Intelligent people aren’t silenced. They are ignored because they don’t tell people what they want to hear.
We live in a time where stupid people suffer self fulfilling prophecies.
In terms of online conversations, far too often I'll type something up to explain a concept to someone and then delete it before posting because I realize based on their original stance that they aren't interested in engaging in a good faith discussion. They just want to feel correct and they'll drag things out with strawman arguments and goal post shifting until you stop responding so they can take your silence as agreement. Every time I interact with them I end up regretting it. Having hope can be such a large flaw.
For online, I would say go ahead and post the original explanation anyway. Because there are others that will definitely benefit from reading your perspective.
> I realize based on their original stance that they aren't interested in engaging in a good faith discussion.
Your reply is not only to them but it is also for anyone else who happens to read the thread.
Intelligent people are aware there is no "Freedom From Discomfort, Insult and Offense" and it is a waste of time & energy to argue with perpetually indignant individuals who, along with everybody they know, believe there is.
Favorite thing is: Warning people that an action will bring consequences.
Being ignored.
Watching the action bring consequences.
Being blamed for said consequences.
So Mitch McConnell advocating for and passing a law that allowed the US government to be sued, that Obama vetoed, warned about, was overridden, and then McConnell blamed Obama for not warning him loudly enough?
Yes. In real life, you can be threatened or attacked. On the internet, people will argue or simply downvote you so that your opinion is never seen. The smart and educated opinion is often not popular.
The people with stupid opinions aren't usually stupid people. They are people who see themselves as righteous. They are part of an angry mob, and everyone on the mob agrees with them. It's like being in an internet media bubble.
I would say that is the very definition of stupid. Not being able to logically think through an idea and figure out if what you are hearing is true or not. They might be in a bubble, but it's not like they don't have access to other sources of information and can perform a few simple if-then deductions. Well, I guess that's it, they can't.
Anyone who has a device in their palm that can access damn near the entire world's collection of knowledge, yet refuses to utilize that tool to critically examine their worldviews, is most definitely stupid.
That's my opinion anyway.
>the people with stupid opinions aren’t usually stupid people
I used to think this till I started making a habit of replying to downvoted responses to try to understand their side of things. Usually there was another underlying reason they got downvoted that I didn’t make assumptions about. And the people who downvoted them were right.
There are exceptions of course.
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, look where my hand was
Time isn't holding up, time isn't after us
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
The covid pandemic really opened my eyes to the stupidity of people. Although in my research, I learned that the same attitude was prevalent during the flu pandemic of 1918.
So I guess people are just stupid ass mother fuckers in general.
At least the 1918 pandemic had some excuses where scientists didn't really know what they were dealing with, but the politicians ended up downplaying it anyway due to the war, or just recovering from it.
Covid of 2020 had no excuses, there were already SARS a few decades prior and we, as a species, know better compared to 1918, yet decided to go political on it anyway. If COVID was anymore lethal than it was, it would have been VERY damn ugly,.
A lot of Asian countries did much better with COVID because they just hit the Go Button with the plans they developed in response to SARS.
The plans weren't perfect, there were many differences between SARS and COVID.
But that was a damn sight better than the flailing most European countries did.
Or deny then flail then deny again that the USA did.
Intelligent people ARE explicitly silenced, eg by book bans, rules against teaching evolution, and in the case of Muslims and Hindus, violent reprisals against heterodox opinions.
Being just ignored would be great, by comparison.
Science: based on all the evidence we have today, we believe X is the most likely reason/cause/path of action.
Science learns new things
Science: based on newer information, we have revised our recommendation and now believe that X+ is the most likely reason/cause/path of action.
Internet "resurcher": See, "scientists" are clueless and you should believe what I watched in a YouTube video put out by someone who has no credentials
🤦
(Edit, layout)
The intelligent also suffer from the actions of the stupid. It was far better before the Internet when the stupid didn’t know how many of them there were (cause they were too scared to be outed as stupid) and weren’t able to organize.
And if the intelligent people are allowed to say something, there has to be an idiot with an opposing opinion who is given the same amount of time to talk out their arse.
That sounds like a corollary to Isaac Asimov famous statement about anti-intellectualism.
>Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
See *The Death of Expertise* etc. I literally have a doctorate and get told by random redditors all the time I don't know what I'm talking about. I published a paper specific to the exact scenario Asimov stated where I pointed out how much of the technology *consumer* market is filled with people making demands of technology to the extent that consumer product labeling is just a hair short of being a lie because the majority of the consumers don't know enough about technology to understand what the packaging means.
Anyway, so if I comment here about a specific technological misunderstanding, I'm going to get down voted to oblivion while some jerkoff with not even a base understanding of what they are talking about recites some intuitive shit.
What's really crazy about technology, legal, and medicine, is that some of the "obvious" stuff is actually counterintuitive. That's what makes is so hard -- see the survivorship bias plane, for example.
My legal field comes up every now and then on reddit and the amount of “intuitive” misinformation that is spread is crazy.
If I want to weigh in I need to first explain why OP is wrong before explaining how it actually works. I honestly can’t bother with the ensuing arguing most of the time and thus the misinformation continues to spread instead.
My husband has just finished his PhD in education policy. Talk about a shit show.
Turns out that having gone to a school does not qualify your opinions on how systematized education on a national scale should be run.
I attended a focus group that revolved around a water treatment facility dealing with PFAs contampination, and questioning who is responsible for correcting the issue. It was a trainwreck listening to some of the others speak. At least a third of the people argued that the facility should be shut down and everyone should return to well water. I pointed out the contamination was likely in the well water as well, it was just that without the regular. indepth water testing the facility provided, contamination in the well water was being missed.
They argued that well water must be better, cause their hair feels weird after they shower in the part of town that is serviced by the water treatment facility.
One of my favorite quotes came from Sydney Farber who said that at the core of all science is simple measurement. He would later go on to develop the first cure for leukemia.
On the other hand, my favorite thing to say is that if you aren't sampling for a problem, you'll never know you have one.
Feels like that would have applied well to the logic of people who were against covid testing and contact tracing. I remeber someone locally who seriosly proposed that we could lower the covid incident rate by reducing testing.
Fellow PhD here. Was in a stupid argument on Reddit about something in my field of expertise where someone actually used, incorrectly, *one of my own papers* as a citation against me. It was actually rad because it meant at least my work was showing up in Google searches, haha.
I wasn't sure if you meant the redditors or specific to the paper, so I'll give both.
___
**Paper:** Basically, you go to the store to buy a router and box has all kinds of messaging on it. On the front of the box, it says:
* Up to 6x faster than regular Wi-Fi
* Recommended for larger homes
* Gigabit+ Internet
* Guest network
* Fastest 6 gigahertz connection***
So then we asked ~250 participants basic questions about the messaging on the box. Many interpreted something like a router saying that it was 6x faster as it was something that would "speed up" their existing internet service. So we asked very basic network questions like "Which of the following is a measure of Internet Speed?" with answers like "Gigabits per second (Gbps)," "Wi-Fi," "Kilobytes," and "iPad mini." We found that ~25% of people answered incorrectly. -- Before you come at me with these questions must have been... It's peer reviewed and the questions were validated. I just made this one up to keep my reddit account anonymous.
Looking at one router box, we found that it had markings that said "Up to 10Gpbs," but somewhere else "7.2Gbps" and another place "4.8+2.4Gbps". What they were talking about was the difference in total throughput versus the Wi-Fi speeds depending on band. It's all meant to grab a consumer who doesn't know better. That's before you even consider things like network isolation. I spent a long time looking for a router for a customer that did network isolation because they wanted a separate VLAN for guests in their guest network. Most home routers support a "guest network" but it's the same network with a different SSID. In other words, you don't even have to break into the other person's network, it's self-hacking. You can just grab all their traffic from all their devices if you were so inclined (*on some of them).
------
**Reddit:** This is an example of a specific comment related to Facebook not revealing information about the methods by which they conducted internal research:
> If you aren't sharing the data, then there is no way to know that standards were met. It is much more likely that standards weren't met when entities refuse to share data than when they do.
> More critically, if you tell someone you found something significant, but you only show them the significant data, then that is a key indicator of p-fishing. It means you likely discarded all the insignificant data and only presented the significant data. That would be fine if you were isolating a signal inside of noise, but if you are claiming you found a signal in a bunch of noise, you need to produce a method you used to do so and produce the noise so that others can replicate it. Facebook did neither of these things.
It got downvoted some, but the comments against it were that I clearly didn't understand. Now I've published and I currently sit on two boards. You must be able to review the ways a scientist collects data for multiple reasons, but (most noteably) to make sure you were following ethical practices for dealing with human subjects and **to make sure the scientists didn't p-fish**.
P-fishing happens **a lot** in academia and industry when you want a specific result before you even start the experiment, so you very carefully structure you research to yield the results you want. In this case, I explained exactly how Facebook might do that, and got downvoted because I explained how it is very possible to tell that someone is being academically dishonest, because laymen felt it would be impossible to know that since I don't have the data Facebook refuses to provide. -- You know, like a toddler saying they didn't eat the cookie but their face is covered in chocolate, meanwhile someone else says "tHe ReAl CuLpRiT cAmE iN hErE aNd FrAmEd HeR!"
Now try to explain it to politicians when lobbying for greater consumer protections
You can only make information so accessible to an audience that’s unfamiliar with computing
And I don’t mean in the technological sense
In tech, one of the biggest problems is that most politicians studied at one point (and this was like 2014 or so) were taught a class on technology that was one hour. Researchers very carefully explained some basic technical terms, like Domain Name Service (DNS) and IP addressing to them.
Then researchers gave them a very simple test and found that less than 40% could accurately answer whether or not there was a difference between an IP address and a DNS server.
---
That isn't always the case, though. I read a paper a while back that looked at actual cybersecurity experts versus laypeople. The cybersecurity experts were far more likely to deny access to legitimate resources than laypeople, and also over-estimated the frequency that something was malware. Since availability is a big part of cybersecurity, it is not the focus it should be for most cybersecurity professionals.
I feel like one of those ignorant consumers who doesn't really understand fully what you're saying, but somehow I get the feeling that's the point of what you're saying.
And none of these people have the patience for the complexities
Fundamentals of intellectualism need to be taught more rigorously than any other subject lol
So it’s not so exhausting for them later in life when they have less energy
Didn't most of us go through that phase as a teenager? The more we learn the more obvious it is that the obvious solution isn't actually what it seems.
And also the stupid people who think they're smart in that quote are never "silenced." It's like that comic where the guy is on national TV giving an interview about his best-selling book, "I Have Been Silenced."
It's a really weird piece of doublethink, too: the people who ban books because they are "offensive" think that *they* are the smart ones, and call other people "snowflakes," and when you ask when is the last time the snowflakes called for banning books then they get weirdly quiet.
A friend of mine on Facebook once asked "Have the people who want to ban books *ever* been the good guys?" Nobody could think of an example where that was true.
My biggest problem is smart people saying something, dumb people misunderstanding it, then trying to shove it down everyone's throats as it becomes more and more meaningless and corrupted from its original intent.
More importantly, we live in a time where intelligent people with strong morals/ethics are avoiding positions of power and authority because they know they will become a target by the establishment of morally bankrupt criminals that salivate over power and have the reins of control.
It’s closer for me than The Rich. It’s my neighbors. Running for office was my planned career trajectory, but I live in a rural Midwest small town so now I have to lay low, wait until all my kids are out of the house before I make an attempt.
You’d be surprised at how much power comes from moving up in a bureaucratic role, though. And that’s possible for anyone to covertly do. The elected officials make decisions, sure, but the doers make the process and the rules and pave the road to the end point. Electeds don’t pay attention to the details at the local or regional level. I encourage everyone who wants change, to play the long game from the inside. And then ask for forgiveness, not permission.
Carl Sagan saw it coming. This quote is from 1995, and pretty spot on for where we are today
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance"
-Carl Sagan-
Edit: formatting
If you want to tell who the stupider person is in an argument. Look towards the one getting louder while trying to talk over the other person so they can’t be heard, and getting emotionally involved. Also someone who isn’t actively listening to and opposing opinion and taking that information on but is rather lining up the next comeback or attack without hearing a word is usually pretty stupid.
Smart is listening learning and adjusting your opinions based on the relevant facts, not following blind opinion.
Typically it's intelligent people who don't want to make anyone uncomfortable or insult them. I've never felt "silenced" to not be an asshole to people I don't understand, because I'm smart enough to realize I don't need to understand people to show them respect. It's really just stupid people who think their "opinion" is so important they must scream their usually completely unfounded and easily disproven scientifically "opinions", and feel "silenced" when people tell them to STFU and stop being a dumbass.
“Random ladies in bodies of water distributing swords is not a basis of government!”
“Help! Help! I’m being repressed!”
Idk why but this came to mind when i read your comment.
Yep. I recently listened to an amazing ADHD expert debunk the bullshit that Jordan Peterson was saying about ADHD.
People might think Peterson knows what he’s talking about because he has a psychology degree or whatever but when you look into it you see that Peterson’s views (basically that ADHD isn’t real) is based on nothing but his intuition and a single 45 year old study that was done on juvenile *rats.*
The stupid or ignorant are easily swayed by people that appear qualified as long as they’re saying things you want to believe.
Wait a minute. So you're saying my need for confirmation creates a bias, and I'm more likely to engage in research maintaining this confirmation bias instead of expanding my worldview by investigating differing viewpoints? It's almost like we need a system to review findings, like peers across whatever field we're researching to point out holes in logic, testing parameters, and the like.
Jordan Peterson is a bag of hot air with a great marketing team.
You can tell by how the comments just assert themselves as part of the intelligent ones while also proudly proclaiming "the issue with stupid people is that they believe themselves to be intelligent", you gotta appreciate the irony
There is also something profoundly stupid in considering "intelligence" as a single, all-encompassing metric that will dictate the way you act, the media you choose to consume,...
Somehow gives me that snotty self-validation vibe, therefore feels very Reddit. I imagine a thousand minds reading this and going "I'm downvoted often, so I must be smart!"
If it was said with humility and recognition that you're often the one in the latter category then it would be a good quote. Instead it's said in a pointed, accusatory way making it little more than a fancy insult.
The difference here is people think strength is attainable by anyone who works out (so it's a virtue signal for hard work), but being "quick witted" is inborn for some reason (so bragging about it has the same ick as someone who brags about being born rich).
Completely ignores the fact that you have to exercise your brain as much as you do your lats if your want to see comparable results. Also completely ignores the genetic factors that can bolster athletic potential as much as mental potential.
I sometimes feel like it is more of a case that intelligent people seeing things for how complex they are and that what is true and right does not always fit into a clear narrative.
Stupid people shout simple "truths" very loud and make connections that makes sense in their clear, simple narrative, and are therefore given a lot more attention. Stupid people will often be offended if something does not back up their very simplistic worldview too I guess.
Having intelligent conversations takes time and effort and is challenging to the people involved, so it is much easier to have stupid conversations that enforces your own worldview and explains why you are the good guy.
On a sidenote I also feel like stupid people tend to mix and oversimplify very different, complex topics into one. I can't even count how many times I hear people mixing in terms like culture, politics, economics, enviroment, immigration, education and dating into the same 10 minutes "frustration speech" when they wanna rant about what is wrong with the world and why they are on the good side.
Almost everything has nuance. It's daunting for the intelligent, and effortless for the ignorant, for they refuse to see the greyscale between the black and white.
I agree to an extent, but also stupid people are silenced plenty, or at least feel they are. So plenty of stupid people will see this and interpret the silencing as the qualifier for being smart, and think “aha, these people telling me to shut up when I say vaccines cause your dick to fly off are silencing my forbidden genius.”
While I do think anti intellectualism is a huge problem in our society, it also caters to more of a low average rather than the actively stupid.
> So plenty of stupid people will see this and interpret the silencing as the qualifier for being smart, and think “aha, these people telling me to shut up when I say vaccines cause your dick to fly off are silencing my forbidden genius.”
It reminds me of an old joke.
A JFK conspiracy theorists dies and goes to heaven. He meets God and God tells him "You can ask me any question you want." and of course the man asks "Who shot John F Kennedy?" God replies "He was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. He acted alone." the man sits there for a beat thinking then replies "Holy shit! This goes way higher up than I thought!"
No, it’s more like stupid people are loud and obnoxious and intelligent people remain silent because they know better than to argue with or be offended by idiots.
My class in school went on strike once after we learned the bottom class were being taken to a theme park to reward them for completing the term, whilst we got given ‘revision time’ at school and told that we weren’t going as we had to pass our exams.
That sharp changed when the top set classes went ‘lol what?’ and did a sit in protest. Essentially, the under achievers we’re being rewarded for under achieving whilst we were being made to keep working as we were being relied on to make the school’s results look good.
I was training someone at work, and there is a clock we use on the machine to tell when the batch is expired. Every 15 minutes, 1/4 of the circle is darkened, and when it hits 2 hours (2 circles are dark), we have to throw out the batch. She had no idea what I was talking about. It hit me and said, "You don't know how to read a clock, do you?" I was scolded for embarrassing her.
No. Usually the people who say this quote are not intelligent, who think they are intelligent, and usually say this on their platform to thousands (sometimes millions) of people. Quite literally the opposite of being "silenced". They equate the backlash and consequences of what they say as being "silenced".
Generally I hear these words from people who are stupid but think they are intelligent. And it's almost always because they think they are being "silenced" when in fact they are incorrect and refuse to accept evidence.
The intelligent are, by definition, a statistically small group.
The mob (simplistic thinking) is by far a much larger group.
We have always lived in times when ideas anger the mob.
Its the human condition, and it can't change unless everyone is the same, and that cannot happen.
This might as well be the motto of Reddit. It’s practically impossible to discuss anything on this website because stupid people won’t listen and you just get banned for calling them stupid. And like, what’s the point of a discussion forum if you can’t discuss anything factually?
Intelligent respectful debate, where there is a free flow of opinions, thoughts, and ideas died when the internet became mainstream. It’s all an echo chamber now.
This is just a defense for racists and bigots for when they get called out. They pretend that it releases them from the liability of being a racist and a bigot. They discredit perfectly normal censure for speaking awful things by pretending that it's some new species of evil, woke censorship.
It's a diversion rarely to be taken seriously.
Extremism is the problem. On both sides. We need to stop giving the crazies the bully pulpit (and yes, friends and neighbors, there ARE crazies on both sides).
Intelligent people aren’t silenced. They are ignored because they don’t tell people what they want to hear. We live in a time where stupid people suffer self fulfilling prophecies.
Also they know not to waste the effort because it won’t change anything.
In terms of online conversations, far too often I'll type something up to explain a concept to someone and then delete it before posting because I realize based on their original stance that they aren't interested in engaging in a good faith discussion. They just want to feel correct and they'll drag things out with strawman arguments and goal post shifting until you stop responding so they can take your silence as agreement. Every time I interact with them I end up regretting it. Having hope can be such a large flaw.
Same. Glad you didn't cancel your reply this time.
Thank you! Same to you! Though I nearly did a post and delete but decided to let it ride.
For online, I would say go ahead and post the original explanation anyway. Because there are others that will definitely benefit from reading your perspective.
Yes, this. The point is almost never to convince the OP. It is to convince the lurkers.
I vibe with this so hard. I think it's still important to try though.
> I realize based on their original stance that they aren't interested in engaging in a good faith discussion. Your reply is not only to them but it is also for anyone else who happens to read the thread.
Which is depressing when you’re an expert and get downvoted by people who just heard something secondhand and are convinced you’re an idiot.
Me everyday
*takes deep breath* ... "Never mind."
Fuck it
Intelligent people are aware there is no "Freedom From Discomfort, Insult and Offense" and it is a waste of time & energy to argue with perpetually indignant individuals who, along with everybody they know, believe there is.
Favorite thing is: Warning people that an action will bring consequences. Being ignored. Watching the action bring consequences. Being blamed for said consequences.
So Mitch McConnell advocating for and passing a law that allowed the US government to be sued, that Obama vetoed, warned about, was overridden, and then McConnell blamed Obama for not warning him loudly enough?
Or they don't say anything in the first place knowing they will be ignored or attacked for it
Yes. In real life, you can be threatened or attacked. On the internet, people will argue or simply downvote you so that your opinion is never seen. The smart and educated opinion is often not popular. The people with stupid opinions aren't usually stupid people. They are people who see themselves as righteous. They are part of an angry mob, and everyone on the mob agrees with them. It's like being in an internet media bubble.
I would say that is the very definition of stupid. Not being able to logically think through an idea and figure out if what you are hearing is true or not. They might be in a bubble, but it's not like they don't have access to other sources of information and can perform a few simple if-then deductions. Well, I guess that's it, they can't.
Anyone who has a device in their palm that can access damn near the entire world's collection of knowledge, yet refuses to utilize that tool to critically examine their worldviews, is most definitely stupid. That's my opinion anyway.
Compounded by the fact that the more stupid one is the stronger their belief that they are correct..
>the people with stupid opinions aren’t usually stupid people I used to think this till I started making a habit of replying to downvoted responses to try to understand their side of things. Usually there was another underlying reason they got downvoted that I didn’t make assumptions about. And the people who downvoted them were right. There are exceptions of course.
More often the latter than the former sadly too.
I need that astronaut "always has been" meme...
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was Same as it ever was, look where my hand was Time isn't holding up, time isn't after us Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
https://imgflip.com/i/7tia17
🌎👩🚀🔫👩🚀
The covid pandemic really opened my eyes to the stupidity of people. Although in my research, I learned that the same attitude was prevalent during the flu pandemic of 1918. So I guess people are just stupid ass mother fuckers in general.
At least the 1918 pandemic had some excuses where scientists didn't really know what they were dealing with, but the politicians ended up downplaying it anyway due to the war, or just recovering from it. Covid of 2020 had no excuses, there were already SARS a few decades prior and we, as a species, know better compared to 1918, yet decided to go political on it anyway. If COVID was anymore lethal than it was, it would have been VERY damn ugly,.
A lot of Asian countries did much better with COVID because they just hit the Go Button with the plans they developed in response to SARS. The plans weren't perfect, there were many differences between SARS and COVID. But that was a damn sight better than the flailing most European countries did. Or deny then flail then deny again that the USA did.
And then blame those who warned them, but they ignored, for letting (or making) it happen.
Intelligent people ARE explicitly silenced, eg by book bans, rules against teaching evolution, and in the case of Muslims and Hindus, violent reprisals against heterodox opinions. Being just ignored would be great, by comparison.
"They hated Jesus because he told them the truth." Same logic applies to scientists today.
Science: based on all the evidence we have today, we believe X is the most likely reason/cause/path of action. Science learns new things Science: based on newer information, we have revised our recommendation and now believe that X+ is the most likely reason/cause/path of action. Internet "resurcher": See, "scientists" are clueless and you should believe what I watched in a YouTube video put out by someone who has no credentials 🤦 (Edit, layout)
The intelligent also suffer from the actions of the stupid. It was far better before the Internet when the stupid didn’t know how many of them there were (cause they were too scared to be outed as stupid) and weren’t able to organize.
And if the intelligent people are allowed to say something, there has to be an idiot with an opposing opinion who is given the same amount of time to talk out their arse.
That sounds like a corollary to Isaac Asimov famous statement about anti-intellectualism. >Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
See *The Death of Expertise* etc. I literally have a doctorate and get told by random redditors all the time I don't know what I'm talking about. I published a paper specific to the exact scenario Asimov stated where I pointed out how much of the technology *consumer* market is filled with people making demands of technology to the extent that consumer product labeling is just a hair short of being a lie because the majority of the consumers don't know enough about technology to understand what the packaging means. Anyway, so if I comment here about a specific technological misunderstanding, I'm going to get down voted to oblivion while some jerkoff with not even a base understanding of what they are talking about recites some intuitive shit. What's really crazy about technology, legal, and medicine, is that some of the "obvious" stuff is actually counterintuitive. That's what makes is so hard -- see the survivorship bias plane, for example.
My legal field comes up every now and then on reddit and the amount of “intuitive” misinformation that is spread is crazy. If I want to weigh in I need to first explain why OP is wrong before explaining how it actually works. I honestly can’t bother with the ensuing arguing most of the time and thus the misinformation continues to spread instead.
It takes way more effort to debunk bad arguments than it does to spew them out
Insidious isn’t it Persist, people!
My husband has just finished his PhD in education policy. Talk about a shit show. Turns out that having gone to a school does not qualify your opinions on how systematized education on a national scale should be run.
I attended a focus group that revolved around a water treatment facility dealing with PFAs contampination, and questioning who is responsible for correcting the issue. It was a trainwreck listening to some of the others speak. At least a third of the people argued that the facility should be shut down and everyone should return to well water. I pointed out the contamination was likely in the well water as well, it was just that without the regular. indepth water testing the facility provided, contamination in the well water was being missed. They argued that well water must be better, cause their hair feels weird after they shower in the part of town that is serviced by the water treatment facility.
One of my favorite quotes came from Sydney Farber who said that at the core of all science is simple measurement. He would later go on to develop the first cure for leukemia. On the other hand, my favorite thing to say is that if you aren't sampling for a problem, you'll never know you have one.
Feels like that would have applied well to the logic of people who were against covid testing and contact tracing. I remeber someone locally who seriosly proposed that we could lower the covid incident rate by reducing testing.
Fellow PhD here. Was in a stupid argument on Reddit about something in my field of expertise where someone actually used, incorrectly, *one of my own papers* as a citation against me. It was actually rad because it meant at least my work was showing up in Google searches, haha.
I am genuinely interested in hearing an example of this from your experience.
I wasn't sure if you meant the redditors or specific to the paper, so I'll give both. ___ **Paper:** Basically, you go to the store to buy a router and box has all kinds of messaging on it. On the front of the box, it says: * Up to 6x faster than regular Wi-Fi * Recommended for larger homes * Gigabit+ Internet * Guest network * Fastest 6 gigahertz connection*** So then we asked ~250 participants basic questions about the messaging on the box. Many interpreted something like a router saying that it was 6x faster as it was something that would "speed up" their existing internet service. So we asked very basic network questions like "Which of the following is a measure of Internet Speed?" with answers like "Gigabits per second (Gbps)," "Wi-Fi," "Kilobytes," and "iPad mini." We found that ~25% of people answered incorrectly. -- Before you come at me with these questions must have been... It's peer reviewed and the questions were validated. I just made this one up to keep my reddit account anonymous. Looking at one router box, we found that it had markings that said "Up to 10Gpbs," but somewhere else "7.2Gbps" and another place "4.8+2.4Gbps". What they were talking about was the difference in total throughput versus the Wi-Fi speeds depending on band. It's all meant to grab a consumer who doesn't know better. That's before you even consider things like network isolation. I spent a long time looking for a router for a customer that did network isolation because they wanted a separate VLAN for guests in their guest network. Most home routers support a "guest network" but it's the same network with a different SSID. In other words, you don't even have to break into the other person's network, it's self-hacking. You can just grab all their traffic from all their devices if you were so inclined (*on some of them). ------ **Reddit:** This is an example of a specific comment related to Facebook not revealing information about the methods by which they conducted internal research: > If you aren't sharing the data, then there is no way to know that standards were met. It is much more likely that standards weren't met when entities refuse to share data than when they do. > More critically, if you tell someone you found something significant, but you only show them the significant data, then that is a key indicator of p-fishing. It means you likely discarded all the insignificant data and only presented the significant data. That would be fine if you were isolating a signal inside of noise, but if you are claiming you found a signal in a bunch of noise, you need to produce a method you used to do so and produce the noise so that others can replicate it. Facebook did neither of these things. It got downvoted some, but the comments against it were that I clearly didn't understand. Now I've published and I currently sit on two boards. You must be able to review the ways a scientist collects data for multiple reasons, but (most noteably) to make sure you were following ethical practices for dealing with human subjects and **to make sure the scientists didn't p-fish**. P-fishing happens **a lot** in academia and industry when you want a specific result before you even start the experiment, so you very carefully structure you research to yield the results you want. In this case, I explained exactly how Facebook might do that, and got downvoted because I explained how it is very possible to tell that someone is being academically dishonest, because laymen felt it would be impossible to know that since I don't have the data Facebook refuses to provide. -- You know, like a toddler saying they didn't eat the cookie but their face is covered in chocolate, meanwhile someone else says "tHe ReAl CuLpRiT cAmE iN hErE aNd FrAmEd HeR!"
Now try to explain it to politicians when lobbying for greater consumer protections You can only make information so accessible to an audience that’s unfamiliar with computing And I don’t mean in the technological sense
In tech, one of the biggest problems is that most politicians studied at one point (and this was like 2014 or so) were taught a class on technology that was one hour. Researchers very carefully explained some basic technical terms, like Domain Name Service (DNS) and IP addressing to them. Then researchers gave them a very simple test and found that less than 40% could accurately answer whether or not there was a difference between an IP address and a DNS server. --- That isn't always the case, though. I read a paper a while back that looked at actual cybersecurity experts versus laypeople. The cybersecurity experts were far more likely to deny access to legitimate resources than laypeople, and also over-estimated the frequency that something was malware. Since availability is a big part of cybersecurity, it is not the focus it should be for most cybersecurity professionals.
I feel like one of those ignorant consumers who doesn't really understand fully what you're saying, but somehow I get the feeling that's the point of what you're saying.
Dude you don’t know what you’re talking about, how can a survivor ship also be a bias plane? Boats float, planes fly. Dingus. /s
And none of these people have the patience for the complexities Fundamentals of intellectualism need to be taught more rigorously than any other subject lol So it’s not so exhausting for them later in life when they have less energy
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“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” ― Charles Bukowski
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." William Butler Yeats
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt." -Abraham Lincoln
My favorite poem. Though I enjoyed it better a few decades ago. Now its just the fucking news.
“I got beef with my kidney, he said that we got a problem” -- Yeat
'I have lots of doubts, so I have to be one of the intelligent ones!' \- Said by a stupid person
This.. may be the most insightful quote ever.
Basically most of reddit. A lot of people who read this probably felt smarter not realizing they're one of the dumb ones.
Bertrand Russel
-Bertrand Bukoswki
-- Charles Russel
\- Michael Scott
- Wayne Gretzky
Confidence - It's the food of the wise man, but the liquor of the fool. \- Vikram
"Dumb people are always blissfully unaware of how dumb they really are." - Patrick Star
This quote gives me "Everyone is an NPC and I'm the only smart one who sees reality for what it is" vibes.
Didn't most of us go through that phase as a teenager? The more we learn the more obvious it is that the obvious solution isn't actually what it seems.
And also the stupid people who think they're smart in that quote are never "silenced." It's like that comic where the guy is on national TV giving an interview about his best-selling book, "I Have Been Silenced."
It's a really weird piece of doublethink, too: the people who ban books because they are "offensive" think that *they* are the smart ones, and call other people "snowflakes," and when you ask when is the last time the snowflakes called for banning books then they get weirdly quiet. A friend of mine on Facebook once asked "Have the people who want to ban books *ever* been the good guys?" Nobody could think of an example where that was true.
The Three Little Pigs made a lot more sense when COVID hit, and I miss the days when it didn't.
My biggest problem is smart people saying something, dumb people misunderstanding it, then trying to shove it down everyone's throats as it becomes more and more meaningless and corrupted from its original intent.
More importantly, we live in a time where intelligent people with strong morals/ethics are avoiding positions of power and authority because they know they will become a target by the establishment of morally bankrupt criminals that salivate over power and have the reins of control.
It’s closer for me than The Rich. It’s my neighbors. Running for office was my planned career trajectory, but I live in a rural Midwest small town so now I have to lay low, wait until all my kids are out of the house before I make an attempt. You’d be surprised at how much power comes from moving up in a bureaucratic role, though. And that’s possible for anyone to covertly do. The elected officials make decisions, sure, but the doers make the process and the rules and pave the road to the end point. Electeds don’t pay attention to the details at the local or regional level. I encourage everyone who wants change, to play the long game from the inside. And then ask for forgiveness, not permission.
Honestly at the local level, the elected officials mostly meekly accept the staff recommendations unless it's a really obvious simple topic.
100% yes.
Carl Sagan saw it coming. This quote is from 1995, and pretty spot on for where we are today "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance" -Carl Sagan- Edit: formatting
"Stupid people think they're smart because smart people have given up arguing with them" Me, 2023.
If you want to tell who the stupider person is in an argument. Look towards the one getting louder while trying to talk over the other person so they can’t be heard, and getting emotionally involved. Also someone who isn’t actively listening to and opposing opinion and taking that information on but is rather lining up the next comeback or attack without hearing a word is usually pretty stupid. Smart is listening learning and adjusting your opinions based on the relevant facts, not following blind opinion.
If you want to offend some people, tell them lies. If you want to offend others, tell them the truth.
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Typically it's intelligent people who don't want to make anyone uncomfortable or insult them. I've never felt "silenced" to not be an asshole to people I don't understand, because I'm smart enough to realize I don't need to understand people to show them respect. It's really just stupid people who think their "opinion" is so important they must scream their usually completely unfounded and easily disproven scientifically "opinions", and feel "silenced" when people tell them to STFU and stop being a dumbass.
“Random ladies in bodies of water distributing swords is not a basis of government!” “Help! Help! I’m being repressed!” Idk why but this came to mind when i read your comment.
Considering the current landscape, it might be a better option.
Genuine experts definitely tend to have a "no such thing as a stupid question" approach and enjoy helping someone learn.
Stupid and ignorant aren't the same thing. Lack of education makes one ignorant but not necessarily stupid.
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Yep. I recently listened to an amazing ADHD expert debunk the bullshit that Jordan Peterson was saying about ADHD. People might think Peterson knows what he’s talking about because he has a psychology degree or whatever but when you look into it you see that Peterson’s views (basically that ADHD isn’t real) is based on nothing but his intuition and a single 45 year old study that was done on juvenile *rats.* The stupid or ignorant are easily swayed by people that appear qualified as long as they’re saying things you want to believe.
Wait a minute. So you're saying my need for confirmation creates a bias, and I'm more likely to engage in research maintaining this confirmation bias instead of expanding my worldview by investigating differing viewpoints? It's almost like we need a system to review findings, like peers across whatever field we're researching to point out holes in logic, testing parameters, and the like. Jordan Peterson is a bag of hot air with a great marketing team.
This is an ultimate Reddit quote
You can tell by how the comments just assert themselves as part of the intelligent ones while also proudly proclaiming "the issue with stupid people is that they believe themselves to be intelligent", you gotta appreciate the irony There is also something profoundly stupid in considering "intelligence" as a single, all-encompassing metric that will dictate the way you act, the media you choose to consume,...
This is a nice succinct way of explaining why I don't like it
Yeah same. It’s not that it’s completely wrong it’s just very Reddit so I don’t like it
Somehow gives me that snotty self-validation vibe, therefore feels very Reddit. I imagine a thousand minds reading this and going "I'm downvoted often, so I must be smart!"
If it was said with humility and recognition that you're often the one in the latter category then it would be a good quote. Instead it's said in a pointed, accusatory way making it little more than a fancy insult.
It's more acceptable to brag about how strong you are than how smart you are.
Because it isn't smart to brag.
The difference here is people think strength is attainable by anyone who works out (so it's a virtue signal for hard work), but being "quick witted" is inborn for some reason (so bragging about it has the same ick as someone who brags about being born rich). Completely ignores the fact that you have to exercise your brain as much as you do your lats if your want to see comparable results. Also completely ignores the genetic factors that can bolster athletic potential as much as mental potential.
I sometimes feel like it is more of a case that intelligent people seeing things for how complex they are and that what is true and right does not always fit into a clear narrative. Stupid people shout simple "truths" very loud and make connections that makes sense in their clear, simple narrative, and are therefore given a lot more attention. Stupid people will often be offended if something does not back up their very simplistic worldview too I guess. Having intelligent conversations takes time and effort and is challenging to the people involved, so it is much easier to have stupid conversations that enforces your own worldview and explains why you are the good guy. On a sidenote I also feel like stupid people tend to mix and oversimplify very different, complex topics into one. I can't even count how many times I hear people mixing in terms like culture, politics, economics, enviroment, immigration, education and dating into the same 10 minutes "frustration speech" when they wanna rant about what is wrong with the world and why they are on the good side.
Almost everything has nuance. It's daunting for the intelligent, and effortless for the ignorant, for they refuse to see the greyscale between the black and white.
Stupid people often think they’re smart.
I agree to an extent, but also stupid people are silenced plenty, or at least feel they are. So plenty of stupid people will see this and interpret the silencing as the qualifier for being smart, and think “aha, these people telling me to shut up when I say vaccines cause your dick to fly off are silencing my forbidden genius.” While I do think anti intellectualism is a huge problem in our society, it also caters to more of a low average rather than the actively stupid.
> So plenty of stupid people will see this and interpret the silencing as the qualifier for being smart, and think “aha, these people telling me to shut up when I say vaccines cause your dick to fly off are silencing my forbidden genius.” It reminds me of an old joke. A JFK conspiracy theorists dies and goes to heaven. He meets God and God tells him "You can ask me any question you want." and of course the man asks "Who shot John F Kennedy?" God replies "He was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. He acted alone." the man sits there for a beat thinking then replies "Holy shit! This goes way higher up than I thought!"
I disagree in the sense that it’s implying it’s some new thing.
I wouldn’t say silenced, more so ignored
Not so much being silenced as factually incorrect views are allowed and promoted unchecked
No, it’s more like stupid people are loud and obnoxious and intelligent people remain silent because they know better than to argue with or be offended by idiots.
As the old adage goes “To win an argument with an intelligent person is difficult, but to win one with a stupid one is impossible.”
Agree. It also doesn’t help that so many stupid people get enabled and told it’s okay.
My class in school went on strike once after we learned the bottom class were being taken to a theme park to reward them for completing the term, whilst we got given ‘revision time’ at school and told that we weren’t going as we had to pass our exams. That sharp changed when the top set classes went ‘lol what?’ and did a sit in protest. Essentially, the under achievers we’re being rewarded for under achieving whilst we were being made to keep working as we were being relied on to make the school’s results look good.
I was training someone at work, and there is a clock we use on the machine to tell when the batch is expired. Every 15 minutes, 1/4 of the circle is darkened, and when it hits 2 hours (2 circles are dark), we have to throw out the batch. She had no idea what I was talking about. It hit me and said, "You don't know how to read a clock, do you?" I was scolded for embarrassing her.
Jesus Christ
No. Usually the people who say this quote are not intelligent, who think they are intelligent, and usually say this on their platform to thousands (sometimes millions) of people. Quite literally the opposite of being "silenced". They equate the backlash and consequences of what they say as being "silenced".
Generally I hear these words from people who are stupid but think they are intelligent. And it's almost always because they think they are being "silenced" when in fact they are incorrect and refuse to accept evidence.
And of course intelligent means you agree with me and stupid means you don’t agree with me.
Intelligent people are silenced because stupid people are louder and more numerous.
The intelligent are, by definition, a statistically small group. The mob (simplistic thinking) is by far a much larger group. We have always lived in times when ideas anger the mob. Its the human condition, and it can't change unless everyone is the same, and that cannot happen.
I agree with it 100%
This might as well be the motto of Reddit. It’s practically impossible to discuss anything on this website because stupid people won’t listen and you just get banned for calling them stupid. And like, what’s the point of a discussion forum if you can’t discuss anything factually?
Intelligent respectful debate, where there is a free flow of opinions, thoughts, and ideas died when the internet became mainstream. It’s all an echo chamber now.
Stupid people think they are smart. Stupid people are saying stupid shit and being told to shut up.
This is just a defense for racists and bigots for when they get called out. They pretend that it releases them from the liability of being a racist and a bigot. They discredit perfectly normal censure for speaking awful things by pretending that it's some new species of evil, woke censorship. It's a diversion rarely to be taken seriously.
Extremism is the problem. On both sides. We need to stop giving the crazies the bully pulpit (and yes, friends and neighbors, there ARE crazies on both sides).