How stupid do you think people are?

I encounter uninformed people but I wouldn't call many people "stupid".

I'm bummed that people don't have more intellectual curiosity. ;_;

Unless I'm at work and dealing with people outside the IT department, then it's I try not to show it but I think most people are morons.

Most people are as smart as they need to be. I don't really worry about it

Most people are as smart as they perceive they need to be. But a lot of people are idiots, so...

Most people are as smart as they need to be. I don't really worry about it.

this, but smart as they need to be = pretty stupid, imo

well yeah, of r a personally-decided given value of 'need to be' was my reading. the second part's more important anyway

voted for the oxygen wasters option tbqh

need option for "it is hard to evaluate fairly from all the way up here"

there's some conflation here of intelligence and (a)political ignorance/smallmindedness/intellectual curiosity. someone could well believe both of these;

Most people are as smart as they need to be. I don't really worry about it.
If I'm being honest, I just wish more people thought like me.

I encounter uninformed people but I wouldn't call many people "stupid".

where's the 'most people are smarter than me' option, HI DERE

If I am anything to go by, I'd say most people are as stupid as they can get away with

I'm bummed that people don't have more intellectual curiosity

-but that doesn't mean I think they're stupid?

there's some conflation here of intelligence and (a)political ignorance/smallmindedness/intellectual curiosity. someone could well believe both of these;

yeah i'm a little unclear about what kind of intelligence we're supposed to be talking about

3, 4, & 5 for me i guess

voted 3 because i'm feeling generous, and fatalistic, since there's nothing that can be done about it.

I'm bummed that people don't have more intellectual curiosity

but this probably applies to me as well so :(

where's the 'most people are smarter than me' option, HI DERE

intentionally left off

yeah i'm a little unclear about what kind of intelligence we're supposed to be talking about

intentionally vague; when you consider the question of intelligence, do you draw an overall picture that weighs several different factors or compartmentalize into different types of intelligence? If the latter, which is most important to you; is there a subset that you would consider to be the core of your concept of the word "intelligent"? If so, use that and pick the statement most closely aligned to how you feel that intelligence is exhibited in others.

In recent months, I have born witness to previously unencountered depths of stupidity, but my broader life experience leads me to vote for "I encounter uninformed people but I wouldn't call many people "stupid"."

I also think that calling people "stupid" is pretty awful.

illiterate mods are killing ilx

xp yeah i'm pretty sure that calling someone stupid is as bad as it gets. i try to avoid making a call like on one-off incidents or brief encounters with people.

If I am anything to go by, I'd say most people are as stupid as they can get away with

― Un peu d'Eire, ça fait toujours Dublin (Michael White), Friday, 17 September 2010 17:23 (4 minutes ago)

yeah but you're evidently pretty clever, is this high-level slumming the least you can get away with?

are you going to get kicked if you misuse the subjunctive?

I also think that calling people "stupid" is pretty awful.

― windmeup (kkvgz), Friday, September 17, 2010 4:32 PM (2 minutes ago)

I agree that calling people stupid is not very nice, but when you've been called to the same director's office three times in the past month alone to explain the same set of reports (that they asked to have made) yet again, you do start to question their wisdom.

also, calling people stupid gives them an out - if you're stupid, it's not your fault.

I'm sure they are happy about that

the average person is about as dumb as the average dog imho

I do not think other people are stupid, but sometimes they seem, yeah, incurious and almost ignorant about some things by choice. But I'm sure it's all relative and I appear that way to others too.

Poll needs "I am stupid myself" option

people are lazy, credulous and/or selfish more often than stupid, but the effect can be p much the same.

is there a subset that you would consider to be the core of your concept of the word "intelligent"? If so, use that and pick the statement most closely aligned to how you feel that intelligence is exhibited in others.

nonreactionary politics/intellectual curiosity/openmindedness may (cor)relate to intelligence but they aren't subsets thereof

don't rly think it's arguable, ~intelligence~ in technical or ordinary language has more to do with reasoning than sentiment

which isn't to invalidate yr poll, but if 'your opinion of the intelligence of the average person around you' = 'I'm bummed that people don't have more intellectual curiosity. ;_;'', that seems like a category error

My instinct is way towards the first check-box. But when 30 or 35% of Americans would seem to be happy, even eager, to elect Sarah Palin president, that gives me pause.

I don't know if I think people are stupid so much as willfully ignorant. a lot of the "dumb" people I encounter truly don't have the wheels turning, but there are a lot that in the spectrum of their own reality, can connect the dots from A to B, but it's just that the "A to B" itself is ill-informed.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8EKC9O8fkUc/Skh3zaUU4QI/AAAAAAAAAh8/G68PbUF_pCs/s400/untitled.bmp

Being a moron, not so bad then

one step below nincompoop, just out of view

"I try not to show it but I think most people are morons."

i expected this option to be a lot more popular. not sayin i voted for it, not sayin i didn't... jus sayin.

i think a lot of ppl are actually smarter than they present themselves -- but if the result is that ppl act dumb then they shouldn't get credit for smarts

as someone diagnosed with "smartypants syndrome" i have trouble understanding these ppl

"I'm bummed that people don't have more intellectual curiosity. ;_;"

basically. I think lots of people are smart but also lazy.

people are lazy, credulous and/or selfish more often than stupid, but the effect can be p much the same.

― Roberto Spiralli, Friday, September 17, 2010 4:46 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

^^agree w/this. people prioritise where they put effort in their lives, i guess, and when this doesn't match up (or come close) to where you put effort in yourself, it can be quite alien and frustrating to be confronted with it.

i think this is why i get most het up about people who seem largely to be on the same page as me in terms of those priorities who are acting stupidly, rather than people whose lifestyle isn't remotely similar to mine.

i don't really have qualms about calling people stupid tho

i feel gwb is just straight up across-the-board stupid + intellectually incurious on almost all scales except for the ones which are useful for becoming president, but maybe those are the areas of intelligence that really count in terms of getting ahead, so in that sense, these fools who stupidly lord over us are the smart ones.

stupid like a fox

that idiot to moron chart is incredible

they should use celebrity photos in that chart imo

drawn by windsor mccay?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

pretty much of the opinion that perhaps up to 90% of the people walking around on this planet are moronic assholes

i used to think that, underneath the surface level of current events/politics/culture shit, everybody had pretty much the same type/number of gears turning in their heads and outside of knowledge holes were all relatively comparable in intellectual capability.

the last 4 months of my life have convinced me otherwise. there are some real motherfucking idiots out there.

Ignorance is universal. A lot of what looks and feels like stupidity is people foundering on the rocks of their abysmal ignorance. The pity is how few people know how ignorant they are, or what their ignorance consists of, which is ignorance squared.

The whole asshole business is another matter.

i feel people are getting smarter to be honest. technology sure isn't getting easier to use.

In my weird law school sub-world, I'd say very few people are genuinely "stupid" and many are impressively bright, but there's not a great deal of intellectual curiosity either. In the larger world, I don't know -- I mean I think my experience of the city is that a lot of people tend to be brighter than stereotypes would dictate -- random people you wind up bantering with on the subway, waiters, cab drivers, coffee cart guys, etc. But if you watch jay leno segments or read statistics on certain things or look at how many people believe completely implausible things, you get the impression that a big chunk of the nation is really dumb.

I try not to show it but I think most people are morons.

The real trick is getting acquainted with your own failings, stuipidity and blind prejudices. It puts those traits in others into a new light.

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us. To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us. An foolish notion..."

-- Robbie Burns --

I voted for lack of intellectual curiosity, taking it to mean gut-knowers.

There are stupids around, to be sure. But I've noticed that many of them call other people stupid. So I'm careful not to call anybody stupid, even to other people. (If I'm pressed, I wink and hum a few bars of "dueling banjos")

I try not to show it but I think most people are morons.

http://img21.imageshack.us/i/smartrl.png

http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/2169/smartwj.jpg

I meant to post this image with that, to explain, but I messed it up which makes me think I should downgrade my status.

that is based on a lifetime of comparing myself to people around me

I try not to show it but I think most people are morons.

no but really. the places i've spent the most time with the least volitional selection of my peers have convinced me of this. the more democratic the venue, the stupider the denizens. at your actual decent-type-job or in college? people will tend to have brains, cuz these environments probably select from the most intelligent 20% or so... but at the DMV or a big public high school? fuck yes, these are the dregs. some cool people too, mixed in among, but a great tide of stupefied drones washes them out. government jobs are another A+ place to observe this. or just the reeking mass of humanity you wade through on the streets.

sometimes you really blow my mind, man

yeah but government jobs also could be a good argument for people being only as smart as they need to be

the more democratic the venue, the stupider the denizens.

Indeed, and this is why democracy must be ended.

Democracy is merely a political junk food that cannot be a substitute for nutritious collectvism.

What the people need is unity and a common purpose, not a false "choice" between "lesser evils".

With the correct education, technology and bioengineered solutions, stupidity will wither away like a sloughed skin.

from what animal - in some the process is rather quick

Something like a lizard, perhaps. The stupidity will be shed then eaten and consumed for calcium.

ideally fried first

or just the reeking mass of humanity you wade through on the streets.

i picture myself as a combination of oscar wilde & ebenezer scrooge while saying this

nice cave on a good day

nick?

is there a correlation between strength of smell and stupidity?

god only knows, but the knee jerk assumption = yes, in that stupidity can be temporarily self inflicted by means of chemical intermediaries

those who choose chemically inflicted stupidity as a means of self annihilation being a special case

huh.

well, and then i wanna be all gentle and say that there are many who may be quite intelligent but who suffer from mental illness, or even just the endless despair, and they wind up reeking as an unfortunate by product these disabilities and life situations, through no real fault or deficit of intelligence, and that shoots holes in my stalking, brooding wilde/scrooge stance, so i dunno. i just wanna shake my fist in the face of humanity at the moment.

elections and politics in general also tend to sour me on the distribution of human intelligence. why can't they all just think like me? [shakes withered fist] on the other hand, most people i meet tend to have something going for them, so...

With politics, the problem isn't so much 'why don't they think like me?' but 'why don't they think?'

Most people aren't 'stupid' per se, if they apply themselves, but what I do find missing in most of my fellow human beings is OBSERVATIONAL SKILLS.

I would tend to agree with the comment above about meeting people in everyday life and them seeming bright enough. But when I read many of the comments on Youtube videos - not so much the bigotry as the failure to read and/or properly understand factual information about the video supplied in the caption - I am shocked. Perhaps that tallies with the reference to lack of 'observational skills'.

voted 'morons' but it is hard to square my belief that >90% of people are morons with the fact that >90% of the people i know are decidely not. obviously some of this is due to self-selection bias but how much? who knows.

90% of people change their behaviours depending on context/situations. anyone you meet on the once off doesn't really care if you think they're a moron.

Bigotry tends to go hand in hand with missing the basic human empathy that allows you to make demands of yourself like 'did I do that right?' or 'can I do it better?' and imagine that others have feelings that could be as important as your own. It's a kind of basic looking outside yourself thing to be able to communicate. If a person is not dyslexic and still can't construct a grammatically correct sentence free of spelling errors, it doesn't reflect well on them and I think that lack points to more serious deficiencies in character (in a thin-end-of-the-wedge kind of way).

i'd never draw a link between grammar/education and character, tbph.

idk there are people in my office who are not dim but completely struggle at producing english that is intelligible, let alone grammatical; and i do struggle do understand how they can be so unaware of their problem, when for every email they send or conversation they have you have to get them to repeat and reword and explain two or three times what they're on about.

I never thought people were intransigently stupid until some of them started leaving opinion comments at news websites! And it shocked me just HOW MUCH stupid they were bringing to the discourse, expecting to be treated like Special Exceptional Children instead of sent to remedial classes.

voted 'quite bright' because that's how I'd describe anyone with an IQ of 100 or above (which is technically most people), and I'm taking "if you give them a chance" to mean "if you give them an expensive private school education".

I do find the bottom quartile quite difficult to work with but they're a minority by definition.

"if you give them an expensive private school education"

refuted, with guns

If a person is not dyslexic and still can't construct a grammatically correct sentence free of spelling errors, it doesn't reflect well on them and I think that lack points to more serious deficiencies in character (in a thin-end-of-the-wedge kind of way).

Wait a minute. I will forever jump to the defense of the illiterate. There are probably fifty different reasons outside of dyslexia that someone might not write or spell so good.

...and it is not necessarily indicative of intelligence or character either.

I never thought people were intransigently stupid until some of them started leaving opinion comments at news websites! And it shocked me just HOW MUCH stupid they were bringing to the discourse, expecting to be treated like Special Exceptional Children instead of sent to remedial classes.

― are you robot? (suzy), Thursday, September 23, 2010 4:57 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

oh yeah, this. the internet has kicked a huge hole in my general estimation of human intelligence. and i know that the comments attached to news stories and youtubes aren't exactly a representative sample of our overall cognitive capacity, but it gets hard to keep your optimism up, you know?

kkvgz, I think you meant 'to spell so well' but relax, I don't find your character/intelligence deficient or anything.

Those people who leave comments are motivated to have opinions'n'shit but they're not motivated to communicate to a legible standard, which I find intrinsically disrespectful.

I think you meant 'to spell so well'

I was being tongue-in-cheek : )

And yes, the denizens of newspaper website comments boxes are very infuriating.

I think what makes youtube/newspaper comments so stupid is the inherent self-selection in not making the leap from "I have just started typing without reading any other comments" to "other people will probably do the same".

LJ I don't even understand what you're disputing!

There are total Neanderthal dumbfucks at Britain's finest public schools, too - it's just that their parents are loaded.

I am not denying this.

I am saying that my general experience of teaching kids, at private schools, who had IQs around 100, was that those kids would in a few years become someone I'd describe as "quite bright".

I'm bummed that people don't have more intellectual curiosity

I kind of feel the opposite to this, in that I am bummed that I don't have more intellectual curiosity (well, the curiosity is there, but the time and effort required to do anything about it is generally not), and bummed that other people have enough of it that I feel lacking

and, people generally seem "smart enough" and many of them are clearly a lot smarter than me, but sometimes I do get sad when apparently bright people are really stubborn about not even wanting to think about points of view which seem completely basic to me (thinking of certain clever but conservative friends here)

I don't think everyone should think like me, but some political positions just seem to require either so much blinker-wearing or so much mental contortion that I have trouble understanding how they act like not thinking like them is the alien concept, I guess

At my school we had it drilled into us that no fucker alive would take you seriously if you could not express yourself coherently, and that spelling was not something we just make up as we go along. As a result, my scholastically lazy sister can at least write a banging, fault-free complaint letter when she needs to.

On a really super-basic level, I think a lot of people have lost sight of the difference between thoughts and feelings. This has probably a million-squillion consequences all of which could be described in this thread. But it would solve a lot of them if people separated their thoughts from their feelings about their thoughts.

or their thoughts about their feelings!

I don't really care how smart other people are unless they are directly influencing my life. live and let live imo

On a really super-basic level, I think a lot of people have lost sight of the difference between thoughts and feelings. This has probably a million-squillion consequences all of which could be described in this thread. But it would solve a lot of them if people separated their thoughts from their feelings about their thoughts.

That rings really true to me. I also think people have also spent a lot of, well, my lifetime I guess, downgrading empathy as a value and elevating consistency, to the point where attempting to see and understand someone else's viewpoint and changing your mind about something are signs of weakness.

xp to dayo- tho i'll defend public/govt sector workers all day on ilx (the irony there, eh?) you should really think about the numbers of people out there that directly influence your life.

so it's the public/govt sector workers who have been pissing on my door at night then

at night? fuck off!

or, if it's them, they're getting overtime, mileage and prob meal vouchers.

why on earth would someone choose the DOOR to piss on

like, in their drunken brains, is there some little voice going "I know this person wants my lovely urine seeping under their jamb; think of it as an early birthday present!" or something

think I know what option you voted for

false assumption- you just don't notice them pissing on the walls

arg I wrote jamb when I meant sill

I am part of the problem

"Jamb" :)

I'd forgotten such a word existed

hey:

Door jamb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A door jamb is the vertical portion of the frame onto which a door is secured.

when is a door not a door?

when it's a urinal

when it's urinal

"If a person is not dyslexic and still can't construct a grammatically correct sentence free of spelling errors"

actually, i suspect GWB, who is the posterboy for this kind of blinkered anti-intellectualism, is actually dyslexic or has some variety of learning disorder,
despite claims of beating karl rove in a book-reading contest. people often remark on GWB's facility with remembering vast numbers of people's names, their hobbies after meeting them just once, which is exactly the sort of coping mechanism you'd expect someone with a learning disability to cultivate, and obviously a great boon to any budding politician. that sort of ability has certainly trumped eloquence, which you'd expect would be #1 in the things a politician ought to have in his arsenal, never mind what a smart person ought to have.

emotionally i am down with the idea that most people are bright, but working where i do gives me like daily reminders of how wrong that is

which sounds a bit like a joke but is actually kind of depressing when i think about it too much

despite claims of beating karl rove in a book-reading contest.

Ob. cheap shot:

http://www.omomisha.com/times9imgs/my_pet_goat.jpg

Most people aren't 'stupid' per se, if they apply themselves, but what I do find missing in most of my fellow human beings is OBSERVATIONAL SKILLS.

This, this, a thousand times this. I want to start a public awareness campaign called "Please, pay attention to something besides yourself for TEN FUCKING SECONDS A DAY."

"people" in this poll does it refer to people of ILX, or people of society as a whole? or sociah t azzahole?

I want to start a public awareness campaign called "Please, pay attention to something besides yourself for TEN FUCKING SECONDS A DAY."

you want to start a campaign. it's always about you you you, isn't it?

Most people are as smart as they need to be.

This isn't necessarily a good thing tho.

I think the main problem is that while there isn't a gap between a certain subsection of people in regards to intelligence, there's a huge gap between the initiative people take to change their ignorance on certain topics.

Like me, if I try to do something, and it doesn't work as I expected, I spend a lot of time to figure out why so I can learn for the future. I read the instructions, I follow whatever SOP exists, I use problem solving skills.

Other people give up immediately and say things like "Oh I don't ever try to do things like this, it never works for me", or, alternatively, insist that whatever they're trying to do is "broken".

Not trying to give myself credit, just citing that the people in the second category are the same problematic people that you can sell BS lines to like the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth".

Lucky I don't have Photoshopping skillz otherwise there'd be an image here of 2 Live Crew's infamous album with the title 'shopped to read 'AS SMARTY AS THEY WANNA BE'

why on earth would someone choose the DOOR to piss on

― bang (HI DERE), Thursday, 23 September 2010 14:41 (4 hours ago)

Because they aim for the letterbox and miss? (I know that's not going to make much sense to people in the US, as you have those metal boxes on sticks outside your houses for collecting mail)

laugh all you want at this generation's critical reasoning skills but their photoshop kung fu is A+.

there's a huge gap between the initiative people take to change their ignorance on certain topics.

I think part of it is this, giving up too easily in the face of difficulties. But there's also a lot of wilful ignorance, some people almost wear it as a badge of pride - "I never bothered to pay attention to algebra class, because it's pointless!", or even status - "I'm never going to learn how to use a computer, because typing is for secretaries!" (dated example but you get the idea).

Most people I know seem to get by ok and have something to say. But I have this huge feeling that the 'average' person just doesn't seem to question anything. Just - they'll accept, on some level, anything they're told without wondering how it's possible, how anyone knows it or how likely it is to be actually true.
xp yeah even their own assumptions.

Because they aim for the letterbox and miss? (I know that's not going to make much sense to people in the US, as you have those metal boxes on sticks outside your houses for collecting mail)

My house was built in 1946, I have a letterbox!

When I'm with nerds, I'll sometimes make up a nerd quiz to demonstrate how deficient our general trivia is to nerd trivia.
I think the worst example of knowing one but not the other was:

Who is the President of the United Federation of Planets?
Who is the President of Russia?

I'm not sure that I know either...

ha here's another:

Name one planet in Romulan territory that isn't Romulus.
Name one city in Haiti that isn't Port au Prince.

President of Russia is Medelev?
Remus is another planet in the Romulan Star Empire
Can't think of another Haitian city...

But this is knowledge, not intelligence, nor any measure of the motivation to use that intelligence. A journalist once asked Einstein how many feet were in a mile, and he replied "I don't know. Why should I fill my mind with facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?".

I thought of a good one just now:

Name three members of The Watchmen who is not Dr. Manhattan.
Name three members of The Manhattan Project (which Dr. Manhattan is named after).

(BTW, I don't know the answers to these either. These are just questions I think we are appropriately embarrassed to know the nerd answers to, but not the general ones, because they do indicate a kind of intellectual incuriousness, or at least a very selective one)

Certainly it's sensible to divide knowledge and intelligence, but sometimes lack of knowledge betrays an alarming (to me anyway) lack of curiosity about the world, like the person at work who didn't know the moon didn't shine by itself.

You must steal that person's soul and post the pic here.

It was rather a spartan affair iirc, now you mention it.

pretty sure intelligence is defined by finding food and living and some other stuff

his 1904 American Journal of Psychology article titled "General Intelligence," Objectively Determined and Measured
o no objectivity c'mon!

actually there's a difference in opinion as to whether a sufficiently comprehensive database of trivia could be considered intelligent, and i'm not sure how one-sided the pro philosophers fall on this debate, but I think it's dealing more with computers than say, ken jennings.

a lot of wilful ignorance, some people almost wear it as a badge of pride - "I never bothered to pay attention to algebra class, because it's pointless!"

What irritates me (part #45947 of an infinite list) is people who encounter a subject they don't know anything about and immediately start smirking and eyerolling about it, like anything they don't already know has to be dismissed with a "hahhh, of course I don't know that, imagine what kind of pathetic nerd would know anything about something like that"

h8 that so much

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

lol

Most people are pretty bright if you give them a chance! 6
I AM SURROUNDED BY OXYGEN WASTERS, PLEASE HELP 6

this is perfect

"how stupid do you think ilx0rs are?"

Here's a nerd vs nerd one:

Name nine Federation Starship Captains.
Name nine real-life astronauts.

How stupid do people think you are?

imo most people are pretty big sweeties once you get to know em even a little bit & usually not half as dumb as you would have thought. also being close-minded is not necessarily a sign of ignorance, there is a limit to openmindedness & curiosity obv, and while i think a lot of people might find it actually nice to learn about new things, people who do know about things are generally unnecessarily unsympathetic towards people who don't--as if there wasn't a time when they themselves hadn't known/weren't interested

also i think that i continue to be, and have been, pretty stupid and have exhibited really stupid behaviour for people to have thought to themselves omg so stupid--yet i still consider myself a relatively bright guy in the grand scheme of things.

ITT: Liberal left wing intellectuals

Most people are as smart as they need to be. I don't really worry about it.

went w/ this

goes for nominally intelligent idiots and every1 else too

imo most people are pretty big sweeties once you get to know em even a little bit & usually not half as dumb as you would have thought.

in my experience if you carry through on this and really get to know people regardless of your immediate expectations intelligence-wise you will find the former to be true but not necessarily the latter

i should say though that intelligence is not the factor that makes or breaks my friendship w/people

"How stupid do people think you are?"

They think I am smarter than I really am. I do honestly think I am average to below average. And no this is not trying to make you say:"BUT NO! Nathalie you ARE intelligent!"

BUT NO! Nathal.. oh. :-(

Huh? I don't understand. ;-)

Too late...
How stupid do people think you are?

Started 2 days ago... How stupid do I think ILXors are to be stupid enough to be fooled by a duplicate thread with the word 'stupid' in it?