Does anyone else feel like 90% of the population is stupid?
Does anyone else feel like 90% of the population is stupid?
To clarify here, I don't feel like I'm significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying "facts."
Keep in mind that you, along with everyone else, know very little all in all.
The things you do know will be important to you, naturally. Their understanding and their importance will also feel obvious, also naturally.
So anyone not knowing these obvious important things will instinctively feel like an absolute idiot to you.
This is a mental trap. Try to avoid it. The less respect you have for others, the less able you will be to really listen to other standpoints and learn from them, leading to a vicious cycle of alienation.
There seems to be a shortage of critical thinking and problem solving skills, that's for sure.
What I see that makes it worse now than in the past is the Internet. It's easy now to find a group that agrees with your delusions and live in an echo chamber where mistaken beliefs are not challenged.
I think the average person isn't very bright. And that's okay. Most of us don't need to be discovering new maths or creating new works of art.
But anyone is going to perform worse when they're stressed, distracted, afraid, hungry, or similar. A lot of people, that's their daily life. Something like less than half of americans can afford a $1000 surprise bill. You're not going to see anyone's best showing when they're worried about feeding themselves tomorrow.
Incidentally, republican policies suck and make more people scared, angry, and financially insecure.
They're actively driving the bus off the cliff.
Think about every scientist and official at cop28 desperately working to halt a 1.5c red line. Did the public rally around this effort? Did coal rollers stop intentionally injecting uncombusted fuel into their exhausts to pwn the libs? Did the governments of the world including the US stop subsidizing new extraction?
1.5c is gone; by the time people 'agree' it's fucked and unify to stop pollution at all levels we're going to be in dire straits.
I think it's important to consider why you think this. Try and explain what makes someone stupid.
I do tend to agree with the general statement that most people are pretty fucking stupid. If IQ were a meaningful number of intelligence, I'd wager that it's heavily skewed left. Meaning that the common saying of "think of how stupid the average person and realize half of all people are below that" is even worse when you use the median.
For me, what makes someone stupid is lack of curiosity, lack of drive to learn, and lack of critical thinking. I think stupidity is a learned trait, and our modern society is doing its damnedest to make sure children learn it as soon as possible. Never question authority, you only need to memorize so you can pass the test, and you will be spoon fed the information.
Then soon as you get out of school, you have to get a job and occupy most of your time with work or sleep, you'll likely get only two-three hours of time to yourself each day, meaning you'll lack the time to break out of the cycle. And the system compounds at most jobs. Your manager is likely stupid, meaning they want you to never question authority, just do what they tell you, and ask them very little questions.
I also think the trillions of dollars that are spent on advertising strongly influences this. And being constantly bombarded with psychological manipulation encourages stupidity.
I also think stupidity is compounding in and of itself. The less you know, the more you can just make hasty assumptions, then use those assumptions as fact for your next set of assumptions.
It's also contagious. Being around people who are less stupid than yourself makes you feel bad, so you aren't around them much or encourage them to join you in being stupid.
There is a massive difference between not knowing something, and choosing to not know something. Just about every person in the world has access to the greatest source of information that has ever been created. There are free courses on just about every topic you could ever desire to learn, fingertips away.
There is also a massive difference between knowing something and rote memorization. Being able to follow the logical chain of facts is very important, so is being able to critically think about a topic. I think being "bored" is great at combatting stupidity in this way. Spending time with no stimulation is great for engaging your brain in actual thoughts. Consider dedicating time to just thinking: no audiobooks, music, podcasts, video games, movies, TV shows, social media, books etc. Just sit and be bored for a while. Meditation is a great entry into this.
I've always felt like most people lack problem solving skills. Nobody knows how to use Google or just figure things out themselves. Friends often call me for tech support but it's often very basic things like how to plug in an HDMI cable or how to fix an error that says how to fix it in the error code.
I work tech support too and deal with behavior like this daily. 90% of what I do is simple things that can be found on the first Google result. People open tickets asking how to unmute their microphone in Teams, it's ridiculous.
90% of people feel like that
If you define "stupid" as "lacking critical thinking skills", then I agree.
I work in customer service. I wouldn't say that 90% of ALL people are stupid, but an astounding number of the people I have to deal with have ... unique ways of thinking, so to speak.
The most recent example was an olderly man who was absolutely furious because a box of candy he bought for his wife "tasted absolutely disgusting". We're talking about something similar to this but I won't link our actual product as I don't feel comfortable sharing that information.
Either way, those are friggin' bath bombs. It says so on the effing package. Just because they're labeled "vegan" doesn't mean that they're edible FFS!
Yes and you can check how much a state spends per student and see why.
Idiots from Florida come in at $9k per student where students from NY/NJ get $12-$15k and the difference shows. If you’re hiring out of Florida expect them to suck and have less skill than 70% of the country.
Idaho and Montana have got to have some of the dumbest and most held back areas I have ever seen. Even their construction practices come from the dark ages in some cases.
Don’t even get me started on the South and Midwest as a whole.
Geniuses are rare and intelligence scores are bullshit.
Put money into schooling and fund teachers. You will solve your “everyone is stupid” problem for sure.
Stupid? Maybe if verifying "facts" is your sole metric. I know people who aren't very media savvy who fall for some stupid propaganda, but they could empty my car's engine bay and put it back together again and have it cranking the same day. Or you can drop them in any body of water in a 250km radius and they'll know what fish can be caught there and be able to hook an edible-sized one in half an hour or less. We don't all have the same skill sets, but we ain't all "stupid".
The feeling of the intelligence or stupidity in others is all relative.
For example an IQ around 170 or above makes somebody have a 1-in-a-million level of intelligence, so for such a person 99.9999% of the population feels less intelligent, with the level felt as "stupid" being a lot higher than average intelligence, to the point that for such a person "entry level" geniouses - those people with an IQ just above 120 - often feel "stupid".
And then there is the whole non-IQ factor to the feeling that somebody is "stupid" - for example, intelligence (even the 170 IQ level) can be "stupid" (more broadly "fool", "gullible", "weird" and so on) because of lack of wisdom, life experience (in the sense of having lived, as age by itself means little for those who don't do much living) or even just social awkwardness. (The Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, though a stereotypical portrait, is quite a good example of that difference between "intelligence" and "smarts" or "wisdom")
You could say that IQ is computing power but with the wrong software or bad data, it's still going to underperform.
Personally, I think it's best not to go around passing judgment in such absolutist terms as "stupid" since we're all "stupid" in some domains and often one's "I'm so much smarter than these people" feeling is nothing more than a case of the Dunning-Krugger Effect.
High intelligence people, especially, need to learn that IQ by itself is not enough and take to hearth Socrate's dictum: "All I know is that I know nothing" (or, as I read it: "The more I learn, the more find out I have yet to learn")
I dunno. I'm pretty smart in some things, but I've also made some real bone-headed mistakes. Sometimes I'm rushing, sometimes I just truly don't think about it. Sometimes while talking through what I think is the best solution, I figure out I'm wrong.
two things I've done.
-gotten a 3.9 GPA with honors through two years of medical school
-didn't realize "Penn State" was in Pennsylvania until I stopped and thought about it
like, sometimes we don't think about things enough. Sometimes we have a brain fart. Sometimes we've just never been introduced to a particular concept or factoid (being ignorant).
I think the only true stupidity is when people don't learn from their mistakes, when people refuse to update their ideas to fit new facts, and when people remain willfully, maliciously ignorant as a point of pride.
There's an old proverb I like about this: a person is smart but people are dumb.
People en masse tend to be dumber than they are apart. I think you're comparing yourself to the faceless masses. It's much more humbling to try comparing yourself to someone you respect (but don't do it as a "I'm not as good as them" thing, only do it as a "goals to maybe achieve one day" thing to avoid accidentally trashing your self esteem)
Side note: old proverb here means I think my dad said it once but I have no idea where it actually came from
I dunno your country or your premise, but I can state pretty confidently that the American school system is completely and utterly failing to prepare Gen Z. Working adjacent to the schools, even amongst the best and brightest the country has to offer are thousands upon thousands of students who fundamentally do not know how to think for themselves about anything.
All this to say, depending on if you're in the U.S., things might just keep getting worse. Especially if you're living in a deeply conservative state, I would not be surprised if the number really was 90%. It's really sad, but that's what happens when you attack public schools for decades.
I don’t think most people are stupid if stupid means lacking reasoning skills or knowledge or curiosity. You can find all sorts of people who you’d think sound stupid but know tons about one subject. But even if they don’t, they likely have a working knowledge base and only know what they need to know.
What I consider stupid or problematic is that most people, probably 75% or more of the overall population, are not skeptical or analytical and have a fundamentally busted epistemology. Even if your information filter works, if you don’t understand why it works, I’m going to struggle in conversation with you. So yes I think the general population has a hard time thinking critically because they don’t know how to analyze their own beliefs or knowledge.
Is someone stupid because they don't know how to change a light bulb? A tire? How to do laundry? How to cook a meal? Review a book? Write an essay? Manage a task?
It's just skills people dont have that often make them look stupid to most people who have that skill. Especially when those tasks seem very trivial once you have that skill.
Being ignorant of something doesnt make someone stupid. But i do think being stupid often prevents you for fixing your ignorance
Just 2 cents of thought
Edit: forgot to say every single person on the planet us stupid at something or about something but we may never have the opportunity to find out
I think the issue here is that we're all genetically just apes and we live in a world where we're expected to know about geopolitics, outrageous technologies, all kinds of cultural artifacts, and a bazillion other complexities of modern life, in addition to the basics of feeding ourselves, finding a mate, and child rearing. At the same time, we have behemoth corporations in control of all media with a strong interest in keeping people dumb, angry and discontent. And education is... not what it should be.
No, humans aren't inherently evil or stupid or whatever. We've just inherited a world situation that we are not adapted for, and few people are able to learn and grow sufficiently to really understand and handle it all properly.
I feel like 90% of people don't put in the mental effort to resolve cognitive dissonance, not that they are incapable of feeling it.
If that counts as stupid, then I fully agree 90%+ of people are "stupid".
I wouldn't say that high, but yeah I think the majority of average people are dumb. Even people that are well educated and considered smart, will just believe stupid things they're told without spending a few seconds to think it through or verify it.
You see it on reddit/lemmy a lot when an obviously fake post gets taken seriously by most commentors, or people just assume that the context someone gives in a title is true, because they literally believe whatever they see on the internet ESPECIALLY if its something that reinforces a strongly held belief.
And that's lemmy users who I generally consider to be on average a fair but smarter and more critical than you're average bloke.
So if we were to talk about you're average middle aged man that's been a trade for 20 years, spends every night down the boozer and his only hobby is getting into fights at football matches..... yeah.
I wouldn't necessarily say 'stupid'. But lacking in sufficient empathy? Fearful of different people (to the point of being irrationally hostile to them)? Feel entitled? Are smug and sanctimonious about their beliefs? Get to caught up on what other people do with their lives and want you control them?...
Then yes. Definitely.
I think ignorant might be more accurate than stupid. That crosses into stupidity if the ignorance is wilful eg they refuse to accept facts or refuse to even investigate if someone tries to present evidence.
People these days seem exhausted and angry and for some there's comfort in the 'certainty' of their wrong beliefs. I read a piece recently about an ex qanon guy who said a large part of the appeal was being part of a community and encouraged to be angry about everything.
I do wonder how widespread Astro-turfing is. I just came from a discussion of EVs and some of the anti people were really obtuse in their claims. Just making wild claims that are completely against any actual real life data. There was similar for climate change, and smoking ….. sure I’m biased but people want to support the status quo against all reason. Is it some sort of stubborn stupidity? Are they malicious/trolls? Is it corporate propaganda?
More like 90% of human actions are stupid, as I'm not sure if there's an even split of "the stupid" and "the smart", and plenty people mix both. (E.g. being oddly competent at something specific, only to vomit assumptions on something else.)
In special I feel like four types of stupidity became a bit too common, too harmful, too egregious. They're the failure to handle:
- uncertainty - or, "how your belief might be wrong, and you'll need to handle the case that it is wrong"
- complexity - or, "how small details have a profound impact on everything"
- undesirable possibilities - or, "how nature gives no fucks about your fee fees, and things don't become true because you roll in wishful belief"
- context - or, "how things are never isolated, and you need to look outside the thing to understand the thing"
They're intertwined, I think. And perhaps there's something more important than those, but those four are the ones that I notice the most.
Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.
People suck.
It’s more of a mixture of stupidity, distraction, and willful ignorance
There's a lot of things that can go into being "stupid", and it's important to remember that these are largely conditions that are debuffing them rather than inherent features of who they are. Most specifically, huge deaths of the population (61% as of Oct 2023) are living paycheck-to-paycheck in the US and have little to fall back on - that kind of perpetual, hopeless stress can greatly fatigue you and occupy your higher reasoning. Moreover, a number of people have become "locked in" to certain kinds of facts - for example the belief that America is inherently good or that God actively relieves suffering; they would have to put their axioms through substantial reevaluation and fresh information to be able to cross through uncertainty and then accept contrary facts, and their living conditions make that difficult.
Human intelligence is segmented and specialized. People who are smart at few things are usually very dumb at others. A person who can speak 9 languages can't do more than basic math. An expert computer programmer, who can't figure out how to keep a plant alive. Etc...
Polymaths are very rare. Very few people have advanced understanding and skills in multiple areas.
Especially when it comes to verifying “facts.”
"90%" doesn't feel very factual to me.
No, I don't feel (or think) that.
If 90% of the population was stupid there'd be no need to spend uncountable billions brainwashing them with propaganda at every turn, would it?
FYI... I once worked in the propaganda industry - propaganda doesn't work on the stupid (and I use that term lightly, since I'm not sure "stupid" is something that even really exists). The smarter you assume yourself to be, the more susceptible you are.
A bunch of us recently gained access to global platforms.
A bunch of global platforms recently gained access to us.
I wouldn't say stupid but I'd say most people believe they know what they're doing, and don't.
I'm not like those other dumb asses, cause I know I'm a dumb ass!
It really depends on where you live. And what kind of people are around you on a daily basis.
I think a lot of it is that we all have topics which we are knowledgeable about. Common discourse then takes different topics, and some people will contribute to the discussion who don't understand the underlying stuff so much, they have different interests.
The problem is when you read a tech article as a tech worker, you laugh at how stupid the journalist and the commenters are. Then you read an article on some geopolitical event, or some natural phenomenon, and you take what is written as gospel, and even comment on it on forums, despite not having the same level of understanding as in your favourite topic. And you don't feel you're part of the stupid 90% then and there.
I think so. One trip through social media is proof enough. Or, people are willing to be stupid for attention/money. But I add self-awareness to that, I’m not as smart as I think I am.
No, this is a classic case of confirmation bias on social media. And I've seen too many people on Lemmy on the daily who have developed a smug attitude and think that everyone else is just another idiot and talk down to others from the start because of it. For a crowd that preaches compassion and understanding, sometimes I wonder why it's only selectively applied by these folks.
The comments in here are so depressing it's actually funny. Evidently we don't even know what the word means. "No metrics" ffs
Look, the fact of the matter is, as soon as you start even just inching over to the right of the curve, the people rolling the other way down the hill are already, let's say, beyond your horizons. The reverse is true too but in the less salutory way. You will never be able to fully communicate anything to them, their heads are populated with bullshit and nothing true can remain in their minds because it just gets overwritten by the stupidity which they have chosen as their life. They do not see obvious connections, they can not follow principles or see how they apply to them, and they are too arrogant to have sense spoken to them. They can not learn, resent the suggestion that there is something they don't already know in the first place, and they say things like "you can't tell me shit". I mean, thanks for self-identifying as a drain on society but we could already tell...
If you "don't feel like I'm significantly smarter than most people" but view "90%" of people, which I think is well into "most" territory, are stupid then one can reasonably infer you're putting yourself into that category.
Additionally, what does stupid even mean? If I were to try to engage with the spirit of your question, I ironically find myself reflecting on a wise insight my uncle once gave me. Someone who would fall under "stupid" if I am to understand your question right. Anyways, my uncle once said that smart or dumb don't have an all-encompassing nature (IQ eat your heart out). Instead, one can be smart or dumb with respect to specific domains. My uncle knows a lot about guns, not so much about the internet.
So to answer your question, yes most people are "stupid" about most things, but are often quite smart in specific fields related to their life experiences. That's why we have experts in various fields of study. You and I are no different, and employing empathy seems to be the best strategy to bridging knowledge gaps with others, if that's your goal.
You are so generous ❤️ because i think 99% it's stupid
And when I see and feel people on important jobs just because they are parents or friends or friends from friends from someone on the top and not because they are right skilled for that job..... Then.... You smell the stupidity 10km far away And nowadays it's what you find on all companies 🤮
Most people just don't care enough in my opinion. When it comes to politics, all they want is to be left alone. They just look for the first piece of media that confirms their biases and be content with that. I think that's why conservative fearmongering works so well. All they have to do is to convince those persons that the left wants to tell them how to live and that is enough for those people to trust that conservative media.
Everyone is stupid some of the time and after we've noticed all that it feels like we're surrounded by idiots.
Truth is we're just not seeing the competence.
Well maybe not 90% but I do feel like smarter* than average but then again half of the population is so that hardly makes me special.
- By "smarter" I don't mean that I know more things than others. Just that I feel like I posses the ability to think more clearly and objectively that most other people.
By what standards do you rank us? Half of us are stupider than average. We're all of very limited intelligence - the best we can do is to team together to function as one gigantic brain of humanity, drawing from the strongest qualities of all of us. That way the world can be brought forward by brilliant scientists who are completely stupid in their own way, and who would never survive a week on their own.
Politics are tricky, but I think it's more fruitful to think of people as brainwashed than stupid. The amount of propaganda we're subject to these days is unprecedented.
As for general stupidity, be charitable; judge people by what they're best at. Most people have one thing or another they are great at, and our differences is what makes humanity occasionally great.
Amen brother or sister
It's lower than 90% for sure, but I'd be comfortable putting the number at a solid 40%.
I feel this, but more along the line of chosen ignorance rather than actual stupidity. Either a new topic us overwhelming or they worry\fear they'll get it "wrong". Also, being from the south, where so much has been politicized, they fear the tribal back lash of thinking for themselves. I don't know what's wrong with me, I was never the type to "go with it".
Yes, myself included.
Holy crap this got more attention than I was bargaining for...
And getting worse.
I have no idea, but if so, I'm definitely in that 90%.
So our brains were crafted to intake "reality" at a specific speed and quality. We can't see things at the atomic, much less quantum reality, nor understand the massive scale of the planet, much less the universe. Most "facts" are more beliefs from what others have suggested to be, than individually researched facts. Even our scientific method is a bit wanting in this area, since if we hear X, how can we prove X? We just need to take other's word that they did the correct process, didn't lie during any steps, didn't have any bad data unknowingly, especially in a culture where reproducibility is not a high priority so most scientific papers are not thoroughly tested and retested
That's roughly our skeletal social structure around "facts", and we're heading face first into a world of deep fakes and misinformation, to an extent never seen before in humanity. So maybe we should all extend each other a bit more patience and kindly help each other through these uncertain times
Yes, we all do, and most of us outgrow it.
I mean, a lot of people have a tendency to do "stupid" things, and maybe even say stupid things - but I wouldn't classify 90% of the population as stupid. First problem is that "stupid" isn't a very quantifiable quality - and "smarter" really depends on the perspective of the way you're looking at it. I'll use what someone else mentioned here as an example: I would like to say that I'm at least a decent software developer (or so I hope), but I know absolutely nothing about cars (I don't even have one). While I'm pretty well rounded on the software side of computers, I'm terrible at the hardware side. I am also terrible at math aside from the very basics (and even then... eh) - hence, I'd never have a good shot at even getting into game development if that were something I wanted to pursue.
So not only can I not comment on whether other people are "stupid", I can't even account for myself, because there's no metric for it. Are we going off of IQ (I have zero clue what my IQ is, nor do I really have an interest in finding out what it might be)? Are we going off of being able to answer Jeopardy questions?
proud to be the majority 💪💪
Well, it is not "90% of people is stupid"
It is more "at any given time, the 90% of people is doing something stupid", or the equivalent statement "90% of the time people does stupid things"
IIRC math guys call this an "ergodic and stationary" system
Yeap, Its actually true
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
-George Carlin
More like 99.
Well I know which half I'm in.
You, of course, are firmly in that 10%, I assume.
Reminds me of:
(Sorry, not sure why this has weird artifacts after I uploaded it. The copy on my phone looks fine.)
only when I'm driving
op, it's not just you, i promise. 🙂
i encourage you to watch this in it's entirety. while it covers a different life story, it explores some avenues of what you are possibly feeling when you ask this question.
Maybe more like 50%. But maybe it just seems like that to me, I might just be a mid tier dum-dum ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Snark mode activated: After reading through the "Threads Federation" comments, and seeing what opinions/comments are currently most popular, I'm going to go with YES.
But jokes aside, my actual personal opinion is no.
can't say about rest of the population but when I read about some great people, I feel there's too much to learn and too little time.
and it happens every single day.It definitely seems like 90 percent of people will twist themselves into knots to find a way to defend their beliefs regardless of how wrong those beliefs might be, morally and factually.
Admitting that you are wrong is hard.
The last time someone said they felt this way they later removed all doubt they were a secret asshole, and had no empathy one major presidential election later. Take a close look at the person you are and what you want to be.
That's because you don't realize the stupid things you're doing or thinking.
The scientific method is the only way we know to reliably discover actual facts, and even with it it can take decades to see through some bullshit we consider as facts.
If you add manipulation, déception and lies, you can't blame people for being mistaken or stupid. You can blame them for being assholes though.
I think they haven't tapped into their potential intelligence.
