding or reasoning skills, that the most terrifying thought was realizing "They drove here."
I put up with that job way too long... It was... So deeply soul sucking I'm still recovering years later. I wish I were joking.
A lot of people who simply didn't read anything presented to them on a screen, couldn't handle the concept of email, and had no idea how to open Microsoft Word, much less type a resume. That was kinda the bread and butter there, unfortunately, but we did our best.
It was a whole lot of "That sounds hard. Do it for me?" And they found all sorts of weasle ways to need constant babysitting without crossing the line of my job description.
Few wanted to actually learn anything. (If they did, I went above and beyond.) They mostly wanted a free butler to do their homework assigned by the government or a lawyer or their job or whatever.
These people are dumb by choice, because they are intellectually lazy.
"Monke, stop being mean to the 85 year olds!" You might be thinking. No. These were like 40 and 50 year olds who would tell me "I'm old school, I don't do computers." Computers were around since way before me! Where the heck were you!?!? (I'm now convinced whenever people say "old school" they mean "no school.")
Some examples:
We used to put big obvious "Out of Order" signs over the screens if a machine wasn't working correctly. I watched a young lady in like her 20s, sit down at that machine, make eye contact with me, see the sign, flip it over, attempt to sign in, then walk up to me to say (yes, in fluent English) it wasn't working.
I had a regular patron always looking for pastry chef jobs. We had to keep her resume, email address, and password on our work machine because she'd show up every week having forgotten all of it. She ended up with one pastry job only to get fired for eating one from a tray on shift.
So she applied to a grocery chain I think (with significant hand holding by a number of staff), and they had one of those basic competency tests like giving correct change and "Click the picture that shows how many apples are left if we had 5 and take 2 away."
I explained the nature of the question but that I couldn't do the thinking for her, and I shit you not this woman in like her early 50's broke down upset that it was all too much to handle. Like, first grade math. She was one who drove there, by the way. In a car.
I had a dude get grouchy with me because I told him he couldn't edit videos with PowerPoint (there was no video editing software on those machines.)
I had people more than once try to get me to help them use Paint or GIMP to alter a scan of a pay stub. (FAT CHANCE!)
They would often try to call customer service reps and hand us the phone. Another huge no.
And these people all showed up to blame their struggles...On me.
...Yeah, I've met people that have made me weep for the species. They have zero curiosity, zero intrinsic understanding or critical thinking or pattern recognition, and they are seemingly content only knowing how to just complain and buy things.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste. And I have seen quite a few wasted minds. It really does break my heart.
Edit: Still work for the library, but in a MUCH better position now. I'm still sad the the weirdest most unhinged people I meet usually want the computer lab though, and I hurt for my colleagues over there...
Well I'm surrounded by religious magas so, yes.
"Earth is 2000 years old. Gay is wrong and unnatural. Dinosaurs didnt exist. Democrats want to turn the US into Russia. Trump should take over Canada"
All actual things said by real life people to me.
Its baffling how stupid most Americans are.
Anyone here thinking that they've never met a dumb person probably IS the dumb person lol
I had a friend in elementary school that was a little slow sometimes. One day we were walking home from school, and out of nowhere, he asks, "Why don't they just make the Playstation 9?"
It took me a minute to figure out what he even meant by that. The Playstation 2 had just came out. Did he think that companies already have the schematics for all of their products decades into the future, but they're just rolling them out one at a time anyway? Does he think that they already know what the PS 3 through 8 are going to be, and they can just...decide to skip those?
It was only about a year ago, right here in a fedi thread, that someone shared this PS2 commercial and I had a giant AH-HAH! moment that was decades in the making.
Yeah, about a decade back. A friend of my roommate was not very bright. She said stuff like "why would anyone do a PhD, didn't we already research all there is?”.
You're gonna give me a small crisis with that one.
I've racked my brain trying to figure out how anyone could be so culturally and politically regressive when the world is chock full of stuff that didn't exist a decade or two ago. And then your post shows a very plausible anecdote that kind of explains it. To think that anyone would observe the outside world and see a fixed and solved existence with no forward trajectory, despite recent history clearly illustrating the opposite, just baffles me. Yet, that really happens.
A ton of pre-millennials really huffed the leaded gas fumes / ate the paint chips and it shows. :/
So, I am normally very skeptical about people yelling about bubbles...but I went from working in IT like you to working blue collar, and thus essentially went from being mildly smarter than most of my coworkers to being very obviously the smartest in the room barring infrequent encounters with others like me.
There are folks around me in blue collar work that are very experienced at what they do and wise in that specific niche due to their experience, but in general my overall mental capacity seems quicker and more flexible than most individuals I meet now, which wasn't showcased nearly as much when I was with other nerds in IT.
So yes, you're in a bubble. I had also been in a bubble for many years and had forgotten WHY I had fled to IT and nerd shit, and got a pretty pointed reminder.
Yes, I have visited the United States of America, thank you for asking
I was in a conscription army. Everyone fit for duty gets called up. I think we can assume that the very extremes wouldn't be fit. But anyone 80+ from the lower side of that bell curve would be there. It's a good mix of the whole country.
I think in most cases you wouldn't realise that someone was on the side of the bell curve unless they had serious problems with social cues.
This one guy didn't know how to shower. He'd strip down, cover himself in soap and then shower it off. I knew this guy from school, and he was bullied a lot. He'd rage out about any little thing, so bullies got a kick out of it. I guess it was a chicken and egg problem.
One guy was nervous about getting drafted, so he showed up shitfaced on the bus that rolled in. As the rest went to stand in line to get signed in and get their gear, he ran and hid in a bush until the MP:s came to get him. Nice enough guy. He hung himself in the forest a few years after conscription.
Another guy really tried to get out of serving by complaining about his knees, hoping to get deemed unfit for service. He got assigned lighter duties, which were to service the fleet of bicycles the army has. When time came around to use them, they all had issues.
Another had been driving trucks before conscription. He claimed he hit 110km/h due to having the sun in his back. He was quite the mythomaniac in general. He didn't make any friends, didn't pick up on social queues and could not clean up his dialect enough to be understood by half of the people there. He came by my bunks asking about a helmet and shovel his friend had borrowed from him, and was supposed to leave with us when friend was discharged. Turns out his "friend" broke into his locker to "borrow" the gear to return for his discharging. I got called in as a witness in that incident, but I hadn't heard anything about it until dumb guy came along for his stuff.
Edit: i just remembered movie night with that last guy. We had a classroom with a TV up front and a microwave on the windowsill for heating snacks. He was sitting by the microwave and his sergeant passed a pack of microwave popcorn down the row to be microwaved. Dumb guy asks for instructions - "just toss it in and set it for three minutes". Three minutes in it starts smelling burnt in the whole room. Turns out dumb guy left the plastic wrapping on.
Wait haven’t you ever had to go to like, the DMV or a Walmart, or a CVS at 11pm? I’m not saying the professions are filled with dummies but the cross section of public you encounter there is sure to have a few dummies.
I literally met someone who called 911 for a broken artificial fingernail.
Spend sometime in the emergency Department and you'll meet plenty.
I used to date this girl that was beautiful, sex was incredible, but was dumb as a rock. I could and should've been better about not wanting a relationship with her, but it's besides the point now.
I really wondered if she was a functional adult. My favorite and most extreme memory is asking her to heat some water in the kettle, and 5 seconds later thinking "she won't be able". So I silently went to the kitchen, watched her try, fail, and turn around with a wet puppy face saying "I can't do it". There's nothing weird about my stove. Gas, a lighter or a match and that's it. Countless people did it before and afterwards, I don't even have a clue how she failed.
I've met more stupid people, and it normally ranges from "I don't want to hear anything from this guy ever again" to "how the fuck are you still alive?". Most of the time, people aren't actually stupid but simply lack education.
I've met plenty of 'dumb' people that function just fine in a familiar environment. You would never know in normal circumstances. The problem comes when something out of the ordinary happens. For instance, we had a shop worker with a learning disability. She dealt with all the common problems just fine, but if someone asked for something out of the ordinary, or for directions (this was pre-smartphone) it quickly becomes apparent.
i had someone assigned under me at work. this person was old enough to have a teenager, yet she could not function. we were painting the halls, she kept setting the paint tray into puddles of paint that she spilled, then kept setting it down on the bare floor. she could not understand how to scrape tape off the tabletops. she could not tell me what her job duties were after 4 months of doing the same shit every day (take trash out, clean bathrooms, sweep, wipe down tables. she could not list that off to me. any time i was giving her direction, she would stare bankly at me slackjawed, like there was no intelligence in her eyes, then 5 minutes later i would find her on her phone because she couldnt remember what she was supposed to do and didnt even think of asking me to remind her.
she lived a couple houses away from where we work and her mother (who she lives with) would walk over to check on her sometimes. weird.
the last straw came when after 2 hours of work, i came out of the bathroom and all the lights were off and alarm code set, and she was gone. i texted her and asked where she went and she said she thought we were done for the day bc she finished her task and couldnt find me (I WAS IN THE BATHROOM.)
when i got management involved, i was told i didnt try hard enough with her. lol
My old roommate. He would make like 20 chicken drumsticks in the night/evening, eat one or two of them, and then leave them to sit out all night only to throw them away in the morning. It did not just happen once, he did it like at least 4 times. Huge waste of food.
He also once cooked [my!] ground beef with 0 seasoning, literally just in a pan. And while he has that plain ground beef sitting in a container in the fridge, he started defrosting another pound of MY beef. What are you going to use it for?? You already have plain ground beef that you cooked literally yesterday!?!?
He also had this ancient and suffering blind & deaf chihuahua who wore diapers, and he would leave the dirty diapers in the most random places including on top of the electricity utility box in front of the house where everybody can see it.
I did not even believe in idiots/stupid people until I met this guy. He was also a big fan of Charlie Kirk, by the way.
A particular fellow student comes to mind who was slow to understand things, made a comparative lot of programming mistakes and so he took more time, but he also worked hard, stuck to a problem until it was solved, coordinated tasks well, and additionally brought positive spirits to any project group. I assume he'd score under 100 but I'd love to have him on my team if he applied with us today.
It's hard to know for sure though, since 100 is the average by definition and most people will be relatively close to it. Not like 97 or 103 makes a big difference. It's half the people you meet in public, like, (by and large) we all go to the same primary schools and supermarkets etc. Outside of those (so tertiary education, workplaces, online bubbles perhaps, etc.), there's still a substantial fraction who learned a lot and/or have a good work attitude and go very far in life amidst people who didn't have to work hard to get anywhere
It frankly seems strange to assume you basically never met anyone who is slightly below the average. From a statistics point of view, one might wonder if that's a dumb thing to say ;) (jk)
I work in mental health and I’ve definitely met patients who have low IQ scores. However, even without getting into clinically significant low IQ ranges, I can virtually guarantee you that you’ve met people who have sub-100 IQs. 100 is the average human IQ score. You haven’t gone through life this far without meeting people who fall a few points below it, just as you haven’t failed to meet people who score above it. A person with a 95 IQ is not going to be able to be distinguished from a person with a score of 105 by someone who doesn’t have substantial training in assessing IQ (and even then, most experts would have to formally test people to detect subtle differences like that).
No, I've only heard about them, usually at least three degrees of separation from me. There are levels of stupidity out there that are truly alien to me. I had the same realization you did.... What I thought a stupid person looked like was not nearly as stupid as they can get. The fact that I usually need to go about three hops from myself to find them really goes to show how socially stratified they become. It's very unfortunate because it seems to imply that people don't really get exposure to people that are very much smarter than them, and the same goes for me.
