Ask Lemmy

I think anyone who spends any time in rural areas has seen plenty. Not just under or uneducated, but literally humans who might seem on par with a dog when it comes to understanding things or curiosity in general. I know you're trying to keep this light-hearted, but truth is, they often run rural areas and it's kind of dark (to me). I think the closer you are to suburban or urban areas, the less enlightened people are more likely to be forced into obscurity. Society just doesn't have a lot of use for people who can't be peers. The inverse is true in rural areas. More intelligent people are suppressed. I knew plenty of farmers who were intelligent or intelligent enough. They didn't socialize much. It's better to be under educated, you are more likely to get along. You don't see much creativity or art in rural areas. Conformity equals comfort and safety. There are, of course, socio-economic factors in rural areas as well, but art finds a way in even the most impoverished areas.

Go visit towns with a population under 1,000 and you'll find plenty.

The definition of dumb is very elastic.

There is one summer student who came to work at my software company. He was in a very specialized and elite program at a top-flight Canadian university. Both his parents were professors at this university.

One day he came to our boss, and said that his family always went to Europe for 2 weeks in the summer, and he needed time off. My boss explained that he had been hired because we wanted to do a special project during the summer, and it would be very difficult to not have him on the team for a significant part of it.

My boss asked the student when the vacation was going to start. The student replied, "tomorrow".

At first, my boss was angry, but then realized that the student actually had no understanding that this was an unusual and onerous request. That's about the time I started learning about autism (and later realized that I was somewhere on the spectrum as well, just not as far along it).

I was in the navy, and many of the people I went through basic with struggled with the big stuff like "Following clearly defined orders" and "not doing obviously stupid shit".

When I was married, my step-daughter's boyfriend was always saying the dumbest, provably false bullshit and would double down when you showed him he was wrong. And he was proud of the fact he never finished high school. Could not stand the dude.

I was in this friend group (many many years ago) were one girl who always amazed me with her conclusions sometimes joined up. She was very kind so you can not dislike her but she didn't understand very simple concepts and were often lost in conversations that were a bit deeper than small talk. Everyone who met her for the first time always had at least one silent movement where they were thinking "why did she ask/say that?" and were unsure how to proceed (to not hurt her).

At my old workplace did I work with one woman that I think is "dumb" but I am very unsure in what way. I always had this weird feeling when talking to her, it felt like she didn't really get it but she didn't say much that would indicate it. Even tho she is older than I did it feel like talking to a child. It was a very weird experience. I didn't really talk much with her so I heard most things second hand but she could come to some weird conclusions about how to do her job. For example I often came earlier so I could leave earlier, so she did the same except I was actually working she did not, she were just sitting there for 1 hour doing nothing and assumed that was ok, as if we got payed to be there not actually work. When her boss told her off did she get stressful like a child and you saw she felt ashamed. She did this for many things and how she reacted made it seem like a child. I am unsure if she just tested us or if she actually thought it would be ok.

Otherwise do I not really meet "dumb" ppl. It is more about not having the knowledge or experience to know how to proceed or understand something. And some ppl are often in flight or fight mode when stressful problems arrive, so they do not think and come up with a solution that may be called "dumb".

Yeah, me neither but someone once told me that If you never met a dumb person, you're the dumb person. And then I was like "oh".

When I was an undergrad in the late '90s, I got a clerical job in the facilities management (FM) department.

The president of the university had a fleet vehicle as a perk of his job. It was a very nice car that was donated by a local car dealer but since it technically belonged to the university, all maintenance was handled through FM.

Late '90s meant that the stereo had a 5-disc CD changer. And the president's most frequent complaint about the car was that the stereo didn't work. Every single time he had that complaint, it was because there were at least two extra CDs stuck in the changer.

You had to really force it to get extra CDs in those things. And that happened at least half a dozen times that I know of.

Being dumb and being lazy is a fine line. I meet a lot of dumbasses that I think just don't care enough to try.

Also I see myself in the mirror everyday

“Of course I know him. He’s me”

Part of it is because IQ is unscientific and ignores variance in person's abilities in one task over the other.

It takes a person to fail at just about everything for us to declare them dumb.

So you might have been not in much of a bubble to begin with.

I sincerely believe that one should make an effort to at least sometimes go out and meet different people. Sure, there are people who you don't want to meet, cruel, uncaring, hateful, and so on. But that is not based on intelligence.

I've met my share of not-so-bright people. No funny stories, I don't want to make fun of people for being "stupid" either.

But I've been in a sports club with some very intelligent and not-so-intelligent people, I'd argue that you can find a good cross section of society in there.

One guy seemed to have some kind of mental disability, and also quite a fan of alcohol, which didn't help either. He was being "mentored" by one of the older guys in the club, and he was, generally, doing an ok job at "life", given the cards he was dealt.

Another guy just wasn't that smart, in the traditional sense. Nice, friendly, hard-working, well organised, with a strong sense of right and wrong, with a wife and a child and all that. Thinking of it, he has a (presumably) happy family, while I have a college degree and am shit-posting on the internet in my underwear by myself. One of us is winning at life, and I feel it isn't me...

Then, I've specteted a class for a rather low-skill job in a not-so-nice city once. Not special ed, regular class for people who want to get a certain (rather low) post-high-school certificate. I've sat with some people, and they were on a visit to the town electricity provider, who was trying to teach them (on a high level) how a power plant works. With one guy I was sitting with, there was just no chance. The concept of how burning gas turns a turbine, which turns a generator, which makes the lights go on just didn't fit into his brain. Super nice guy, but that was just out of his reach.

I have met a fair share of people at college as well. There are some people who are kind of unable to think for themselves, regardless of "intelligence" (whatever that is). College is likely the first time they have to figure out things on their own, with nobody telling them how to do it. I remember deliberately giving people tasks that seemed trivial to me in some kind of TA role, like "we used this device $X in the past, but it is too heavy, can you google for something like $X but maybe only 100g max?" and they were completely lost. All they had to do was type things into the search bar, click links, and look for "specs" and "weight". I can only guess they had parents do everything for them.

In my experience I have come across people who presented as "stupid." I have worked with rotating casts of temps at a couple of jobs - the "stupid" people are just as common in management as in the temps.

Usually I think it is because they are not present in their moment/don't care about what is happening, so they aren't really stupid but are just... vacant. Once you get them talking about a project they are actually passionate about, you can see the light of their intellect. Some folks however really do have a hard time understanding the world through logic, even when they are really trying.

Whew.

Buddy, @chunes@lemmy.world is right - you have met people that fall below average. I would easily bet money on it. You either don't recognize it, or think you are immune from it for some high and lofty self-centered reason.

This seems like a pretty trite ego post that only demonstrates how unaware you proudly are of your surroundings and a lack of sonder and empathy for many people you meet. Dunning-Kruger effect in action, if this is even real.

Bubble or not, genuinely stupid people are still human enough to recognize some patterns and play along. They fit in well enough to reproduce. Frequently. All throughout history. Meaning that you are not as good as recognizing them as they are at hiding it.

Shout out to @Pudutr0n@lemmy.world for maybe also calling it.

I worked with a guy once, we'll call him "Kevin"

I was making coffee in the office one day. Picture a typical Mr. Coffee type drip coffee maker. I filled the filter with grounds. I filled the glass pot with water. I poured the water into the reservoir. I missed a little - maybe ½ oz (~15ml) - that was left in the bottom of the carafe. Whatever, though, right? Coffee is mostly water, anyway. Whether that little bit went through the grounds or not doesn't make a noticeable difference. I put it down in the machine and hit "start".

Kevin was there and saw what happened.
"There's some water still" he says, pointing at the carafe.
"Eh, yeah, but..." I started to say, before my brain interrupted me and I went wide-eyed.

Kevin decided that he would remedy this himself. He turned his pointing into a reaching, then a grabbing, then lifting the coffee pot. He thought he would pour the remaining water into the reservoir.

Before I could tell him to put it back, the coffee started coming out. With no pot in place to catch it, it starts going directly on the hot plate. Of course, Kevin is turning to me to argue about whether the water should be put in the reservoir or not. He's not paying attention to what he's doing.

A moment later, when he finally notices, he starts freaking out. Notably, this freaking out did not include immediately putting the coffee pot back on the coffee maker to catch the remaining coffee. I actually had to instruct him to put it back.

So yeah, the dumbest person I've worked with let coffee spill all over because apparently it's unacceptable to have water in your coffee.

Yes, when I was doing community college theatre there were two guys - best friends - who were the dumbest fucking idiots I've ever encountered in the wild. It was years before Dumb and Dumber came out or I would have called them that. Really good natured, happy-go-lucky guys. but they didn't have six brain cells between them. Over the few months I knew them their friendship fell apart when Moron A beat up Moron B for getting him fired from Taco Bell where they both worked. I can no longer remember any specific stories about dumb things they did, cuz it was decades ago, only that it was always hard to explain anything to them, and I wasn't the only person who had this problem. They seemed normal in social situations, not like they were mentally impaired or high or anything, just not much going on under the hood.

Met one? I am one

Yes, but I'm of the general opinion that people are usually willfully dumb. If you have passion and drive, I think you'll more likely than not have some level of strong intelligence.

As a matter of "fact", I work with a bunch of people in the left half of the bell curve. We regularly complete psychological testing, and it's uncommon that clients are above 100 IQ, tho it's not surprising when it happens. I would be hesitant to call anyone under 100 IQ "dumb" though. There is a certain level of intent behind it, I think. "Willfully stupid" is a better description.

However, I have recently had a client who called out of work because he "had a horn growing out of his stomach".

It was a skin tag.

Oh yes. I worked retail for over a decade, and now I work in parts. The amount of people that can't follow directions or read is mine boggling.

I have one client whose purchasing department has one guy. Most of the time he cannot send a correct dollar amount on the purchase order, no matter how many times I tell him "hey, line 2 needs to be $146.76, you have it priced at $257.32." he will send me an updated PO, but change a different items price and not the one I told him to change.

We normally have to go back and forth 3-6 times. It's been like this for YEARS. Dude just isn't good with numbers and he is in charge of purchasing for a billion dollar company.

Yes.

Ran into a person in a random discussion about hand sanitizer. This was well before covid. They completely believed that having clean looking hands was better than having dirty hands. IOW if you’re a mechanic and can’t quite get all the crud out from under your nails but had scrubbed you hands with cleaners and soap as best you could that this was far worse than not washing your hands all day.

No amount of reason would penetrate this stance.

I don't believe in dumb people. Measured intelligence is a pretty useless concept that does more harm than good.
I think everyone spends their cognitive capacity, what they choose to care about and pay attention to in different ways, and then we as a society place more value on those qualities that are deemed useful from a perspective of productivity - and label those 'high intelligence'.
The overall variance between healthy (non-brain damaged) human adults in 'mental processing power' for lack of a better term seems negligible to me though. Some people just use theirs to advance quantum physics, while others use it to organize their garden or draw Sonic the Hedgehog porn.

@1984 you know, over time i met so many people who were dumb, but I often just try to forget about them because it just depresses me.

Yes, I worked in IT support. And I don't even just mean customers, some of the dumbest people were colleagues. Some of them on higher levels, so they earned way more than me as well. Often I think I am the idiot to my colleagues.

You don't know what's going on with people in their lives. Although I still don't think outright maliciousness should be acceptable

Dumb is relative.

This dude, is on some other level.
https://lemmy.world/comment/23642747

Honestly I think intelligence is a vector, not a scalar. There are lots of things that contribute to it. If you have to boil it down to a single thing, I'd say the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated facts or ideas. In fact I seem to remember there was a show called Connections with this as its premise, tracing cause and effect between historical events that seemed otherwise unrelated. I remember watching it and feeling very dumb.

I've hit what I think are the limits of my cognition on a few occasions, and it's always a scary experience. First was probably failing calculus II in college for the second time. I had this distinct feeling that no amount of studying or sheer willpower was going to make me understand it. The latest was when I kept failing a certification exam. I had been trying over and over, but my score was actually getting worse. I still maintain that I could have passed the test if it were presented differently, like if there was more time, or if I were given better tools than just a bunch of unsearchable JPGs of log output scattered around the screen.

This doesn't answer your question, but I thought I'd put it out there.

EDIT: my spatial reasoning is nonexistent, so I have a hard time comparing the sizes of two objects if they're not directly in front of me. This comes up most often in the kitchen. I can't deduce the most appropriate size pot or bowl for a given task, so I default to the largest, which is of course hardest to clean and takes up more room in the fridge. And I don't think it's down to inexperience either. The only way I can figure out if a leftover container will fit said leftovers is by actually placing them in the container, which of course dirties it, so if it doesn't fit I have to get another one. So again I just use the largest one I can find. I'm sure there's a visual comedy routine in there somewhere.

I have met people who were confidently wrong, and no I don't mean people who's worldview differed from mine. When I was in 5th grade, I had an argument with a grown man who thought ants weren't animals. I think he just thought "animal" meant terrestrial vertebrate. Pretty sure he had gone to college, too.

I would define one type of 'dumb' as people who upon learning they are making errors, refuse to apply any effort in improving. I have met lots. I am it sometimes too.

Another type of 'dumb' is ones that care nothing for others and cannot even foresee that caring broadly for and uplifting others is actually caring for yourself. I will also fail at this one often.

Labeling others as dumb is just an indirect way of calling yourself smart.