God damn this is too real
Yes because almost everyone in the planet agrees with the sentiment, even the people we consider stupid (who use a different metric).
Not true, because a fuckton of those stupid people erroneously believe they’re smarter than everyone else in the world. The number of times I have heard “if I were in charge, everything would be straightened out” from these troglodytes is too damn high. I’m actually smart enough to know how insanely demanding “being in charge” and “doing things right” actually fucking is so I god damned know I am not up for the challenge so, yeah, actually they’re still actually fucking stupid. Sorry, not sorry.
it’s not about smart vs stupid. it’s about skeptical vs gullible.
plenty of very smart people are gullible. and most people are gullible because it’s ‘nice’.
most of us who are skeptical are see as cold, mean, and anti-social. hence to be pro-social you have to be ‘stupid’ and believe in the nonsense everyone else is going on about.
I haven’t seen this perspective before. What makes you think healthy skepticism needs to be demeaning or rude?
They’re saying skeptics are perceived that way, not that they necessarily are acting that way. Just that other people clock you as “not nice” when you don’t always take what they say at face value.
“Think of how stupid the average person is. Now understand that HALF us are even stupider than that!”
So has average intelligence fallen that much or has the distribution changed so much that the median and the average are quite different? Maybe our graph is now u shaped with a huge number at very low intelligence and equal a very high and not much middle ground? What is it about the internet and 24hour news that has collectively dumbed down the population?
News cycles are breeding grounds for hate. In return, hate is breeding grounds for ignorance, which is closely linked to either cognitive decline or unintelligence
A lot of “stupidity” you see in the world is a result of anxiety and exhaustion proximately caused by individual poverty and bad infrastructure* imo
*Infrastructure includes hard systems like transit and housing and soft systems like community organizations and government agencies imo
I feel like it’s pretty common for kids to see the actions of adults and think they’re all stupid until they themselves become adults and finally see what motivated those actions in the first place.
The few adults I’ve run into who maintained the whole “everyone else is such a moron” both overestimated their own intelligence by an order of magnitude and were cripplingly narcissistic.
speak for yourself.
I live in Cambridge MA. one of the smartest/richest places on the planet. Lots of people are stupid here and anxious and exhausted even making 300-400K a year and living lives of luxury and privilege.
the crux of it is they are just selfish jerks who don’t care about anyone else and are supremely overconfident about how genius they are… and that arrogance makes them incredibly gullible and stupid when a charming personality tries to convince them that vaccines cause autism. and their biggest complaint about their lives is that they don’t have more luxury and privledge and that they are actually ‘struggling’ in life because they can’t afford to charter jets and have to ‘suffer’ first class plane travel.
Probably true, but I don’t think that warrants the stupidity being put in scare quotes like that. Regardless of whether it is intrinsic or extrinsic stupidity, stupidity by nature or by nurture, the result is genuine stupidity all the same
