"There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid."
I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.
Although perhaps the terminology is a bit dichotomous - smart vs. stupid, which could be misleading also. I mean it's a bit ridiculous to condense ability and wisdom along many dimensions into this single dimension. And it further seems that in common parlance, stupid can mean a variety of things based on context...
Although I get the spirit of the article, I think it's just too much of a simplification to be useful.
I feel like the ability of making connections is relative to the domain, and more learned by exposure rather than innate.
For example, someone doing system engineering will be able to understand how the networking of a system works, while someone being a movie critics will find the hidden meanings and connections in the movies they watch. Similar for a musician.
Probably indeed the semantic is important. Someone can say something stupid in a specific occasion or all the time in a specific domain, but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
> ...but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
This is a reasonable assumption if you've spent your life in places where the average person is well-educated, but, if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated. Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
I do think there's a distinction to be made between "stupid" and "uneducated" but in terms of how you experience interactions, it's a distinction without a difference.
I read an article along these lines with a title like "how would you go about buying a car for $500." The gist is that folks in poorer rural areas would have the experience and contacts to buy the car. In contrast, most middle class folks would have no idea how to by such a car.
That's resourcefulness and I would argue that being resourceful is not the same thing as being smart. There can be a relationship between resourcefulness and intelligence, but they're inherently different.
About the car example: most middle class folks don't live in places where there's a substantial market for these types of cars. The availability of these types of cars is environmental.
My wife’s family is from a poor rural area. There are a minority of poor people who are smart like that. But more often than not what happens is that these people will come into some money, and immediately blow it on a car way behind their budget because they can “afford the payment.”
> poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education.
What does this mean? That they're able to scratch through existence on a minimum wage salary (or whatever) may be "quite smart" or it may be "meager survival". I don't think there's any inherent connection to anything, here, and it feels hand-wavy.
They're not the divider, but they are unsurprisingly correlates.
A vlogger I sometimes follow has generated many fascinating stories for me. They were getting by driving for instacart for a period, and they would do stuff like get home at the end of the day and... order instacart. They then proceed to say how they tip their driver well because they know how much it sucks to not be tipped. I honestly was confused about how these ecosystems even have a large enough market of rich people to be viable until I saw this; it did not cross my mind that poor people used it.
Or they got a small inheritance and went out and bought 2 brand new cars on finance. Basically never drove one of them. A year later and one of them has been repossessed, and they're complaining that their landlord is taking too long to change a smoke alarm battery, and that they can't afford to go buy a stool to change it themselves.
As far as I can tell, most of the luxury fashion industry exists to sell to people who can't afford to buy it. Like no rich person is spending $5k on an ostentatious bag covered in LV logos. But poor people do, thinking it will make them look rich (they have no idea that rich people know this, but I suppose if other poor people don't, maybe it works).
If you don't think stupid people exist, you are in a fortunate bubble. It can feel like you're an alien studying humanity watching some of the things they do. It's often baffling, and they have no idea when they do something stupid, so they don't try to hide it. Some people will instantly squander any way out of their situation, and then complain about it. It's like the parable of the drowning man.
I think it is very difficult to discern innate ability because it can be so easily masked by effort. Lack of effort registers as lack of ability. Sometimes it's hard to keep making an effort when you lack ability. So are you slacking because you are lazy, or are you slacking because it's exhausting?
Sometimes you can help somebody find their smart by sparking their interest. Their smart was there all along. They just needed the right motivation to find it. They can learn all sorts of smart things as long as you relate it to kites, or Napolean, or horses, or whatever they find interesting.
If you feel the need to quote that, just remember that it was from something written back in 2012. That was a time so beautiful, even the light reflected from a raw sewerage tank could create a full spectrum rainbow with twinkling stars if you capture and bring it to today's world.
Now days, the world has grown much bigger, and people are accustomed to unfamiliarity (the world of strangers), with no need to understand and love, with no need to bring people together. So the check is much straight forward and quick: if someone thinks stupid, acts stupid, then maybe they are stupid. Brutal and useful, high utilitarian efficiency.
Sure, there are some people with specific intellectual disabilities, brain injuries and the like.
But beyond that it gets woolly - how do you separate aptitude, interest, effort, and opportunity? And even if it were possible, would the work needed to identify a (presumably small) set of 'truly stupid' people really be worth the effort?
> "There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid."
> I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.
Even if it's not technically true, IMHO it's better to strike "stupid" from your conceptual vocabulary, because not thinking that way just gets you into a better mindset to live with others.
That's especially true for software engineers and other people who've often built an identity around being "smart." That mindset usually leads to arrogance and "smart people being stupid." It's also help to default to being very respectful of experience and expertise outside of your field (and even within it).
The fact that some people are smart and some people are stupid is obvious to everyone. Every single human quality (strength, hair color, endurance, patience, height, immunity to diseases, penis size, etc.) follows some form of smooth distribution and we all agree on that. The claim that intelligence somehow doesn't because reasons is so blatantly false I don't understand why would we be discussing it in the first place. If you're a woman you ain't going to compete with men in MMA no matter how hard you train. It's extremely evident with children who innately display different skills. Also mentally disabled people exist and they prove that "everyone is equally innately smart" is false as fuck unless you don't consider mentally disabled people to be people - controversial position, but not exactly useless.
The issue here is that the society simply isn't ready for the logical implications of the fact that different people have different innate intelligence.
What’s very funny about this is that most people who aren’t very smart know they aren’t. They’re not too smart to think that there’s no difference between smart people and not smart people.
Are there clusters of people with high/low intelligence, just like there are clusters of people with other traits? Like, Asians tend to be short, Africans are mostly black, men are usually stronger than women, Irish are redheads, etc. If we identify groups of people that are indeed stupid, what do we do about them as a society? We've tried mass murder and it backfired, we've tried other eugenics programs and it backfired too.
"If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole." -Raylan Givens, Justified
I believe the same applies to stupid. Yes, you will occasionally run into stupid people (or as the OP states "people being stupid"). But if it happens more often than not, look in the mirror.
there are plenty of places in the world in which most people are assholes about some particular thing.
For example if you are a young black man or a gay person living in Utah you might encounter pretty much assholes all day, depending on what you are trying to do that day and depending on if you are unlucky. If you are a good Mormon person in Utah you will probably meet nothing but good people when you go out, even if you meet people who are not good Mormons.
If you are living in Denmark and taking care of a severely autistic child of about 6 years old with learning disabilities, if you meet nothing but unknown Danes during the day you are probably meeting nothing but assholes.
This really clever quote, like most really clever quotes, is somewhat insulting when it reaches its limitations.
however I will note, if you spend a long time in a place and situation that is not suited to you, and every time you go out you meet almost all assholes, in the end you will probably become an asshole too, because you are not going to want to approach any person you meet when you go out with any sort of social conviviality. Quite the opposite in fact, and with a probable short warning.
>> "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole." -Raylan Givens, Justified
> This really clever quote, like most really clever quotes, is somewhat insulting when it reaches its limitations.
The point of quotes like that are just to get people to examine their own behavior, which they often conveniently leave unexamined. This type can have more impact because it ties into the persons own observations and experience.
It's not some kind of proposition to be absolutely true or absolutely false.
> For example if you are a young black man or a gay person living in Utah you might encounter pretty much assholes all day, depending on what you are trying to do that day and depending on if you are unlucky.
Are you speaking from experience? As a “brown guy with a beard,” Utah was like heaven compared to Maryland or New York. I’m so fucking sick of the mid-Atlantic “we’re not racist, we’re assholes to everybody” shtick.
Please don't besmirch Utah. It's one of the few high-trust societies left in this country. It's a beautiful, safe, peaceful haven and I literally never had a bad interaction there in years. And I'm not white.
This is a strong anti-signal for me. When you work for someone who thinks every other team / counterparty we interact with is stupid / we could do their jobs / blah blah blah.. hugely demotivating behavior.
This line of thinking is common but it’s only a self serving implicit bias.
Yes, everyone around you could very well be more stupid or the bigger asshole. This is a perception issue void of evidence either way. The people most prone to poor perception analysis are those least capable of perceiving, which is the foundation of Dunning-Kruger.
For everyone else there are things like measures and accomplishments.
Just an FYI but the foundation of Dunning-Kruger is bad math/charting. The data from the experiment shows that generally people understand how good they are at things. But they charted the data on a bad variable.
> The worst test-takers would also overestimate their performance the most because they are simply the furthest from getting a perfect score.
No. Earlier the article correctly states that all result quadrants more or less guess their raw performance with a similar degree of precision, but fail to guess their performance relative to each other with the same level of precision. These are two entirely unrelated measures that the article attempts to correlate in an invented relationship. The actual Dunning-Kruger results also indicate the highest scoring quadrant tend to underestimate their performance relative to their testing peers, but they are off by much less than the lowest score quadrant.
I am not saying Dunning-Kruger is necessarily correct or valid, and it has been challenged repeatedly. Still it is necessary to know what Dunning-Kruger actually concludes before challenging it.
Secondly, regardless of agreement on the conclusions provided by Dunning-Kruger it does identify something more important than relative bias. People are generally better at guessing from a known, or at least determinable, objective measure than they are at guessing from perceptive qualities that includes themselves as a data point. This is the basis of social intelligence. Social intelligence is the ability to perceive the communications of other people and to introspect. Both introspection and perception of others are required for the definition of social intelligence. Social intelligence has a weak correlation to academic intelligence as it is primarily a perceptive skill (conscientiousness) but it also requires the proper motivation (openness). People with low general intelligence are more likely to score lower in social intelligence and people with lower perceptive skills in any regard are less motivated/capable to measure things for any reason, and that motivation discrepancy is dramatically elevated a person places themselves a data point of measure.
While not wrong, this quote assumes a healthy self-regulating society that isn't being actively driven off a cliff by algorithms optimizing everything for short-term benefits.
Meaning that it might actually be that the assholes one runs into all day are in fact assholes.
Even more so when we consider that one during a normal day does not run into a representative sample of society, but tiny tiny bubbles. We made sure to atomize everyone into that and separate the social classes from each other.
__
We can of course not expect our quotes like that to serialize all the assumed preconditions into their writing, but we should remember that those exist when replicating them.
As I am sure many HN type people are familiar with, growing up and into my adulthood, people have often commented on me being "the smart one". It confused me, because I honestly have never felt particularly smart. I have always felt like I have been playing catch up.
I have been a member of a local makerspace for the past couple of years, and one thing that being a member has crystallized for me is that pretty much everyone is smart in their own way. It feels obvious to say, but being a member there really made that click for me. People just think I'm smart because I have interests often associated with smart people, not because my capacity for learning or the size of the set of things that I know are all that different from other people.
The other big thing that I think makes people think I'm smart is that I have absolutely no issue saying "I don't know", or just asking questions about something, like the article says. I think people don't really weigh statements or questions like that into their understanding of the knowledge you actually have nearly as much as if you do something like guess incorrectly. I have a habit of shutting up and letting people talk, and people just assume that I know more than I do :P
There is not really that much deviation in intelligence among most adults. People just have different experiences, and therefore different knowledge sets. The way those sets intersect, and the way that non-overlapping sections are treated during interactions seem far more influential for how "smart" someone is perceived, than the actual size of those sets, or even the rate at which one can change that set (how fast they can learn).
> There is not really that much deviation in intelligence among most adults.
I cannot think that you have a lot of experience with all social classes if you think this. I have extremely disordered family members with mental disabilities and I regularly come into contact with their friends and service-industry coworkers. A lot of adults struggle with memory, comprehension, logic, speed, and reasoning, which I would call "large deviations in intelligence".
It's one of those luxury and insular beliefs that could only possibly arise from a sheltered existence. Just for example, anyone who both went to a decent university and grew up in a not-decent public school could not possibly have this opinion.
In my experience, this is true even when they _should_ believe that someone is stupid. It seems that the very intelligent make two errors: humility, and then the same theory of mind error that every makes.
The "humility problem" is well-intended but incorrect; they don't want to claim they're above anyone, at at least in the same of some very intelligent people this is not just a social signal. They seem to think that other people must be just as intelligent as they are, but there's some other explanation for why they don't understand things. This ties into the next problem:
I don't have a clever name for the next problem, but I would call it "the same theory of mind error that every makes." When we try to model other people, we use our own mind as a model. We do this even when we've been proven wrong over a lifetime. We do this when we know better. We slip back into this when we've previously corrected for this. How many extroverts do you know who can tell when an introvert has had "enough" social interaction. It's exceedingly rare. But the extroverts aren't bad people. They just have no real way to slip into the introvert's perspective. They're modeling the introvert as being more or less the same as them, but just with a few quirks. The model fails over and over.
The in case of intelligent people, they seem to have no understanding what a very unintelligent mind would look like, and instead seem to believe that apparently unintelligent people _could_ be brilliant if they just read more, or were not so closed minded. Or maybe they had a poor upbringing, or are dealing with trauma. They don't seem to understand that for stupid people, abstractions are often impossible, impulse control is fleeting, and emotions rule their mind more than thoughts. They cannot really place themselves in the stupid person's mind, so they try to ask "how much would need to go wrong for _me_ to come to such an incorrect conclusion." And so they come up with a false hypothesis, such as "their school teachers must have failed them."
My first-year philsophy professor gave a similar warning. He offered words to the effect that if we (the students) started thinking that the philosophy we were reading made no sense, was idiocy, or just nonsense, pause for a moment and imagine whether we thought it was likely that Plato was an idiot and everyone hasd missed it for millenia, or that we might be misinterpeting something. There’s always the chance that we’ll have an insight that others might not have had, but there’s a reasonable chance the the philosophers we were to study might not be exclusively stupid.
But generations of philosophers who have described the next couple of thousand years as "footnotes to Plato", and treat philosophy as if it can only be understood in terms of one very dead guy... It turned me off philosophy for a very long time. Maybe they aren't stupid, but they at least lack the tool kit for showing me the merit of their position.
The "footnotes to Plato" quote is more about the idea that Philosophy doesn't exist in a vacuum rather than just scoring brownie points with peers studying the same thing.
I had a longer written reply but it turned out pretty snarky. In my opinion Philosophy is built upon just like Mathematics otherwise most people can't meaningfully engage.
That's a good professor. I think everyone who has dabbled in Philosophy, especially of the ancients, usually Plato, has had that experience of thinking they are smarter than Plato and that he is making obvious errors all over the place. The first thing any student of philosophy (or a lot of other fields, really) has to do is to cultivate epistemic humility; he must train his instinctive reaction to "I don't get it" or "this is obvious" away from "therefore the author is dumb" and towards "I must be missing something".
That isn't to say that every author and philosopher is infallible and you must assume they are smarter than you at all times, but just that you need to acknowledge that very famous works are typically very famous because, in the opinion of very learned people, they contain depths to be plumbed. If one isn't seeing those depths, he needs to look harder.
I think it's a question of internalization. When you have internalized the correct way to think about it, it feels obvious. And wrong ways to think about it seem absurd. We stand on the shoulders of giants, Plato being one of them. We have internalized their philosophy. And that's why it feels idiotic.
The primary argument of this article can be simplified and rephrased as “Only stupid people call other people stupid” which really points the finger back at them.
Exactly because calling out someones intelligence, whether it is strong or weak, is the equivalent of trying to be-little someone. And that is a complete a-hole move.
It's fascinating to see this in things as life-or-death-to-millions-important like global politics, and the you-know-who. And his team of this kind of people...
Fascinating in the sense of "How did you get here!? And can't you see this move will blow up in your face in the near future!?".
I guess if you have 50-60 years of adulthood where you made dumb moves but got away with it...
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrounded_by_Idiots for the case that people generally aren't stupid, they're just different - personality, upbringing, culture, etc. Being smart is knowing how to spot those fundamental differences, interpreting them for what they are and adapting your behaviour.
more related to the term "surrounded by idiots": my spouse and i go on a big trip every year and in the few weeks leading up to it we both find ourselves feeling like were "surrounded by idiots" in work and life. noticed the pattern so well tell one other "ive entered the surrounded by idiots phase" once were close to vacation time
100% and there are a large groups of people who just don't care/motivated about the things you do and that doesn't make them stupid. The trick is not getting caught trying to spend all your time with people who don't care about similar things unless you need them to care.
Also agree with your statement that there is a huge cross-section of intellectual capability as well.
Smart people do not default to thinking that others are stupid.
They go through the answer space, exhausting the other options and then settle on "that guy must be an idiot" with a confidence level somewhere in the high 90%.
It has to be this way, because stupid people do in fact exist.
So there must be a process of which the outcome is thinking that someone might be stupid.
And smart people suffer [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] exactly because they, first, think that others can have the same scrutiny about things and get surprised/disappointed when they find out how other people reach conclusions. Loneliness is the most common.
The more I look into philosophy the more it seems the "enlightened" thing to do is instead pity the people we perceive as stupid because (unless they have a clinical pathology) they are simply misinformed and unaware of that fact (plus the dangers of such confidence).
This also makes it harder and harder to hold grudges against people in general, which I'm on the fence about, because I've had people close to me do some really horrible shit in my time.
I'm not religious, but there is a bible passage that I feel just happens to sum this up nicely:
For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief. - Ecclesiastes 1:18
You can (and should!) start pitying the people as soon as they stop making your life worse. Which also means that to pity them, you need to be doing not just well, but so well as to absorb some of their nonsense and still come out fine.
Pity alone just gives people free reign to set the world on fire. Stupidity needs friction to be stopped.
I see this style of framing a lot and it always seems like turtles all the way down to me:
- Smart people recognize that some people are stupid
- No, real smart people recognize that behaviors are stupid, not people
- No, real smart people don't label others, including calling themselves smart, based on a small sample of observed behaviors. They leave the dichotomy behind.
- Wait, you still called yourself smart...?
- You are all wrong, all labels are generally meaningless and unhelpful in describing dynamic people in a dynamic world, though let's not be dogmatic about it, sometimes a dolt is a dolt and a genius is a genius
I think smart people either don’t say it out loud or just don’t care.
The hard part about this topic is, the moment you say anything you’re kind of saying that you’re one of the smart ones lol
Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered as one of the important phillosophers of 20th century, did it all the times! he even compared simple people to animals. When he was a teacher in small village(s) in Austria, he was higly disrespecting to the simple village-people and their kids he was teaching. Using force on dumb pupils to put knowledge into them with his bare hand!!!
i think its lack of understanding and empathy in smart people causing them to think others are stupid - when I studied, the only thing i really learned is to ask "why in this stupid way, and not in some other more smarter way" when there's one answer one can use to explain why, then its enough to counter that "stupid"/"smart" arguments. Smart people often live in a higher state where their knowledge allows them to find better approaches/answers/methods - so the result is they alwys question approaches/answers/methods and if there's a simple better approaches/answers/methods, they say "thats stupid" - but never consider the why was it made this way and not the other way around.
Thats my experience. Until I learned to question first, then think&suggest, I was, i thought, "the smartest guy in the world, because all other were plain dumb!". Now i differentiate more and only if something is not explainable, erratic, uncalculated, i call DUMB with an emphasis on the forced, spitting, pronounciation without opening the mouth for vowels! :)
Important doesn't mean "smart." I would actually argue Wittgenstein wasn't very smart (and in my opinion, often wrong). There were just the right enough people around him that thought he was a gifted student (though he didn't always excel academically, weirdly enough). At what, that is a mystery and is contentious. During his early years when people thought that, he was already harassing and beating children (he published Tractatus in his early 30s).
1. He rejected infinite mathematical extensions, unbounded quantification, misunderstood Godel’s incompleteness theorem and quite a bit more that the math community dismissed. So he wasn't a math genius (he originally studied engineering and became interested in math through that)
2. Most people were skeptical of his picture theory, and rightfully so. It grew out of the same environment that gave rise to, at that time and in their initial form, logical positivism, empiricism, and at its most horrific, behaviourism, which led to infant pain denial. Picture theory explains something surface-level, which in itself people understood was just incomplete, and I'm sure you know, even Wittgenstein rejected his theory later
3. But the problem with his last work, Investigations, was that it was again surface-level musings, and written in a weird cryptic way sprinkled with made up words. His language-games, to me, sounds like what teens nowadays would talk about in high school with less fancy language. And it describes, to me, this kind of juvenile high school behaviour. Which, fair enough, I'm sure rings true to some people. But his philosophy is general enough to not really contribute much as a whole. It just hides behind this high-brow language. Yet he was very adamant and defensive about it
Wittgenstein had severe anger issues that people recognized but hardly anyone wanted to do much about. He had a superiority complex (lots of childhood stuff in his life probably) and he just didn't like a lot of people and thought very little of them
I guess the one good thing about him I can say is when he wanted to accomplish something he really set his mind to it. If only that same fervour was used to be not just a better person but to work well with others, he might've contributed something most experts would still rely on and be influenced by
> But [Wittgenstein's] philosophy is general enough to not really contribute much as a whole
Is this consensus (in Western tradition) or your opinion?
> Wittgenstein wasn't very smart (and in my opinion, often wrong)
Well, you've got to hand it to Wittgenstein for being one of the most self-critical philosophers, if nothing else.
> He rejected infinite mathematical extensions
Socrates abhorred the written form, but that takes nothing away from his works (as presented by Plato). I guess humans are weird in weird ways, and pretty excellent in others.
I don't think this is a good marker for intelligence, but I think if you avoid dismissing issues because other people are dumb you will generally think harder and in the end will have a better understanding of the issue.
I have a personal rule that goes along the lines of "If I can't explain why a smart and kind person thinks the opposite of me it means I don't really understand the issue". It doesn't mean that I have to agree with them, but I always try to understand where they came from.
The line of thinking progresses like this - it starts at ignorance, then it comes to the showcased "there are no stupid people" partially because of the still remaining ignorance in the "unimportant" humanities areas usually "STEM and economics is all that's needed to be smart!". And partially because of the combination of self-censoring and social virtue signalling "Look, I'm super duper extremely tolerant and avoid even a slight mention of the "bad words", please praise me!". And then, rarely, a person understands that a) there are no "bad words" and opinion of others is more or less worthless with the exception of friends and family, and b) a lot of people are actually stupid in a clear biological or medical sense. Like for example, the oft incorrectly remembered IQ score. It is quite openly in the definition of that score, that score 100 is around the median. And word median implies that there are not only higher scores than 100. but also lower too. It's really obvious, and after virtue signalling is no longer in the picture, it is very easy to explain.
I read and love all from Derek. I like that he always makes you think through, even when starting from simple and stupid ideas.
Personally I tend to dismiss myself as stupid, because many times I detect I'm being misguided by lazyness and not wanting to think things through, which obviously makes me feel so smart that I could spend all day trapped in this stupid paradox.
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
Only problem is that there are people that are actually stupid in the actual medical sense of the word. And a side effect is that they’re not great at thinking things through.
idk this sort of thinking just feels very “everyone gets a participation trophy” when much of the world doesn’t work that way
Or shouldn't, for that matter, because once we leave bullshit office jobs, real lives kinda depend on an accurate assessment of reality, no matter how hurtful that might be to a person.
Ideally delivered without hurt, of course, but there is only so much one can do.
Smart people typically turn out to be disrespectful towards stupid people if in their life such stupid people made their life more difficult. And smart people often have a good memory.
If they never had any problems with stupid people in life, smart people are in most cases much more respecting.
I'd argue that this is a matter of wisdom, not intelligence per se. Lots of smart people think others are stupid, especially when they're young. Most smart people grow out of this over time, as they gain experience. Some don't, but that's not because they get stupider. Sometimes it's due to lack of real-world experience. Other times it's inappropriate devotion to certain fictional tropes that people always seem to forget are usually villain-coded: the heroic smart guy sometimes gets frustrated but rarely complains about the intelligence of their comrades, but the villainous smart guy complains about it all the time.
As a second comment: Nowadays the main problem that people who are smart in one field think they can solve all problems because they have the proven track record of one. The tech field is full with that kind of people sadly. And they have a followers too.
> Smart people don’t think others are stupid
> saying “I don’t know” is usually smart — because it’s refusing to jump to a conclusion.
this has been on my mind a lot lately
for decades ive been interacted with people assuming were all on the same page, have thought things through, and that many conclusions to statements are implied, thus would be rude and patronizing to clearly call out. doing so would be treating the other like a child. i dont think im that smart, i mostly spend time with friends, peers, and family who all keep up with me
my therapist pointed out my way of processing things is actually uncommon and suggested i could seek out a spectrum diagnosis. this comment took a lot to process but it helped me remember im in the 99% given a standardized test or if we look at other, certainly flawed, education metrics. similar to a varsity athlete who never makes it past high school is in the 99% of athletes, they dont think theyre so good because theyve seen much better competition and their peers are others at their level
on top of all this i find thinking of myself as smart as disgustingly egotistical
now my point: ive found i get along much better with people i normally alienated or conflicted with if i treat them the way i refused to before my therapist called me out. i clearly describe all of the thought that went into a conclusion, something i would have considered rude and "mansplainy" 6 months ago, and others seem to treat me entirely differently. pretty much completely rehabilitated my relationship with my inlaws
i forget where i heard it first, but people may still forgive you after burning down their house, killing their parents, kidnapping their daughters, but will never for calling them stupid.
This has the smell of enterprise corporate positivity. In a corporate setting, you have to keep the peace.
But no, there are absolutely maliciously intentionally stupid people out there.
The other fallacy is the author who says "smart people don't think others are stupid", makes an assumption that this Derek Severs is a " smart person".
Though, there's also plenty of completely innocent, decent, but stupid people. Be it innately or just as a result of a terrible set of environmental factors
There's a massive difference between someone who is proud to be ignorant and someone who acknowledges their ignorance. You want to be around the latter, not the former.
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
Yeah, no. When someone is constantly being stupid they are stupid. That is what that word means. Sugar coating that is just fake positivity.
"Smart" people realize that smartness is not binary and that there all sorts of things that can influence people's smartness in a situation or on a topic other than intelligence. Very intelligent people absolutely do stupid shit. Emotions, ideology, pride, wishful thinking, laziness, arrogance, just refusing to understand something etc. can make the most intelligent people really dumb fucks.
But there absolutely are stupid people. Sometimes they have the potential to be smarter by actually using the brain capacity they have but don't use for one of the aforementioned reasons. Sometimes people are just really unintelligent; Which is fine. There is no moral failing in this. Being unintelligent but good person is perfectly okay. The real issue here is that we judge people based upon their intelligence – or rather our perception of their intelligence, which is often skewed – rather than what they do with the intelligence they have, something they can control. Nothing wrong with being unintelligent, but being purposefully stupid because it serves your point or interest is unacceptable.
In the end smartness is also an overloaded term that we project all kinds of different things into.
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
If you believe this, go to where my mother in law lives in rural Oregon and spend a few months there among the people who weren't smart enough to go live somewhere else.
There are many ways one can be smart. Having an intuition for solving complex problems is not the same trait as having a good memory or controlling your emotions or being environment and self aware.
Many are overlapping traits sure, but someone that has them all, can easily be the worse at each one, when compared with others that excel in that area. This is why you see so often brilliant people doing idiotic stuff.
So, "everyone's stupid" is a matter of alignment, in the areas you're best, where you can judge best, few around are better. Which can be true while still not making you the smartest person around in all ways.
I don't agree that this iuis an indicator of any kind of intelligence other than social intelligence (e.g. don't say stupid things that affect your life, in other words socially intelligent people keep it to themselves)
There are lots of smart people on all "sides" of the political spectrum, but in online forums (especially Reddit in my experience) people on dismiss the other side as stupid or evil, rather than trying to see the issue from a different perspective and understand the other persons point of view
I think the anonymity of being online brings out the worst in people. Having a discussion in person tends to be much more civil, even if you completely disagree with the other person
This may seem like a trivial article, so it probably won't survive on the front page, but it's one of the hardest points to get across. We see it all the time on HN, where drive-by dismissals are an art form (I'm as guilty as everyone). Often, our main interest in an article is the possibility that the author is an idiot and we can quickly correct them for internet points. Maybe with "correlation isn't causation" or some other perennial comeback that isn't as clever as it seems.
I guess the internet tests you because it exposes you to more stupidity than you might have thought existed, and some of it is engineered to keep you outraged or otherwise glued to the screen. But I think we have a choice between fewer more meaningful engagements and higher numbers of drive-by quips, and we should probably be choosing the former.
Unfortunately, it's another thing made worse by AI, because when the volume of long-form punditry is up 10x due to LLM-generated blogs and social media posts, how do you even choose what's worth engaging with? Increasingly, there's no human on the other end who cares about what you have to say. It's just karma / reach farming at a scale, and it makes no difference if you respond with a thoughtful argument or a singular "this is dumb".
It looks trivial because it is. Overuse of stupid as a label does not mean that there are no stupid people and noticing their existence does not make you automatically join their group.
What about the alternative possibility - the author is a rather intelligent being, but what they've written in this instance is idiotic?
Just because I like to think of myself as a non-idiot, doesn't mean I haven't brought strings of words into existence that were ill-conceived. In those cases, having someone come along and say something like "eh mate - you're confusing correlation with causation here!" is valuable feedback.
> What about the alternative possibility - the author is a rather intelligent being, but what they've written in this instance is idiotic?
With respect, I think you're doing the same thing. You picked a word to squabble about while ignoring the context of the sentence. If you take the sentence and replace "is an idiot" with "has an idiotic point", my argument isn't weakened. Neither is the argument in the original article: we make this assumption more often than we should, because the game we choose to play is to be the smartest guy or gal on the internet.
With respect - I believe you’re correct. I mentally reacted to a minor phrasing nit, jumped to a response in my head, dashed it and went on my way before really digesting the entirety of what you were saying.
Which illustrates your very point, right? In an environment where we have a firehose of information pointed at us, our natural reaction is to fast filter/summarize and then discard or react. You’re saying we need to slow down and engage with each other (real people) on more than that superficial level. I agree. Thank you for taking the time to write this.
> So if you decide someone is stupid, it means you’re not thinking, which is not being smart.
What if, according to the author's definition, after thinking through, one has decided someone really is stupid. Then one's decision that the person is stupid is just true. Isn't it being smart according to author's own definition.
It appears the author didn't think it through essentially making the author "stupid" according to the author's own definition.
He doesn't acknowledge it explicitly, but my reading is that the author will acknowledge that he himself sometimes jumps to conclusion. This is his definition of stupid, so he likely does agree that he's stupid sometimes. He's trying to do it less, but it's impossible to get through life without making assumptions -- we don't have the time or energy to thoroughly analyze every little thing.
I guess I’m stupid, then, because I think a lot of other people are stupid. Like holy crap, so stupid. Have you seen people? They are by and large not smart.
When I was younger, I used to think most people were dumb as well. But then you realize that you are just as dumb sometimes, and your most cheerished people can be as well. It's just human nature. Thinking everything and everyone is dumb can probably be characterized as being stupid, since you're not thinking about this very deeply.
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
The author needs to touch grass and meet more people - maybe go to your local prison or skid row and have a chat to the people there. Prison has some smart ones for sure, but it’s also got some profoundly stupid people; skid row is almost wholly stupid people who have also fried their brains. There are of course plenty of stupid people in almost all other places, too, but pound for pound skid row probably wins.
I am smart enough to realize the smartest people I ever met indeed did not think others were stupid, they considered them to be complete imbeciles instead.
Albert Einstein, who was accused of being stupid in his youth, once stated "We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us."
I'm skeptical. I've met some of the smartest people on earth and some of them indeed called others stupid, and I personally believe rightly so. The statement is on the level of "there are no stupid questions", which is also a myth. I can't back this up with hard data but in my personal experience I've witnessed all combinations of {smart, stupid} people calling {smart, stupid} people {smart, stupid} without any strong tendency towards a particular combination.
Of course there's stupid people. A lot of them. It's simply dishonest, manipulative or plain stupid or say otherwise.
If this article was more insightful, thoughtful, etc it would be saying that a smart, decent, wise etc person wouldn't belittle anyone for the combination of innate intelligence and environmental factors that caused them to not be thoughtful, creative, able/willing to learn etc.
And they'd moreover perhaps even take the responsibility upon themselves to try to do something about it - addressing inequality, social and educational systems, changing culture, better family planning, and endless other things.
"There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid."
I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.
Although perhaps the terminology is a bit dichotomous - smart vs. stupid, which could be misleading also. I mean it's a bit ridiculous to condense ability and wisdom along many dimensions into this single dimension. And it further seems that in common parlance, stupid can mean a variety of things based on context...
Although I get the spirit of the article, I think it's just too much of a simplification to be useful.
I feel like the ability of making connections is relative to the domain, and more learned by exposure rather than innate.
For example, someone doing system engineering will be able to understand how the networking of a system works, while someone being a movie critics will find the hidden meanings and connections in the movies they watch. Similar for a musician.
Probably indeed the semantic is important. Someone can say something stupid in a specific occasion or all the time in a specific domain, but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
> ...but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
This is a reasonable assumption if you've spent your life in places where the average person is well-educated, but, if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated. Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
I do think there's a distinction to be made between "stupid" and "uneducated" but in terms of how you experience interactions, it's a distinction without a difference.
>if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated.
poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education.
these attributes are not the divider between smart and stupid.
> poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education
Care to elaborate?
I read an article along these lines with a title like "how would you go about buying a car for $500." The gist is that folks in poorer rural areas would have the experience and contacts to buy the car. In contrast, most middle class folks would have no idea how to by such a car.
That's resourcefulness and I would argue that being resourceful is not the same thing as being smart. There can be a relationship between resourcefulness and intelligence, but they're inherently different.
About the car example: most middle class folks don't live in places where there's a substantial market for these types of cars. The availability of these types of cars is environmental.
My wife’s family is from a poor rural area. There are a minority of poor people who are smart like that. But more often than not what happens is that these people will come into some money, and immediately blow it on a car way behind their budget because they can “afford the payment.”
> poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education.
What does this mean? That they're able to scratch through existence on a minimum wage salary (or whatever) may be "quite smart" or it may be "meager survival". I don't think there's any inherent connection to anything, here, and it feels hand-wavy.
They're not the divider, but they are unsurprisingly correlates.
A vlogger I sometimes follow has generated many fascinating stories for me. They were getting by driving for instacart for a period, and they would do stuff like get home at the end of the day and... order instacart. They then proceed to say how they tip their driver well because they know how much it sucks to not be tipped. I honestly was confused about how these ecosystems even have a large enough market of rich people to be viable until I saw this; it did not cross my mind that poor people used it.
Or they got a small inheritance and went out and bought 2 brand new cars on finance. Basically never drove one of them. A year later and one of them has been repossessed, and they're complaining that their landlord is taking too long to change a smoke alarm battery, and that they can't afford to go buy a stool to change it themselves.
As far as I can tell, most of the luxury fashion industry exists to sell to people who can't afford to buy it. Like no rich person is spending $5k on an ostentatious bag covered in LV logos. But poor people do, thinking it will make them look rich (they have no idea that rich people know this, but I suppose if other poor people don't, maybe it works).
If you don't think stupid people exist, you are in a fortunate bubble. It can feel like you're an alien studying humanity watching some of the things they do. It's often baffling, and they have no idea when they do something stupid, so they don't try to hide it. Some people will instantly squander any way out of their situation, and then complain about it. It's like the parable of the drowning man.
I think it is very difficult to discern innate ability because it can be so easily masked by effort. Lack of effort registers as lack of ability. Sometimes it's hard to keep making an effort when you lack ability. So are you slacking because you are lazy, or are you slacking because it's exhausting?
Sometimes you can help somebody find their smart by sparking their interest. Their smart was there all along. They just needed the right motivation to find it. They can learn all sorts of smart things as long as you relate it to kites, or Napolean, or horses, or whatever they find interesting.
If you feel the need to quote that, just remember that it was from something written back in 2012. That was a time so beautiful, even the light reflected from a raw sewerage tank could create a full spectrum rainbow with twinkling stars if you capture and bring it to today's world.
Now days, the world has grown much bigger, and people are accustomed to unfamiliarity (the world of strangers), with no need to understand and love, with no need to bring people together. So the check is much straight forward and quick: if someone thinks stupid, acts stupid, then maybe they are stupid. Brutal and useful, high utilitarian efficiency.
Sure, there are some people with specific intellectual disabilities, brain injuries and the like.
But beyond that it gets woolly - how do you separate aptitude, interest, effort, and opportunity? And even if it were possible, would the work needed to identify a (presumably small) set of 'truly stupid' people really be worth the effort?
> "There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid."
> I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.
Even if it's not technically true, IMHO it's better to strike "stupid" from your conceptual vocabulary, because not thinking that way just gets you into a better mindset to live with others.
That's especially true for software engineers and other people who've often built an identity around being "smart." That mindset usually leads to arrogance and "smart people being stupid." It's also help to default to being very respectful of experience and expertise outside of your field (and even within it).
The fact that some people are smart and some people are stupid is obvious to everyone. Every single human quality (strength, hair color, endurance, patience, height, immunity to diseases, penis size, etc.) follows some form of smooth distribution and we all agree on that. The claim that intelligence somehow doesn't because reasons is so blatantly false I don't understand why would we be discussing it in the first place. If you're a woman you ain't going to compete with men in MMA no matter how hard you train. It's extremely evident with children who innately display different skills. Also mentally disabled people exist and they prove that "everyone is equally innately smart" is false as fuck unless you don't consider mentally disabled people to be people - controversial position, but not exactly useless.
The issue here is that the society simply isn't ready for the logical implications of the fact that different people have different innate intelligence.
Well there’s a spectrum with literally everything, including benchmarks. The perception of who is intelligent changes over time.
What’s very funny about this is that most people who aren’t very smart know they aren’t. They’re not too smart to think that there’s no difference between smart people and not smart people.
> society simply isn't ready for the logical implications of the fact that different people have different innate intelligence.
What are the logical implications?
Are there clusters of people with high/low intelligence, just like there are clusters of people with other traits? Like, Asians tend to be short, Africans are mostly black, men are usually stronger than women, Irish are redheads, etc. If we identify groups of people that are indeed stupid, what do we do about them as a society? We've tried mass murder and it backfired, we've tried other eugenics programs and it backfired too.
"If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole." -Raylan Givens, Justified
I believe the same applies to stupid. Yes, you will occasionally run into stupid people (or as the OP states "people being stupid"). But if it happens more often than not, look in the mirror.
there are plenty of places in the world in which most people are assholes about some particular thing.
For example if you are a young black man or a gay person living in Utah you might encounter pretty much assholes all day, depending on what you are trying to do that day and depending on if you are unlucky. If you are a good Mormon person in Utah you will probably meet nothing but good people when you go out, even if you meet people who are not good Mormons.
If you are living in Denmark and taking care of a severely autistic child of about 6 years old with learning disabilities, if you meet nothing but unknown Danes during the day you are probably meeting nothing but assholes.
This really clever quote, like most really clever quotes, is somewhat insulting when it reaches its limitations.
however I will note, if you spend a long time in a place and situation that is not suited to you, and every time you go out you meet almost all assholes, in the end you will probably become an asshole too, because you are not going to want to approach any person you meet when you go out with any sort of social conviviality. Quite the opposite in fact, and with a probable short warning.
>> "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole." -Raylan Givens, Justified
> This really clever quote, like most really clever quotes, is somewhat insulting when it reaches its limitations.
The point of quotes like that are just to get people to examine their own behavior, which they often conveniently leave unexamined. This type can have more impact because it ties into the persons own observations and experience.
It's not some kind of proposition to be absolutely true or absolutely false.
> For example if you are a young black man or a gay person living in Utah you might encounter pretty much assholes all day, depending on what you are trying to do that day and depending on if you are unlucky.
Are you speaking from experience? As a “brown guy with a beard,” Utah was like heaven compared to Maryland or New York. I’m so fucking sick of the mid-Atlantic “we’re not racist, we’re assholes to everybody” shtick.
Please don't besmirch Utah. It's one of the few high-trust societies left in this country. It's a beautiful, safe, peaceful haven and I literally never had a bad interaction there in years. And I'm not white.
This is a strong anti-signal for me. When you work for someone who thinks every other team / counterparty we interact with is stupid / we could do their jobs / blah blah blah.. hugely demotivating behavior.
This line of thinking is common but it’s only a self serving implicit bias.
Yes, everyone around you could very well be more stupid or the bigger asshole. This is a perception issue void of evidence either way. The people most prone to poor perception analysis are those least capable of perceiving, which is the foundation of Dunning-Kruger.
For everyone else there are things like measures and accomplishments.
Just an FYI but the foundation of Dunning-Kruger is bad math/charting. The data from the experiment shows that generally people understand how good they are at things. But they charted the data on a bad variable.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruge...
The article misses the point.
> The worst test-takers would also overestimate their performance the most because they are simply the furthest from getting a perfect score.
No. Earlier the article correctly states that all result quadrants more or less guess their raw performance with a similar degree of precision, but fail to guess their performance relative to each other with the same level of precision. These are two entirely unrelated measures that the article attempts to correlate in an invented relationship. The actual Dunning-Kruger results also indicate the highest scoring quadrant tend to underestimate their performance relative to their testing peers, but they are off by much less than the lowest score quadrant.
I am not saying Dunning-Kruger is necessarily correct or valid, and it has been challenged repeatedly. Still it is necessary to know what Dunning-Kruger actually concludes before challenging it.
Secondly, regardless of agreement on the conclusions provided by Dunning-Kruger it does identify something more important than relative bias. People are generally better at guessing from a known, or at least determinable, objective measure than they are at guessing from perceptive qualities that includes themselves as a data point. This is the basis of social intelligence. Social intelligence is the ability to perceive the communications of other people and to introspect. Both introspection and perception of others are required for the definition of social intelligence. Social intelligence has a weak correlation to academic intelligence as it is primarily a perceptive skill (conscientiousness) but it also requires the proper motivation (openness). People with low general intelligence are more likely to score lower in social intelligence and people with lower perceptive skills in any regard are less motivated/capable to measure things for any reason, and that motivation discrepancy is dramatically elevated a person places themselves a data point of measure.
I like Nassim Taleb's take - the Intellectual Yet Idiot.
He needs to look in the mirror.
While not wrong, this quote assumes a healthy self-regulating society that isn't being actively driven off a cliff by algorithms optimizing everything for short-term benefits.
Meaning that it might actually be that the assholes one runs into all day are in fact assholes.
Even more so when we consider that one during a normal day does not run into a representative sample of society, but tiny tiny bubbles. We made sure to atomize everyone into that and separate the social classes from each other.
__
We can of course not expect our quotes like that to serialize all the assumed preconditions into their writing, but we should remember that those exist when replicating them.
Following aphorisms like the quote are part of how we achieve such a self regulating society.
No. Following stuff like that quote is how you run a self-regulated society and keep it self-regulating.
If however the baseline already moved into chaos, the quote just leads to tying your own hands and complacency.
It is the right prescription for the wrong disease, essentially. We need chemotherapy/surgery and not mild cough syrup.
As I am sure many HN type people are familiar with, growing up and into my adulthood, people have often commented on me being "the smart one". It confused me, because I honestly have never felt particularly smart. I have always felt like I have been playing catch up.
I have been a member of a local makerspace for the past couple of years, and one thing that being a member has crystallized for me is that pretty much everyone is smart in their own way. It feels obvious to say, but being a member there really made that click for me. People just think I'm smart because I have interests often associated with smart people, not because my capacity for learning or the size of the set of things that I know are all that different from other people.
The other big thing that I think makes people think I'm smart is that I have absolutely no issue saying "I don't know", or just asking questions about something, like the article says. I think people don't really weigh statements or questions like that into their understanding of the knowledge you actually have nearly as much as if you do something like guess incorrectly. I have a habit of shutting up and letting people talk, and people just assume that I know more than I do :P
There is not really that much deviation in intelligence among most adults. People just have different experiences, and therefore different knowledge sets. The way those sets intersect, and the way that non-overlapping sections are treated during interactions seem far more influential for how "smart" someone is perceived, than the actual size of those sets, or even the rate at which one can change that set (how fast they can learn).
> There is not really that much deviation in intelligence among most adults.
I cannot think that you have a lot of experience with all social classes if you think this. I have extremely disordered family members with mental disabilities and I regularly come into contact with their friends and service-industry coworkers. A lot of adults struggle with memory, comprehension, logic, speed, and reasoning, which I would call "large deviations in intelligence".
It's one of those luxury and insular beliefs that could only possibly arise from a sheltered existence. Just for example, anyone who both went to a decent university and grew up in a not-decent public school could not possibly have this opinion.
>Smart people don't think others are stupid
In my experience, this is true even when they _should_ believe that someone is stupid. It seems that the very intelligent make two errors: humility, and then the same theory of mind error that every makes.
The "humility problem" is well-intended but incorrect; they don't want to claim they're above anyone, at at least in the same of some very intelligent people this is not just a social signal. They seem to think that other people must be just as intelligent as they are, but there's some other explanation for why they don't understand things. This ties into the next problem:
I don't have a clever name for the next problem, but I would call it "the same theory of mind error that every makes." When we try to model other people, we use our own mind as a model. We do this even when we've been proven wrong over a lifetime. We do this when we know better. We slip back into this when we've previously corrected for this. How many extroverts do you know who can tell when an introvert has had "enough" social interaction. It's exceedingly rare. But the extroverts aren't bad people. They just have no real way to slip into the introvert's perspective. They're modeling the introvert as being more or less the same as them, but just with a few quirks. The model fails over and over.
The in case of intelligent people, they seem to have no understanding what a very unintelligent mind would look like, and instead seem to believe that apparently unintelligent people _could_ be brilliant if they just read more, or were not so closed minded. Or maybe they had a poor upbringing, or are dealing with trauma. They don't seem to understand that for stupid people, abstractions are often impossible, impulse control is fleeting, and emotions rule their mind more than thoughts. They cannot really place themselves in the stupid person's mind, so they try to ask "how much would need to go wrong for _me_ to come to such an incorrect conclusion." And so they come up with a false hypothesis, such as "their school teachers must have failed them."
My first-year philsophy professor gave a similar warning. He offered words to the effect that if we (the students) started thinking that the philosophy we were reading made no sense, was idiocy, or just nonsense, pause for a moment and imagine whether we thought it was likely that Plato was an idiot and everyone hasd missed it for millenia, or that we might be misinterpeting something. There’s always the chance that we’ll have an insight that others might not have had, but there’s a reasonable chance the the philosophers we were to study might not be exclusively stupid.
Plato wasn't an idiot.
But generations of philosophers who have described the next couple of thousand years as "footnotes to Plato", and treat philosophy as if it can only be understood in terms of one very dead guy... It turned me off philosophy for a very long time. Maybe they aren't stupid, but they at least lack the tool kit for showing me the merit of their position.
The "footnotes to Plato" quote is more about the idea that Philosophy doesn't exist in a vacuum rather than just scoring brownie points with peers studying the same thing.
I had a longer written reply but it turned out pretty snarky. In my opinion Philosophy is built upon just like Mathematics otherwise most people can't meaningfully engage.
That's a good professor. I think everyone who has dabbled in Philosophy, especially of the ancients, usually Plato, has had that experience of thinking they are smarter than Plato and that he is making obvious errors all over the place. The first thing any student of philosophy (or a lot of other fields, really) has to do is to cultivate epistemic humility; he must train his instinctive reaction to "I don't get it" or "this is obvious" away from "therefore the author is dumb" and towards "I must be missing something".
That isn't to say that every author and philosopher is infallible and you must assume they are smarter than you at all times, but just that you need to acknowledge that very famous works are typically very famous because, in the opinion of very learned people, they contain depths to be plumbed. If one isn't seeing those depths, he needs to look harder.
I think it's a question of internalization. When you have internalized the correct way to think about it, it feels obvious. And wrong ways to think about it seem absurd. We stand on the shoulders of giants, Plato being one of them. We have internalized their philosophy. And that's why it feels idiotic.
The primary argument of this article can be simplified and rephrased as “Only stupid people call other people stupid” which really points the finger back at them.
Exactly because calling out someones intelligence, whether it is strong or weak, is the equivalent of trying to be-little someone. And that is a complete a-hole move.
No. That's a stupid (pardon me, but the opportunity and all) thing to say.
It _can_ be wielded as such, yes, but saying that each usage of that must be of the petty kind is not fitting the data known to us as reality.
That would mean stupid people exist, the opposite of what the post says
Theory falls flat quickly when discovering there's actualy people who will never think 1 step futher.
It's fascinating to see this in things as life-or-death-to-millions-important like global politics, and the you-know-who. And his team of this kind of people...
Fascinating in the sense of "How did you get here!? And can't you see this move will blow up in your face in the near future!?".
I guess if you have 50-60 years of adulthood where you made dumb moves but got away with it...
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrounded_by_Idiots for the case that people generally aren't stupid, they're just different - personality, upbringing, culture, etc. Being smart is knowing how to spot those fundamental differences, interpreting them for what they are and adapting your behaviour.
But there are also proper idiots.
i like the chart, thanks for sharing
more related to the term "surrounded by idiots": my spouse and i go on a big trip every year and in the few weeks leading up to it we both find ourselves feeling like were "surrounded by idiots" in work and life. noticed the pattern so well tell one other "ive entered the surrounded by idiots phase" once were close to vacation time
100% and there are a large groups of people who just don't care/motivated about the things you do and that doesn't make them stupid. The trick is not getting caught trying to spend all your time with people who don't care about similar things unless you need them to care.
Also agree with your statement that there is a huge cross-section of intellectual capability as well.
Smart people do not default to thinking that others are stupid.
They go through the answer space, exhausting the other options and then settle on "that guy must be an idiot" with a confidence level somewhere in the high 90%.
It has to be this way, because stupid people do in fact exist. So there must be a process of which the outcome is thinking that someone might be stupid.
And smart people suffer [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] exactly because they, first, think that others can have the same scrutiny about things and get surprised/disappointed when they find out how other people reach conclusions. Loneliness is the most common.
[0] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00328.x
[1] https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12181
[2] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2020.101465
[3] https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/28009
[4] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43076-023-00313-8
The more I look into philosophy the more it seems the "enlightened" thing to do is instead pity the people we perceive as stupid because (unless they have a clinical pathology) they are simply misinformed and unaware of that fact (plus the dangers of such confidence).
This also makes it harder and harder to hold grudges against people in general, which I'm on the fence about, because I've had people close to me do some really horrible shit in my time.
I'm not religious, but there is a bible passage that I feel just happens to sum this up nicely:
For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief. - Ecclesiastes 1:18
Yes, but with an asterisk.
You can (and should!) start pitying the people as soon as they stop making your life worse. Which also means that to pity them, you need to be doing not just well, but so well as to absorb some of their nonsense and still come out fine.
Pity alone just gives people free reign to set the world on fire. Stupidity needs friction to be stopped.
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I see this style of framing a lot and it always seems like turtles all the way down to me:
- Smart people recognize that some people are stupid
- No, real smart people recognize that behaviors are stupid, not people
- No, real smart people don't label others, including calling themselves smart, based on a small sample of observed behaviors. They leave the dichotomy behind.
- Wait, you still called yourself smart...?
- You are all wrong, all labels are generally meaningless and unhelpful in describing dynamic people in a dynamic world, though let's not be dogmatic about it, sometimes a dolt is a dolt and a genius is a genius
I think smart people either don’t say it out loud or just don’t care. The hard part about this topic is, the moment you say anything you’re kind of saying that you’re one of the smart ones lol
Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered as one of the important phillosophers of 20th century, did it all the times! he even compared simple people to animals. When he was a teacher in small village(s) in Austria, he was higly disrespecting to the simple village-people and their kids he was teaching. Using force on dumb pupils to put knowledge into them with his bare hand!!!
i think its lack of understanding and empathy in smart people causing them to think others are stupid - when I studied, the only thing i really learned is to ask "why in this stupid way, and not in some other more smarter way" when there's one answer one can use to explain why, then its enough to counter that "stupid"/"smart" arguments. Smart people often live in a higher state where their knowledge allows them to find better approaches/answers/methods - so the result is they alwys question approaches/answers/methods and if there's a simple better approaches/answers/methods, they say "thats stupid" - but never consider the why was it made this way and not the other way around.
Thats my experience. Until I learned to question first, then think&suggest, I was, i thought, "the smartest guy in the world, because all other were plain dumb!". Now i differentiate more and only if something is not explainable, erratic, uncalculated, i call DUMB with an emphasis on the forced, spitting, pronounciation without opening the mouth for vowels! :)
Important doesn't mean "smart." I would actually argue Wittgenstein wasn't very smart (and in my opinion, often wrong). There were just the right enough people around him that thought he was a gifted student (though he didn't always excel academically, weirdly enough). At what, that is a mystery and is contentious. During his early years when people thought that, he was already harassing and beating children (he published Tractatus in his early 30s).
1. He rejected infinite mathematical extensions, unbounded quantification, misunderstood Godel’s incompleteness theorem and quite a bit more that the math community dismissed. So he wasn't a math genius (he originally studied engineering and became interested in math through that)
2. Most people were skeptical of his picture theory, and rightfully so. It grew out of the same environment that gave rise to, at that time and in their initial form, logical positivism, empiricism, and at its most horrific, behaviourism, which led to infant pain denial. Picture theory explains something surface-level, which in itself people understood was just incomplete, and I'm sure you know, even Wittgenstein rejected his theory later
3. But the problem with his last work, Investigations, was that it was again surface-level musings, and written in a weird cryptic way sprinkled with made up words. His language-games, to me, sounds like what teens nowadays would talk about in high school with less fancy language. And it describes, to me, this kind of juvenile high school behaviour. Which, fair enough, I'm sure rings true to some people. But his philosophy is general enough to not really contribute much as a whole. It just hides behind this high-brow language. Yet he was very adamant and defensive about it
Wittgenstein had severe anger issues that people recognized but hardly anyone wanted to do much about. He had a superiority complex (lots of childhood stuff in his life probably) and he just didn't like a lot of people and thought very little of them
I guess the one good thing about him I can say is when he wanted to accomplish something he really set his mind to it. If only that same fervour was used to be not just a better person but to work well with others, he might've contributed something most experts would still rely on and be influenced by
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
> But [Wittgenstein's] philosophy is general enough to not really contribute much as a whole
Is this consensus (in Western tradition) or your opinion?
> Wittgenstein wasn't very smart (and in my opinion, often wrong)
Well, you've got to hand it to Wittgenstein for being one of the most self-critical philosophers, if nothing else.
> He rejected infinite mathematical extensions
Socrates abhorred the written form, but that takes nothing away from his works (as presented by Plato). I guess humans are weird in weird ways, and pretty excellent in others.
I don't think this is a good marker for intelligence, but I think if you avoid dismissing issues because other people are dumb you will generally think harder and in the end will have a better understanding of the issue.
I have a personal rule that goes along the lines of "If I can't explain why a smart and kind person thinks the opposite of me it means I don't really understand the issue". It doesn't mean that I have to agree with them, but I always try to understand where they came from.
The line of thinking progresses like this - it starts at ignorance, then it comes to the showcased "there are no stupid people" partially because of the still remaining ignorance in the "unimportant" humanities areas usually "STEM and economics is all that's needed to be smart!". And partially because of the combination of self-censoring and social virtue signalling "Look, I'm super duper extremely tolerant and avoid even a slight mention of the "bad words", please praise me!". And then, rarely, a person understands that a) there are no "bad words" and opinion of others is more or less worthless with the exception of friends and family, and b) a lot of people are actually stupid in a clear biological or medical sense. Like for example, the oft incorrectly remembered IQ score. It is quite openly in the definition of that score, that score 100 is around the median. And word median implies that there are not only higher scores than 100. but also lower too. It's really obvious, and after virtue signalling is no longer in the picture, it is very easy to explain.
I read and love all from Derek. I like that he always makes you think through, even when starting from simple and stupid ideas.
Personally I tend to dismiss myself as stupid, because many times I detect I'm being misguided by lazyness and not wanting to think things through, which obviously makes me feel so smart that I could spend all day trapped in this stupid paradox.
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
Only problem is that there are people that are actually stupid in the actual medical sense of the word. And a side effect is that they’re not great at thinking things through.
idk this sort of thinking just feels very “everyone gets a participation trophy” when much of the world doesn’t work that way
> when much of the world doesn’t work that way
Or shouldn't, for that matter, because once we leave bullshit office jobs, real lives kinda depend on an accurate assessment of reality, no matter how hurtful that might be to a person.
Ideally delivered without hurt, of course, but there is only so much one can do.
My experience is rather:
Smart people typically turn out to be disrespectful towards stupid people if in their life such stupid people made their life more difficult. And smart people often have a good memory.
If they never had any problems with stupid people in life, smart people are in most cases much more respecting.
I'd argue that this is a matter of wisdom, not intelligence per se. Lots of smart people think others are stupid, especially when they're young. Most smart people grow out of this over time, as they gain experience. Some don't, but that's not because they get stupider. Sometimes it's due to lack of real-world experience. Other times it's inappropriate devotion to certain fictional tropes that people always seem to forget are usually villain-coded: the heroic smart guy sometimes gets frustrated but rarely complains about the intelligence of their comrades, but the villainous smart guy complains about it all the time.
some people are being stupid all the time though. stupid is a shorter way to say it
As a second comment: Nowadays the main problem that people who are smart in one field think they can solve all problems because they have the proven track record of one. The tech field is full with that kind of people sadly. And they have a followers too.
I wonder if people who call people stupid for calling other people stupid might also be stupid. But I’m not jumping to conclusions. Just a thought
> Smart people don’t think others are stupid > saying “I don’t know” is usually smart — because it’s refusing to jump to a conclusion.
this has been on my mind a lot lately
for decades ive been interacted with people assuming were all on the same page, have thought things through, and that many conclusions to statements are implied, thus would be rude and patronizing to clearly call out. doing so would be treating the other like a child. i dont think im that smart, i mostly spend time with friends, peers, and family who all keep up with me
my therapist pointed out my way of processing things is actually uncommon and suggested i could seek out a spectrum diagnosis. this comment took a lot to process but it helped me remember im in the 99% given a standardized test or if we look at other, certainly flawed, education metrics. similar to a varsity athlete who never makes it past high school is in the 99% of athletes, they dont think theyre so good because theyve seen much better competition and their peers are others at their level
on top of all this i find thinking of myself as smart as disgustingly egotistical
now my point: ive found i get along much better with people i normally alienated or conflicted with if i treat them the way i refused to before my therapist called me out. i clearly describe all of the thought that went into a conclusion, something i would have considered rude and "mansplainy" 6 months ago, and others seem to treat me entirely differently. pretty much completely rehabilitated my relationship with my inlaws
Smart, and not so smart, people realise you can't categorise people in such binary ways
This. And in a great many contexts, things that we'd call smart are worse than things we'd call stupid.
i forget where i heard it first, but people may still forgive you after burning down their house, killing their parents, kidnapping their daughters, but will never for calling them stupid.
This has the smell of enterprise corporate positivity. In a corporate setting, you have to keep the peace.
But no, there are absolutely maliciously intentionally stupid people out there.
The other fallacy is the author who says "smart people don't think others are stupid", makes an assumption that this Derek Severs is a " smart person".
It's an engagement bait by some TED speaker style guy and it is being very successful at that. Just content marketing.
I have been contributing to its success too and continue doing so while typing the next character right now.
Indeed.
Though, there's also plenty of completely innocent, decent, but stupid people. Be it innately or just as a result of a terrible set of environmental factors
I’d rather be around a self-proclaimed stupid then a self-proclaimed smart
There's a massive difference between someone who is proud to be ignorant and someone who acknowledges their ignorance. You want to be around the latter, not the former.
Then I guess I'm not smart
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
Yeah, no. When someone is constantly being stupid they are stupid. That is what that word means. Sugar coating that is just fake positivity.
"Smart" people realize that smartness is not binary and that there all sorts of things that can influence people's smartness in a situation or on a topic other than intelligence. Very intelligent people absolutely do stupid shit. Emotions, ideology, pride, wishful thinking, laziness, arrogance, just refusing to understand something etc. can make the most intelligent people really dumb fucks.
But there absolutely are stupid people. Sometimes they have the potential to be smarter by actually using the brain capacity they have but don't use for one of the aforementioned reasons. Sometimes people are just really unintelligent; Which is fine. There is no moral failing in this. Being unintelligent but good person is perfectly okay. The real issue here is that we judge people based upon their intelligence – or rather our perception of their intelligence, which is often skewed – rather than what they do with the intelligence they have, something they can control. Nothing wrong with being unintelligent, but being purposefully stupid because it serves your point or interest is unacceptable.
In the end smartness is also an overloaded term that we project all kinds of different things into.
100%
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
If you believe this, go to where my mother in law lives in rural Oregon and spend a few months there among the people who weren't smart enough to go live somewhere else.
There are many ways one can be smart. Having an intuition for solving complex problems is not the same trait as having a good memory or controlling your emotions or being environment and self aware.
Many are overlapping traits sure, but someone that has them all, can easily be the worse at each one, when compared with others that excel in that area. This is why you see so often brilliant people doing idiotic stuff.
So, "everyone's stupid" is a matter of alignment, in the areas you're best, where you can judge best, few around are better. Which can be true while still not making you the smartest person around in all ways.
I don't agree that this iuis an indicator of any kind of intelligence other than social intelligence (e.g. don't say stupid things that affect your life, in other words socially intelligent people keep it to themselves)
You could replace smart with mature.
It took time for me to mature and see others this way.
> They say it because it’s satisfying to jump to that conclusion.
> So if you decide someone is stupid, it means you’re not thinking, which is not being smart.
That’s also a jump to conclusions. You don’t know what their decision is based on.
You see this in political discourse all the time
There are lots of smart people on all "sides" of the political spectrum, but in online forums (especially Reddit in my experience) people on dismiss the other side as stupid or evil, rather than trying to see the issue from a different perspective and understand the other persons point of view
I think the anonymity of being online brings out the worst in people. Having a discussion in person tends to be much more civil, even if you completely disagree with the other person
I believe you are right. I wish this belief was more widely held.
This may seem like a trivial article, so it probably won't survive on the front page, but it's one of the hardest points to get across. We see it all the time on HN, where drive-by dismissals are an art form (I'm as guilty as everyone). Often, our main interest in an article is the possibility that the author is an idiot and we can quickly correct them for internet points. Maybe with "correlation isn't causation" or some other perennial comeback that isn't as clever as it seems.
I guess the internet tests you because it exposes you to more stupidity than you might have thought existed, and some of it is engineered to keep you outraged or otherwise glued to the screen. But I think we have a choice between fewer more meaningful engagements and higher numbers of drive-by quips, and we should probably be choosing the former.
Unfortunately, it's another thing made worse by AI, because when the volume of long-form punditry is up 10x due to LLM-generated blogs and social media posts, how do you even choose what's worth engaging with? Increasingly, there's no human on the other end who cares about what you have to say. It's just karma / reach farming at a scale, and it makes no difference if you respond with a thoughtful argument or a singular "this is dumb".
It looks trivial because it is. Overuse of stupid as a label does not mean that there are no stupid people and noticing their existence does not make you automatically join their group.
> the possibility that the author is an idiot
What about the alternative possibility - the author is a rather intelligent being, but what they've written in this instance is idiotic?
Just because I like to think of myself as a non-idiot, doesn't mean I haven't brought strings of words into existence that were ill-conceived. In those cases, having someone come along and say something like "eh mate - you're confusing correlation with causation here!" is valuable feedback.
> What about the alternative possibility - the author is a rather intelligent being, but what they've written in this instance is idiotic?
With respect, I think you're doing the same thing. You picked a word to squabble about while ignoring the context of the sentence. If you take the sentence and replace "is an idiot" with "has an idiotic point", my argument isn't weakened. Neither is the argument in the original article: we make this assumption more often than we should, because the game we choose to play is to be the smartest guy or gal on the internet.
With respect - I believe you’re correct. I mentally reacted to a minor phrasing nit, jumped to a response in my head, dashed it and went on my way before really digesting the entirety of what you were saying.
Which illustrates your very point, right? In an environment where we have a firehose of information pointed at us, our natural reaction is to fast filter/summarize and then discard or react. You’re saying we need to slow down and engage with each other (real people) on more than that superficial level. I agree. Thank you for taking the time to write this.
> So if you decide someone is stupid, it means you’re not thinking, which is not being smart.
What if, according to the author's definition, after thinking through, one has decided someone really is stupid. Then one's decision that the person is stupid is just true. Isn't it being smart according to author's own definition.
It appears the author didn't think it through essentially making the author "stupid" according to the author's own definition.
Does the author think he is smart? And smart compared to whom?
He doesn't acknowledge it explicitly, but my reading is that the author will acknowledge that he himself sometimes jumps to conclusion. This is his definition of stupid, so he likely does agree that he's stupid sometimes. He's trying to do it less, but it's impossible to get through life without making assumptions -- we don't have the time or energy to thoroughly analyze every little thing.
I'm smart and I think others are stupid
I guess I’m stupid, then, because I think a lot of other people are stupid. Like holy crap, so stupid. Have you seen people? They are by and large not smart.
When I was younger, I used to think most people were dumb as well. But then you realize that you are just as dumb sometimes, and your most cheerished people can be as well. It's just human nature. Thinking everything and everyone is dumb can probably be characterized as being stupid, since you're not thinking about this very deeply.
The issue is conflating words "sometimes" and "systematically". Being stupid systematically and a majority of the time is, well, stupid.
I don’t think everyone is dumb. Just most people.
As far as not thinking about it deeply goes, that’s a strong claim that you haven’t supported at all.
I know for sure I am stupid because HN reminds me about it from time to time with downvotes when I write dumb comments
I mean, Einstein said there is no limit to stupidity... Do you think he said it about himself?
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
The author needs to touch grass and meet more people - maybe go to your local prison or skid row and have a chat to the people there. Prison has some smart ones for sure, but it’s also got some profoundly stupid people; skid row is almost wholly stupid people who have also fried their brains. There are of course plenty of stupid people in almost all other places, too, but pound for pound skid row probably wins.
I am smart enough to realize the smartest people I ever met indeed did not think others were stupid, they considered them to be complete imbeciles instead.
Albert Einstein, who was accused of being stupid in his youth, once stated "We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us."
It seems there is indeed room for some humility.
I'm skeptical. I've met some of the smartest people on earth and some of them indeed called others stupid, and I personally believe rightly so. The statement is on the level of "there are no stupid questions", which is also a myth. I can't back this up with hard data but in my personal experience I've witnessed all combinations of {smart, stupid} people calling {smart, stupid} people {smart, stupid} without any strong tendency towards a particular combination.
This is just... stupid...
Of course there's stupid people. A lot of them. It's simply dishonest, manipulative or plain stupid or say otherwise.
If this article was more insightful, thoughtful, etc it would be saying that a smart, decent, wise etc person wouldn't belittle anyone for the combination of innate intelligence and environmental factors that caused them to not be thoughtful, creative, able/willing to learn etc.
And they'd moreover perhaps even take the responsibility upon themselves to try to do something about it - addressing inequality, social and educational systems, changing culture, better family planning, and endless other things.
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