Have you ever met an actual dumb person?
I was thinking about this. I went to university, and I worked in tech for decades. I met many assholes but I didn't meet anyone that would fit on the left half of the bell curve (less than 100 iq).
Since I've been living in that bubble my entire life, I'm curious of your stories. Have you met someone who was actually quite dumb (not just having opinions you don't agree with) and do you have an example situation you remember you can share?
Hopefully this becomes more funny than hateful since intelligence is not the value of a person, but it can be funny to read the stories.
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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 guess it depends on how you define stupidity.
Distrusting governments and distrusting vaccines are totally different things. There is vast scientific consensus that vaccines work, if you're antivax you've made a conscious decision to ignore that, which is stupid in my book. Distrusting government advice on vaccines, depending on where you are, may be totally justified.
Well, again, many groups have has the scientific establishment lie to them in order to experiment on them. I can't really blame people who have that in their cultural memory for being skeptical of the current scientific establishment too. I can't view that as stupid. For example, even if the Nazis have the scientific establishment backing them up (they did in some cases), I don't want people trusting them. I don't think that's wrong. It's often hard to impossible to separate science and the state.
I don't think that's happening today though, at least not to a large extent. I think science is a lot more open now, and there's too many people watching for the same things to happen without us knowing. There are probably some pretty fucked up small experiments happening today, but not on the scale of vaccines. However, I feel it's important to see where people are coming from, especially if you want to convince them of something. If you want to convince marginalized groups to trust the concensus on vaccines, you need to understand why they'd be skeptical so you can overcome that skepticism.
Doubting an experimental vaccine is different to being antivax.
There no ambiguity on vaccines, the science is settled, and anyone who doubts vaccines as a concept because of localised corruption isn't harbouring a healthy amount of caution. I call it stupidity, but others might say brainwashed.
There are some I have worked for that also believe the earth is 6k years old and that evolution is fake and that dinosaurs weren't real... plenty of idiots in stem fields.
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.
To be fair, there is a way to bet in craps that minimizes the house odds and gets it to a roughly 52% chance the house will win. This is very simple and pretty boring, i.e. not much of a system. As it turns out, these are the lowest house odds for any game found in a casino.
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.
That's actually hilarious. :) Its always the best stories from tech support.
Man this reminds me. I was helping an engineer support my company remotely and after a month or so of everything working fine, he emails frantically and says "THE SCREEN IS BROKEN!"
After some time, I finally figured out that he means he can't log on to the VPN. Probably two hours of testing in and we didn't figure it out, so we left it. The third fucking day of this I eventually was annoyed and wanted a coffee break, so i told him to reboot again. He actually rebooted this time and it works.
Caps lock had been on for like 3 days. Everything he typed was yelling because he just didn't notice.
I later met someone in IT at his company who said that this is a fairly regular occurrence from him
I used to do phone tech support for a device that hooked up to TVs to filter out profanity.
I would give very explicit instructions on what to plug where. It was really common for me to have people unplug everything and start over because they did something wrong, and I had no way of knowing what because they were all unreliable narrators.
On a second, third, fourth attempt I'd often hear a "OH! You said to plug that into the TOP ROW! I've been plugging it in to the bottom row." Or something like that.
A call less than 30 minutes was a good call. Calls over an hour were not uncommon. If I had someone who could follow instructions, it could be as quick as a handful of minutes.
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. 😬
If you haven't met a dumb person, you are the dumb person.
I'd rather be the dumbest in the room than the smartest :)
Amen. I told a coworker this in a meeting recently that I felt like the dumbest person on the call and I loved it. They're doing development stuff I never would have thought in my dreams I could do and yet here I am lol
Haha yeah, could be. :)
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 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.
Is being bellow 100 really the definition of dumb?
It used to be unable to talk.
Also if 100 is average being slightly bellow average shouldn't be considered "dumb"
Yeah you are right. It's not dumb to be on the left side, unless it's quite far on the left side. And even then, it's not at all the most important human quality at all.
I meant that I have lived in a bubble a bit, with friends, colleagues, girls all being university students. I have never worked customer service or been in the military.
Many of the examples in this thread are experiences I haven't had. So I just wanted to ask people about their experiences.
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.
Ah, yes. Boneless mice, also known as terrestrial quadropodes. I'm pretty sure they're related to the chickens we get boneless wings from.
It would be amazing if they didn't have any bones. Just a big blob of flesh. :)
Yeah, like I said, she was a really sweet gal. She cared about people, her family, and coworkers. She was a hard worker and I enjoyed having her as a colleague. I really liked her, she just wasn’t very smart.
My brother-in-law heard and believed that cats could squeeze into tight places because they have "collapsible skeletons." Like, they could sense a tight place and detach their bones on demand and pop them back in later.
Now that’s an interesting one. I don’t get where people get this kind of stuff. Like, do you not pay any attention in science class? It’s some of the most basic of basic biology. But I was also the kid who used to read biology textbooks for fun lol
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.
Yeah I have seen examples of this behavior on YouTube. People become very convinced about something and it warps their entire view of reality. And yeah, some people don't realize that other people can be much, much better at something than they are, and they should listen, not talk in that situation. :)
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 think many people in Europe could not point out the American states either. It's one of those things you learn in school once and never do again. :)
I guess most people would know Florida and California maybe. But just guessing here.
Yes, but most could point out North-America.
Yes. :)
A ton of pre-millennials really huffed the leaded gas fumes / ate the paint chips and it shows. :/
And it's leeching out of their bones as they age. Cognitive impairment and aggression would be the symptoms we see now as Boomers and Gen Xers age.
Ive come across that story before yeah. Sad thing is, it just happened to them and nothing they could do to prevent it.
I've just met a dumb person.
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...
I've spent lots of time at the public library and I've never seen this, though, I'm not surprised. For better or worse, the public library brings refuge to the the most vulnerable people in our population.
Yeah, the library is definitely a wonderful institution for everyone! I did get a chance to support some wonderful people who wouldn't have had any support otherwise.
I don't wanna sound like I lacked any compassion or understanding. I wouldn't have survived many years doing that job otherwise. I was just focusing on the prompt. But the "carer's fatigue" was REAL.
It wasn't all bad though! For example: While I couldn't/wouldn't personally touch anybody's computers, I did help two people with really old laptops switch to Linux Mint, and they LOVED IT. So that was really cool! (I kept wanting to run a clinic for this and admin just kinda ignored me to shut me down)
But at the same time, it's clear in the U.S at least, the library is often positioned as an ill-equipped bandaid to cover a gaping wound in a decayed and eviscerated social system. Libraries would be more pleasant for all with a working social safety net and more "third places" that were free to all to enioy.
Clearly in this case, libraries are expected to make up where underfunded schools utterly failed their students.
Employees trained to help with information are also called upon to be social workers, teachers, employment specialists, and even crisis management personnel in the most extreme cases, and are paid to be none of these things.
Of course private interests and their pet politicians are keen on destroying libraries like they did everything else, because free access to knowledge is dangerous to them. :)
So yeah, support your local library: The last place you can be without paying admission. ❤️
Exactly, I go to libraries because sometimes I need a place to sit down and do work and it's kind of sad what I have to see in the library. I see so many homeless people and it's all a result of the conditions we live in right now. There really is no other free 3rd place like the library.
I'm 50 and I worked in tech until very recently, so yeah, age is not the problem there. It's just that they have no interest at all in it.
I guess its like me trying to learn a language, something I find very frustrating. I would take any shortcut I could to avoid any struggle, because I just want the end result, not the journey. :)
I mean maybe? But even if it's frustrating it sounded like you tried and that's the key point I'm trying to make about intelligence.
I've been there too, and I think finding shortcuts to communicate is part of the process, right? Also I notice people tend to LOVE helping new people learn their language here and there. People love it when others are trying their best even if they're awful at it. I wouldn't call that dumb, for sure. :)
My experience with these folks felt more like those stereotypical cringey tourists or expats, who would move somewhere foreign to them and just get louder and more indignant at everybody: "WHY ISN'T EVERYTHING IN ENGLISH?! CAN'T YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?! I WANT TO TALK ONLY IN ENGLISH ABOUT HOW ANNOYING YOUR LANGUAGE IS AND HOW FRUSTRATED THAT MAKES ME. ABSORB MY NEGATIVE EMOTIONS!!"
It struck me as demoralizing and sad how often the first words someone would utter in my presence were "I hate computers."
I guess I just realized something about computers makes stupid people very mean. 🤔
So I'm happy to help people learn computers, who actually want to learn something new.
Computers are for anyone! But it was a mistake to push them on everyone. Especially if the school systems weren't going to bother with teaching them.
Certain types of stupid people get mean around computers because they are frustrating to use if you don't understand what you are doing.
Computers are complex machines with a lot of options and no understanding of intent. When dealing with simple machines, someone can just poke random things until they get the outcome they want, limited understanding required. When talking to a person, the other person can recognize their question makes no sense and try to find their misunderstanding or explain in simpler terms.
A computer responds to these things with an error message they don't understand or don't care to understand. It won't use simpler language if they seemed confused. It won't try to calm them down if they start showing frustration. It will just keep doing what it's doing and make them feel stupid, leading to frustration and anger.
On the flip side, a lot of stupid people love LLMs because they will accept any insane input and will output a reasonable looking answer(correct or not) while showering them in validation.
Anyone here thinking that they've never met a dumb person probably IS the dumb person lol
I got that comment a few times in this thread. :) Yeah maybe!
It really is fine, maybe I am dumb :) Life is an interesting journey for sure!
Well, but that is natural if everyone, really everyone around you is smarter...
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.
democrats want to turn the us into russia??? the us has never been more like the ussr was portrayed in the 80's
Lol thats the funniest part. They obsess over Putin's lapdog like he's Jesus yet he's a literal Russian asset.
There's a difference between intelligence and poor upbringing though. 500 years ago even the smartest person alive probably believed the first three of them, because anyone who said otherwise was crazy, and all the authority figures were saying it was objective fact. If you raise someone today from childhood, cut off from a lot of external influence, then regardless of how smart they are they'll probably still lean towards believing them. Brains are weird, and the ability to process information, solve problems, remember things, and question things don't necessarily correlate as well as you'd expect.
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.
I laughed at that one. :)
This has to be bait
I promise it's not! It really is about hearing funny stories.
I just think we tend to hang out with people of the same social class and may actually never encounter someone a bit dumb. Like I said, I really haven't.
They say if you don’t know who the sucker is at a card table…
Anyway yeah you’ve probably just never ever ever met anyone who was even slightly below average intelligence. Statisticians might want to study your story
As someone who also went to a good university and worked in tech, it boggles my mind that someone with that experience could claim not to have met a dumb person. I have to question OP's ability to judge intelligence. People from those social environments do at least have to develop the patina of not being a knuckle-dragger which some might be fooled by, but I've seen many cases of deep stupidity lurking behind that.
imagine you never went to school and work in septic system maintenance, and spend your entire life in one small suburban town, never really leaving unless you go on vacation once a year or so for a week.
can you imagine this person never meeting a dumb person? or maybe it's that they wonder why people are so ignorant of septic systems and keep flushing weird shit down their toilets and fucking up their plumbing?
Yeah OP is the dumb one or just terrible at judging people's level of dumb.
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.
We still have 4 more iterations of the PlayStation before we get those nano spores. (was it me who shared it? I always loved that dumb commercial lol)
Might have been!
That's a great question though, if you don't have a technical background.
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.
Most of the people I've met in IT seem a lot more intelligent than average - clearly better analytical skills, can keep more details in their heads, understand complex subjects more quickly, etc - which makes sense because you kind of have to be that way to do the work.
Makes a lot of sense. :)
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.
Thats actually a good place where this sort of thing would happen. Conscription army... I guess in a war we would meet all kinds.
I felt sorry reading about the guy who hung himself. Some people should be excused from service in my opinion.
I don't think the hanging was related to his time in service. As I recall, love trouble was the trigger and alcohol abuse the catalyst.
You can get dismissed for psychological reasons, it's not hard if you want out. They do a test to screen that you're not a liability. And you have the option to do civil service instead.. which if pretty much free labor at some municipal place.
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.
how do these people not go bankrupt!!!
Former loan underwriter here: oh they do.
People can be stupid and still latch onto a mate who protects them.
Or as the other commentor pointed out, they do end up paying for their mistakes.
I'm not sure I understand the question.
Yes, no, maybe... I don't know, can you repeat the question?
I wait tables and deal with the public every day. So, yes.
Yeah customer service jobs... Do you have any stories you can share that may be humorous?
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).
If you are walking through a crowd somewhere, keep in mind that about half the people around you have an IQ of 100 or less.
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
We used to have an employee like that too. You could give him exactly one task at a time. Any more than that, and he would get overloaded and nothing would get done. And even then, the one task usually had to be double-checked, because there was a good chance he would do it wrong. Even when it was something we did every day, and that he had been shown multiple times.
He was the embodiment of “the lights are on but nobody is home.” He was awake and seemingly alert… But holy shit, that is a very big sliding scale. Oftentimes when talking to him, you legitimately got the impression that he was zoned out like a driver turning their brain off during their commute.
He quit to become a middle school teacher. No clue how he is doing now, but we made lots of jokes about his middle schoolers being smarter than him when he left.
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.
Having to manually light the flame on your stove is pretty weird unless this story is from the 60s.
Born in the 90s and have done this plenty of times.
I mean same (80s) but that doesn’t make it normal
Idk what to tell you, I still have that stove, it works just fine, I still need a lighter. Most I've seen in my life are like that.
My theory is that people like attractive people so much that attractive people never really have to learn to do things for themselves because other people will gladly do it for them. So they end up stupid yet confident at everything they do. People just like attractive and confident people. If you ever look at leadership around you, you'll notice that most of them are tall. It's because we see tall people as authority because that's how it was when we were kids. The tall people were in charge. Smart people are always unsure of themselves because there's no way to predict what is going to happen for certain. So that's why the world is run by overconfident dumb people.
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.
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.
the vast majority of is are in social bubbles our entire live where we are mostly around people who are mostly like us.
and it's jarring and scary and painful when we are around people who aren't like us. and won't like you either.
and yeah, most aspects of ourselves, like intelligent or health, are deeply died to our social strata. sure, people do fall and rise, but it's not that common, especially anymore.
I'm someone who got to spend time in a few different bubbles in my lifetime, and sometimes that 'exposure' really did not benefit me in any way and I think I might have been better off had I not had it. at least, life would have been simpler/easier.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of bubbles that I want no part of. But it would be nice if I felt like I knew some people who were dramatically smarter than myself. I've been able to help other people with problems. And they thank me and tell me how nice it is to be able to go to me and get help. But honestly, I don't have many people like that myself. I guess even if I did, then all that would happen is they would just solve my problems... And then I would be up at their level and have whatever their level of problems are. 🧐 I'm talking purely about intelligence here, not like "social level" (ew), to be clear
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)
Some people have understood what I meant. We tend to live in our own bubbles with people from the same social class. Everyone around us went to university, all the colleagues, our friends and so on.
And I meant that I have never seen anyone act in a very dumb way. There are stories in this thread about conscripts, where you see examples of what I mean. Or customer service jobs, where you meet all kinds. I have never had any job like that.
Perhaps I could have explained it better.
The person I was talking about in the first paragraph was in a school that's internationally considered a university! People in "we all went to university" bubbles may not all be that type of smart, although - yes - many of them will be. Degrees primarily show whether someone thrives in a structured school setting, and most people not acting very dumb is not surprising when they're near (but below) the average
I've completed the highest and the lowest mainstream education levels in my country. Long story how that came to be, but what that taught me is that while university students frequently have an easier time memorising facts on paper than those who "work with their hands" (not sure if that's how you say it in English), it's not a given. There were kids smarter than me at the lowest level: they just couldn't be bothered to do homework and wanted to skip class to buy or sell drugs. Some others in that school sounded really dumb whenever they asked a question, but when this came up with a teacher once, the teacher asked if I knew what grades the student in question ended up scoring (I didn't) and that this is just their way of learning the subject matter effectively. Okay, at least for some of them :P. Meanwhile, not everyone whom I know with a university degree can hold a job
Btw, what I also found interesting is that people score differently on IQ tests through the ages, way too short timescales for brains to evolve at a population level so our actual smartness as a species isn't what changed. I wrote some stuff here but then checked my facts and actually this is a better article so I'll just link the Wikipedia instead :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect. But that's not what you're talking about since you don't mean IQ scores literally but just how people act around you, if I understand correctly now. Just thought it interesting as an aside
I'd say that attitude, mental health, learning styles, social skills... lots of things play a role in how we perceive people's wits besides their actual wits. People are hard to capture by one metric. Which is also why I'd call many of the examples in this thread into question btw: service workers often interact with someone only on a single topic, often even only during a single session (support call for example). It could sometimes also just be some neurons not making the right connection in that moment, rather than the person's intellect. Or regarding the attitude they gain towards the general public: who needs support most frequently? Surely not the people that are particularly resourceful and make smart decisions. There's a massive selection bias there
Okay, last anecdote. Two people with a university degree (one of them has even two university degrees in IT) are put in front of an Apple device which is of course super intuitive and needs no manual. It's so easy that neither of us can figure out how to complete the unskippable device setup wizard. We call Apple support. The solution? Scrolling down. I tried that, but the part of the screen that I touched wasn't a scrollable element and so I concluded there was nothing to scroll to, which of course the support person couldn't know. The person receiving that call would fit right in in this thread with a story about someone not realising in 2026 that there is such a thing as scrolling down to find the 'continue' button below the form. Nobody (afaik) considers either of us dumb and yet there's plenty of ways to end up as one of the service job examples in a thread like this xD
I agree with you actually about everything. It is very hard to capture a person's intelligence with a single number like we do in the tests, and I think we all know it's not actually accurate. But we do it anyway because it has a certain amount of likelihood of being close to the truth, and it's useful for hiring people.
I know that a human being is so much more than that and I dont personally care about intelligence when I pick friends. I just care about how they make me feel and how we feel together. Having a good time is the most important thing and to me, that's not solving puzzles together. :)
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.
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).
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".
Haha could be. :)
are you at least pretty?
nothing wrong with being dumb if you are good-looking!
I guess I had my 15 minutes but not anymore, no. I'm uglier than opening a .pdf in notepad/kate/whatever the mac hunks use.
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 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.
Yeah. Because most smart people leave those towns.
They're just conditioned to not think for themselves
As a person who grew up in a town of 800, this matches my experience. The artists, the creative thinkers, and the smart kids got out as soon as possible.
The people who stayed were the conformists and the people who couldn't imagine a better life than living in their tiny hometown.
When I go back to visit my family, I see some of them, and they seem happy.
Yeah ive never experienced that and sure, it would scare me a lot.
Don't confuse "intelligence" with conformity. There are lots of farmers' kids who are intelligent by common standards, but either got conditioned into pretending, or deliberately pretend to fit in. I've met someone in college who was very intelligent, had a well-paid job doing ML stuff, and decided to go back to the countryside with their partner because they simply enjoyed life and the people there. As you said, conformity equals comfort and safety. I've met at least one guy who could turn the "redneck" on and off at will. One moment, he would enjoy doing complicated engineering shit or talking about politics and philosophy, the other he would enjoy bragging about the dumbest shit while drinking the local liquor.
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".
“Of course I know him. He’s me”
I was halfway through Googling this phrase before I remembered who said it and where. Well played!
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
Yeah, what people mean by "smart" is to a great extent really "attentive." Raw IQ (to the extent that it's measurable) has to be significantly different before it matters more than attention. And the thing about attention is that it can wain, be captured, be exhausted. The act of maintaining/directing it changes tenor from moment to moment, decade to decade.
yeah, and when people think you are smart, it's that you are attentive to the things they value or think you should be attentive too. otherwise, they think you are dumb, if you are attentive to things they don't value.
hence the idea that smart people are socially stupid, because they are not socially attentive to the thinks that are socially acceptable, they attend to the 'wrong' things.
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.
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.
That's true. Humans have so many skills and talents, and we are usually good at some things, all of us.
Met one? I am one
Whew.
Buddy, @[email protected] 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 @[email protected] for maybe also calling it.
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.
Vacant - I know exactly what you mean, and that's a good word for it.
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.
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.
Competently designed drip coffee makers have a simple device inside them specifically for people like Kevin. It's variously called something like "pause and serve," and what it basically boils down to is a little spring loaded plunger with a gasket on it that is pushed up by a knob on the lid of the carafe when it's installed. If you remove the carafe this closes like a little valve and water is allowed to accumulate inside the filter basket for some time, probably up to a minute or so, in order for you to pour a cup (or whatever else) in that amount of time before it finally overflows. It's simple, broadly effective, basically free to implement, and goes a long way towards preventing the operator from hanging himself.
I suspect the gasket in yours is worn out or MIA. It happens eventually.
All of the above notwithstanding, I don't imagine you'd have much success explaining to Kevin that nothing other than clean water should go into the reservoir and thus the heating chamber, and certainly not partially brewed coffee which will allow the water in it to boil up into the percolator tube and leave the increasingly scorched little coffee particles to burn against the heating element forever. Or at least in a very difficult to reach and clean place.
I'll leave you with my own coffee related anecdote, revolving around "Vic." Vic was our resident office coffee freak. And if I of all people am describing someone as being just a trifle too obsessed about coffee, you have a problem. If it wasn't directly work related, basically everything Vic talked about was coffee. "How's the coffee today? Has anyone refilled the coffee machine? Do you want some coffee? I'm going to go up front and get some coffee." Et friggin' cetera.
I'm ashamed to admit that this plan was not mine, but rather hatched by another coworker. He deliberately and meticulously (I believe scales were involved — this was after all a building full of engineers) began blending decaf into the office coffee machine over the course of a couple of months. Progressively, ultimately weaning Vic off of caffeine entirely. This was not only brilliant, but also completely diabolical. My metaphorical hat is off to him, even all these years later.
He kept the office running purely on decaf for a couple of weeks, and then one morning abruptly switched the entire shebang back to 100% regular coffee.
Vic spent the next couple of days living life on speed dial. Talking fast, walking fast, bouncing around all over the place and off the walls. He was like a squirrel on amphetamines. He absolutely did not notice. Everyone else did, though. It was hilarious.
That is such a fantastic story, thanks for sharing.
I have been Kevin. I arrived at work, half asleep, went to the drip coffee maker, put in the grounds, poured in the water, and went to the morning briefing. Five minutes into the briefing, I realise that I never put the pot back under the thing. Now, it had a valve, but the valve does not prevent the filter from overflowing... yeah. Made me wake up really fast.
This made me laugh. :) Good story but god, that's frustrating.
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.
@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
@1984 the one guy I will remember forever was the manager who tried to make problems for us on day 1 of his employment.
I had processed the request for his windows accounts the week before.
Then he got his account and tried to make a big problem about not having all accesses. He decided to loop in management and board in an insult-filled email.
He got told noone was allowed to work on his stuff until he apologized to us, then got fired.
I processed his account deletion two days later.
So they kicked out the new manager? That's actually cool.
@1984 I assume it was because he looped the whole board in. They kicked him out and made us process his account deletion almost immediately. Normal was two weeks grace in case there was a mistake (it happened more often than you'd believe that someone put in a request for deletion of someone still working).
No, in this case all his accounts were gone in two days
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.
That a good point, and you are right about calling anyone under 100 stupid. Obviously half the planet is on that level and they are doing fine in their lives or nothing would work around us. It's just that sometimes people can be doing a bit dumb stuff that surprises others.
Nah you're good lol. I have a lot of clients who aren't intelligent, but they aren't dumb either. It was more just me making a general distinction and not a commentary on you.
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.
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.
Labeling others as dumb is just an indirect way of calling yourself smart.
I didnt mean it that way. What's a better word for it? I'm not very smart myself, I just managed to be smart enough for my job and that's it.
If you're not very smart yourself, how could you possibly know you've never met anyone dumber than you? My point is that the "dumb-smart"-axis is largely subjective and quite useless for putting a person on. Doesn't matter what you call it. IQ tests have a long history of being biased. There's not even a consensus on what intelligence is exactly. Trying to score it using a single number is just ridiculous.
I've worked with some mentally challenged people in the past and through customer service. I'd much rather deal with someone with limited reasoning skills than someone who is genuinely intelligent. Intelligent people fail to see their own limitations and don't know when to be humble. Some of the dumbest people on this planet are academics, top of their field, highly educated. Those people don't know shit about anything because they're hyper focused on one teeny tiny aspect of the universe. At least the mentally challenged know that they have limited reasoning skills and are fairly skilled at asking for help and knowing their limitations.
Yeah those people can be super frustrating, and they also enjoy playing games, acting not so subtle superior sometimes. Its common that they are assholes, but not always.
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.
That is a good analogy, esp as because intelligence changes over time. It is not a fixed value.
It's more like a physical ability. The more you practice it, the easier and stronger it becomes. The less you do, the more it atrophies. And just like our bodies, it's growth and it's decline are largely linked to our aging processes.
I don't understand why people are so insistent intelligence is this fixed property that is innate. If is, however, limited. Some folks have the gift of a life and environment which lets their intelligence flourish, others, do not. Same with athletics.
Not just aging, I would say intelligence is highly variable just on an individual level due to all sorts of factors. How much rest you get, the quality of said rest, current physical comfort level, distractions, stress, whether you're hungry or have eaten recently, time of day, whether there's a time constraint, etc etc etc. I wonder how many "stupid" people are genuinely that way even in the best conditions, or if the majority are just suffering from any of multiple detractors on them. Because of this I try not to judge, because I don't know their lives.
Plenty
I heard the same thing, but I dont know if it was my parents or somewhere else. I just understood what they meant and remembered it as good advice. Also helps against inflated ego. :)
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.
The second part I do if it's someone that does it back. I've met people who just drain you with their negativity and those are pointless to try and uplift. It just makes you frustrated.
I guess their brains are wired to be negative because of some self protection or something.
I met a good deal of people with intellectual disabilities in the past. Few of them were a bit difficult, but most of them were innocent and very authentic. Frankly, that authenticity made it chill to be around them.
I've met people who work in management, yes.
They aren't dumb. They are intellectually disabled, and maybe of them have areas of superior ability.
That being said, yes I have; and I've met beaucoup supersmart, intellectually lazy people who were ignorant as a box of rocks.
Of course I know him! He's me.
Every time I look in the mirror. I do posses a healthy amount of self-loathing though.
You are not alone, I think probably 10 people said something similar.
When I was in high school, I volunteered for a couple of days in a special ed class, which, I guess by definition, contained people with sub-100 IQ (sub-70, even). I guess that fits your specifications. One thing I remember observing was that the girls were more capable of stringing together coherent sentences than the boys.
Also, a couple of years ago, I worked as a school bus driver for 3 months while looking for a tech job. There seemed to be much more variance in intelligence among my colleagues than I was used to: some seemed to be just as smart as most of the ones in my previous tech jobs, but others, while they were generally nice enough, seemed to fail to grasp basic concepts or retain information very well during the training.
Certainly. Probably not enough because this time period still threw me for a loop. So although I have met them they did not seem predominant. Honestly how smart a dumb a person is not such a big deal as much as how smart they are vs how much they think they are. Like there are folks who realize they were not the head of the class and sorta keep quite and identify folks to get advice from and then there are some who completely do not realize how little they understand things and will be insistive of all sorts of crap. Honestly one mark of intelligence I often see is a massive realization of how much they don't know.
That's a good way to see it. The ability to observe others and realize they are on another level is absolutely a sign of intelligence.
I hear there were some intelligent people on my dad's side of the family. But my mom's side is kinda dumb.
My wife's family has some dumbos as well, dunno how you got away from all that.
Now, my immediate bubble is full of professors, engineers, etc. So, I dunno. It's a mixed bag, and i kinda assumed everyone had that experience given that i have a few data points of that.
¯\(ツ)/¯
Man, I had an IQ test tell me 145 or some similar score. I still struggle with simple things like with laundry, cleaning and cooking. I've never had my drivers license because driving is fucking hard. I flunked my bachelor's degree twice before finally getting it.
Dumb is relative and situational. That being said, nowadays I'd probably be diagnosed with some form of autism and / or ADHD.
You have to be careful with internet iq tests too, they generally give you a very high score to make you feel good. :)
But sure, everything is possible. You could have autism and be super good at pattern recognition and be poor at coordination tasks for example.
It wasn't internet, it was part of conscription health checkups. I remember the psychologist being all smug and annoying going like "Almost as high as mine…" when went over the results.
Haha :)
I teach industrial electronics at a community college. We get a wide spectrum of students, many are average students, some upper 10% absorb information like a sponge and i barely have to teach them anything, then there's the lower 10% who are so clueless and confused that you don't understand how they arrived to class on their own (assuming they didn't literally have help from somebody). They can barely count, they don't know what fractions are, they can't keep papers and handouts organized, they have horrible spatial reasoning, etc. The sad part is they know how bad they are... even if you're a dummy, you're but clueless about it, especially when you see the other 15 people in a class who ate learning and progressing to the next thing yet you cannot grasp the items being presented. These people are still on problem number 2 after 15 minutes when others are already done with the whole first page. Anyway what always happens is I'll drag them through the classwork but they do horrible on quizzes and exams, muddle through with a C average (which really means you don't understand the content), then they usually wash out during the 3rd or 4th semester. It's very predictable during their very first classes but hey it's not my job to profile people even if it's a guarantee 🤷♂️
I keep running into maintenance jobs that want industrial controls and electrical experience which I don't have, just a strong background in mechanical repair and troubleshooting. The problem is that all these jobs are night shift, odd 12 hour schedules with weekends, or travel. So I'm stuck doing production work but on an 8 hour day shift schedule. My work was even offering a two year apprenticeship with 2 free years of school but you have to work 2 more years on nights after that on top of 12 hr days. It seems like it could be a fun trade, but doesn't seem worth the work/ life balance for me.
Yeah. Its actually true what you said that getting a C means you don't really understand the content, although I haven't thought about it that way before. But its true.
Don't believe "intelligence" can be quantified.
I love your username
Well to be fair it seems like mostly people here are just describing intelligence not quantifying it.
Over here seems like every friend group has the dumb one. When they nice person who cares?
I agree, it doesn't matter for being friends. A human being can have many other good qualities.
I mean, it's not like they carry a sign. Some actual mental handicaps can sort of get through the day with some supports. So, maybe you're just not looking hard enough. If you're going IQ you should use <85 or something, too, since <100 is literally half of the population.
On top of that, it's really hard to tell between weird behavior because they're dumb, they're not really paying attention or they're neuroatypical/mentally ill. I have better stories about supposedly intelligent people missing obvious things. (I star in many)
I've worked with a couple people who were slow learners and didn't seem to think very well. Everyone I've known like that thought they were smarter than everyone else and never stopped talking about how stupid other people are.
Yeah that's a well known behavior and it's simply understood of course. Those people just dont see that others are smarter since they think they are wrong instead.
i grew up in a 3rd world country, in some rural parts people get very short or no schooling at all, they would do terrible on IQ test's verbal and math sections, and possibly the other sections too. i just keep conversations simple.
Yewh of course. That makes sense. I feel like those tests are not really good at measuring the actual intelligence of those people though. Either that or everyone has very low iq. I guess it's possible but seems also a bit strange, unless only bad iq genes has survived.
Yes, some people are cognitively impaired.
In the US almost 20% of the adult population is functionally illiterate.
literacy isn't intelligence.
nor is being good at math.
but in our society we seem to think that's what it is, because those are the primary metrics by which we evaluate children. because they are easy to measure and track scores on the tests for them, and we have been doing that for generations.
someone not being able to read doesn't mean they are stupid. and many folks, who can read, are stupid. and maybe folks who are genius readers, are stupid/illiterate about many other things. spend some time in a english dept at a world famous uni, you will meet plenty of complete idiots, who are just really good at reading books and analyzing them, and not much else, because well, that's all that they do really. and it's easy to be intelligent about something if you put 50,000 hours into doing it.
I agree with this 100%. A lot of people are only booksmart and can't really think for themselves.
While this can be anecdotally true, higher order thinking does require a mastery of language.
what is higher order thinking?
do you mean academic specialization?
Does anyone know anyone who has ever admitted to getting below 100 on an IQ test?
I'm guessing the answer is no. In which case, presumably none of us can know whether or not we have. You would need to have to know someone who both scored below 100 and was willing to admit that to know for sure.
That's true. Everyone thinks they are smarter than average as well, because each person feel like they are.
There is research that the smartest people doubt themselves the most, and the dumbest feel the most confident in how smart they are.
Obviously because smart people recognize all their own flaws and feel very insecure about those.
Yes but even that research is a generalized average, there are still dumb people who are very self doubting and smart people who are over confident.
I always say that I'm not as smart as I think I am, but I'm definitely smarter than others think I am.
I watch Jeopardy regularly, and I know I could hold my own, and they don't have dummies on that show. My biggest strength is that I know my strengths and weaknesses.
Of course I've known less intelligent people, some even officially handicapped, but intelligence is fairly low on the list of my priorities for friendship. I wouldn't hire a lot of them, but I value their camaraderie, humor, trust, respect, morality, etc. All of those are more important in a friend than intelligence.
Absolutely, I have the same view on things. Intelligence is useful for solving tasks but there are many other qualities in a human being that makes them amazing.
I have never had an iq test that I know of. It test general intelligence so the ideal time to take it is kinda as you finishing your gen eds in college but have not started the real intensive high level stuff. Either that or when you take the ged wich is kind of a general intelligence test. Most people just have things like sat and shoot. honestly I forgot what the other one was called.
I have.
I have doubts about the veracity of the test however, I got something like a 30 because they changed the numbering on the answer sheet and apparently noticing that is part of the test...
A 30 would mean you have profound disability, could not take care of yourself. Possibly need assistance just to feed yourself, etc.
And given that I am at least capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, I dont think the test was accurate.
Someone with a 30 IQ would not be able to form complete sentences. That's nearly five standard deviations below the mean.
What part of tech are you in? If you interact with end-users ever, they're everywhere.
I didnt, no. It was devops, building infrastructure for stuff the company wanted to do. End users would just connect to databases and use sql for their analytics.
So yeah not public tech support, more like building tech environments for analytics.
I'm in a similar boat as you, as an M365, Azure, etc. Consultant, where most of the people I work with are CIOs, other IT people, and like, director level and above.
Even in those cohorts where you would think intelligence is generally above average you get a few.
I started out in help desk though, and occasionally run training classes. They're at all levels.
In college I didn't hang out with my classmates much, I mostly hung out with townies. Obviously not all townies were dumb, but some were very dumb, nice though.
I have a few.
They arent necessarily hostile or mean. but there is a definite laziness to their intellect where they get super insecure if even minor challenged and refuse to admit to any learning disability or any level disability (and look down on those with a disability) and they believe because they are older = know everything.
One took it upon herself to explain walking poles to me....and i didnt even ask. Mainly because she requires to be explained to how to use basic functions of a toaster. So she believes she is at the intellect of everyone else around her by asserting herself to explain how to use even most basic of things only a very young child would struggle with and entirely gives up if the task entirely if it has any complexity. Such as just checking oil in the car. A stick in a hole. this is too hard apparently.
At first i thought she was just acting stupid like some women famously do this where they dampen their intellect around others but living around this person ive come to suspect a learning disability she refuses to accept about herself.
A true dunning kreuger if i ever saw one.
Meanwhile she would give you the shirt off her back.
met a lot of these type in a conservative country town but occassionally i will run into one in the city.
i think the trouble comes from them thinking if having a learning disability means inlovable. which is in many ways sad and just really mean against those who have owned it and worked on their's.
Yes. They were a local judge apparently.
What makes someone an 'actually dumb' person? Because everyone has a different definition of 'dumb.
An atheist might call religious people 'dumb' for believing in a 'Sky Daddy,' while a pro-vax person and an anti-vax person might accuse each other of being 'dumb' for not subscribing to their beliefs.
Me, every morning, in front of the mirror
Yes, I met a few in hs, they were always baked out of their minds, and when they weren't, had zero brain processing
Yes. One person in particular comes to mind - very nice guy, but has some obvious learning disabilities. He mispronounces words very often and mistates stuff frequently (a lot of 'hims is', that kind of thing). He doesn't seem to have much of an inner life, though perhaps its more that he doesn't have the facility with language to express himself well. He also doesn't seem to understand a lot of things that people around him talk about.
But he's a kind dude - frankly, that's the important bit imo.
Most of the other folks I've met and considered dumb were seen only for limited duration and in specific contexts. They might indeed be, on the whole, dumb. But I've always felt those small interactions aren't enough evidence of that - after all, I've met objectively brilliant people that, in certain contexts, have done phenomenally dumb things. Heck, we all do (or rather, I sure as fuck have).
Usually management/CEO's if you've tried to talk to them
Im not judging people by how dumb are they but when they cant do something simple and dont accept that they cant do it thats the time i call them dumb.You should say that you cant do it not make excuses