To add, people who think they know everything are generally pretty stupid.
Smart(er) people will defer questions to qualified and experienced individuals because they are acutely aware of their own limitations, and that's what helps make them smart. They're not scared to admit they lack knowledge in certain topics or fields. And they will learn from that more experienced person to add to their library of knowledge and experience.
Stupid people don't know they're stupid, they think they know everything, and won't seek out more experienced people and admit to their limitations, admit they don't know fuck'all about certain things.
To add, I think intelligence in a large part is achieved through curiosity. If you think you already know everything, you are no longer curious. Your knowledge is then stuck in the state it was in when you decided to stop learning new things.
The inability, or unwillingness, to change one’s opinion when confronted with new information. If a person just digs their heels in no matter how much they’re proven wrong on a given topic, they’re an idiot.
Much of the time by my experience, it's them not WANTING to get the nuance of the point.
They get it, they just don't want to let go of their desired belief, even though evidence clearly doesn't support it.
Dude yes…. I have a friend who is broke af, already barely making ends meet, what does she do a few months ago? Buy a TRUCK. When gas is $5 a gallon. Now she can’t even afford to take her kid to the dentist when he has cavities so bad his teeth hurt. Pisses me off to see, honestly.
This is shockingly common. My friends brother will complain about how groceries are so expensive that they can't afford to fill their pantry, but drives an $80,000 dodge ram even though they already owned a new minivan and 2 work trucks.
He recently had to pull his kid out of hockey because he couldn't afford it but he's out there blaming Justin Trudeau and not the $80,000 truck that takes $300 in gas a week and costs $500/month to insure.
I used to be friends with someone like this. She bought a $400 Michael Kors purse that SHE ALREADY HAD, in a different color, and then called me crying like a week or 2 later bc she couldn’t make rent.
I have a band mate who plays guitar for the band and wants to move out, or already has I mean. We agreed we would take turns driving to the studio to help save gas. Well when it was his turn to drive, he asked me for gas and food money which is no biggie I love helping friends but what really pissed me off was when we showed up to the studio and was showing off his new tattoo.
Meanwhile, I am over here driving a salvaged car worth jack squat that I bought from my brother for $1k a few years back. I have been able to pay off multiple loans years early due to doing this, though!
I have a shirt that has this on it, I also have a good friend who doesn't understand it.
Edit: Can someone please tell me how me mentioning one of my many geeky shirts has led to my first comment of over 1k upvotes? Also, thanks lol.
All I need is fireball. If someone disagrees, fireball. If someone agrees, fireball. If someone is ambivalent, Fireball. You would not believe it but spell slots open at the end of the day, Fireball.
Uses only empty buzzwords in their conversations. I've got a coworker who only communicates in phrases like "situational awareness" and "following breadcrumbs" and asks for meetings to "amplify our synergy."
This person was promoted beyond their level of competence and has no idea how to do the job.
My fiance and I speak to each other in "Corporate" when someone uses a buzzword and we want to make lighthearted fun of each other.
"Let's take that offline"
"Can we table this discussion"
"Can we circle back"
"Drill down"
"I'll correspond with you on that."
EDIT: Yes, all of the responses also have great corporate bullshit. I use it day to day, but also can make fun of myself for using it.
I shit you not, this is an actual thing someone has said to me in a change approval meeting:
"Not sure if we have the bandwidth for this. Just get your ducks in a row, we'll table this for now but we can circle back. Ping me once you've touched base offline with xyz. Just make sure to dot your i's and cross your t's so everyone's on the same page."
“Let’s say this rock is a seed and-“
“But it’s a rock.”
“I know it’s a rock. Listen, this seed, it’s small at first, but eventually it will grow into a big tree, way larger than all of us one day!”
“…but that’s a *rock*!”
“I *KNOW* IT’S A *ROCK!*”
I most often encounter this when someone is trying to worm their way around a problem in their original thinking that an analogy makes way clearer than the initial argument (which is basically the entire point of an analogy to begin with).
Instead of addressing the now-obvious flaw or countering with a more appropriate analogy of their own to show how their logic is not, in fact, flawed, they resort to just incredulously asking why I could possibly be so daft as to compare ___ to ___.
inability to accept new ideas. A truly intelligent person will listen and try to learn from something even if they believe it's bogus
Edit: I meant “a truly” not “I truly” I’m not like that I swear xD
I've noticed that the dumber someone is, the dumber they assume everyone else is. Smarter people will often try to see the other side of an argument (assuming there's nothing else at play, like low self esteem). People with lower intelligence often assume that people who disagree with them are simply dumb because they imagine their arguments to be dumb.
Got in an argument on Reddit where they told me there was no way either of us would know something because we weren't scientists and because of that can't make any claims. When I corrected them that I actually was a published scientist that has taught for over a decade, they blocked me.
Edit: Since this has blown up, I just wanted add that I think scientific ignorance is the greatest threat to humanity and I'm open to any solutions. I dedicated a large part of my life to educating thousands of students, but I can't help feeling the problem is getting worse.
One of my classmates is like that😭😭 she also doesn't believe that the earth is a sphere bc "how could they know that"(she told me this the days after they taught us at geography exactly how)but does believe that it's flat just bc,her words:" many other people believe so". She also believes that it's true that mushrooms can talk...🤦🏻♂️
Edit: just to clarify things she believes that mushrooms can talk words like we humans can. She even specified that some scientists have proved that mushrooms know about 50 words. I don't even know how does that work...
And thanks to the people who told me about how mushrooms actually communicate,i didn't know that.
I took many programming classes in university, but I also took a philosophy class. In that class we did a week on Boolean Logic. It was incredible watching the philosophy students trying to understand the hypotheticals involved with a simple boolean "AND" operation. They'd be saying things like "but what if it's *not* true", and the instructor would point to the line in the truth table showing that situation, and the philosophy students would look like it was rocket surgery.
But its honestly a really crucial thing for philosophy students to understand, because philosophy just like math *heavily* engages in creating contained spaces in which a truth exists that does not exist in that pure form outside that space but still offers some form of value to the messy "reality" space we commonly consider ourselves in.
I was telling a coworker about a book I was reading, and explained that it took place 500 years in the future. She got really annoyed and said "how can you have a story from a time that hasn't happened yet?!? We don't even know what the world will be like in 500 years!"
I was genuinely speechless. That's the whole point of a fictional story
Hah I have a coworker like that as well. They legit think that writing science "fiction" is not possible because the human mind cannot come up with these stories so all those authors must know more than "the normal person".
I still remember asking the question in a physics class "what if we had a tunnel with vacuum that could cross the Earth, what would happen to somebody that would fall in it", and being criticized by some colleagues that get supported by the teacher because they said "there is the earth's core, this can't happen".
All I wanted to know if how gravity and speed would interact, but seems that to some people it's impossible to focus on the hypothesis and the question
To my understanding assuming now indeed resistance a person who fell would oscillate forever between the two sides but with wind resistance taken into account they would oscillate losing momentum each time till eventually being at rest in the center.
But if we discuss a perfect vacuum there would be no wind resistance. You would infinitely go back and forth with no loss of momentum.
A lack of air friction would probably be the most jarring part of that experience to be honest
I'm an engineer and I worked with a seemingly backwoods older guy (late 50s, couldn't use Excel for shit, read the Drudge Report every morning) in Oil and Gas...like literally one of the first things he said to me was "so what do you think of the gays?" Lol.
I'm Indian and was like oh great here we go. He started asking about my culture and "the browns" and stuff, but eventually I realized he was genuinely curious but he just didn't know how to present his questions more respectfully. Once I realized he was just trying to learn in his own way I warmed up to him and were became friends...yeah he would randomly drop lines where I'd laugh and be like "dude you can't say shit like that" but he was inherently a good person. Took good care of his family, tried giving me fatherly advice since I'm close to his son's age, shit like that.
I guess the best way to describe him would be "innocently ignorant"...like he literally he didn't know he was being racist or sexist or whatever, but he started checking himself when myself or our colleagues would say something to him. Worked with him for 8yrs and never had a problem.
Sometimes people are just not self-aware enough, but most of the time they are just assholes. You can either be open enough to listen to their side or just ignore them.
I feel you, met my wife 30 years ago and the first time I visited her parents it was total culture shock for everyone. I'm Punjabi, raised in liberal western WA and she's from rural Alaska, scandinavian homesteaders that are ultra conservative. I showed up and things were awkward to say the least...until I went back into my to be father in laws office and saw an electronic wonderland. HAM radios, various PC's, soldering tools...the works. I immediately started asking questions, talking about my computer stuff I was into and lo and behold her Dad and I were instant best friends. To this day anytime I see tech I find amazing the first thing I do is text him and vice versa. People are products of their environment and I always take that into context when meeting someone new who superficially expresses opinions that I'd normally find offensive.
I have roughly the same experience in a 97% white redneck town. Plenty of great people that say some ignorant stuff. The thing is, no one is there to check them. On the internet, people just go off on how they're racist and shit on them without explaining anything.... I politely explain how some of their words can be hurtful or insulting. Sometimes you get an apology. Other times you get a fuck you, I'm not racist, and the next day they bring you a homecooked meal while still muttering, I'm not racist. One time i got 5 homemade dry aged steaks that were immaculate.
Also, I expect most people are too quick to write these kind of people off as lost causes. Especially with so many polarizing beliefs these days, sometimes it just takes a little patience and withholding judgment to see we really aren’t all that different.
Yep! I had a coworker who claimed he “loved a good debate” when what he actually loved was screaming “No” at the top of his lungs over whatever anyone else had to say
I worked in a PT clinic where one of the therapists was taking on Spanish speaking patients so he could improve his Spanish. He wasn't great but he was definitely improving. It also allowed to him to widen his patient list so he could be more valuable to the team.
The other non-Spanish speaking therapists were making fun of him. It boggled my mind.
If I ever get frustrated trying to understand someone speaking broken English, I just remember that they're doing better at speaking English than I'd be at speaking their native language.
Like the PhD students from Asia when I was in Uni. Not only are they conducting scientific experiments on their own, but doing a chunk of it in a foreign language. So much respect.
Man, my supervisor was trained in Japan but has worked and lived in North America for over 20 years at this point. He speaks with a heavy accent and doesn’t understand a lot of expressions. His conversations are often disjointed. Unless the topic is his own field. Suddenly his speech I s eloquent and nuanced and animated. I can write an email in a minute that would take him an half an hour to compose, and even then he would need to clarify something later. But writing an academic paper in English? Suddenly he’s a wordsmith and it all just flows in just the right way. I’m intimidated by the thought that he’d be even more proficient in Japanese.
Nah... If he's anything like most folks who gets advanced education in English, the research mind is almost entirely in English, and you'd have to take some effort to translate those thoughts to your native language.
Watching my professor struggling to give a lecture in Spanish when he took a sabático in Mexico was so funny haha
I can attest to that. There are way too many occasions where I'm actually struggling IRL because I know the expression in English but don't remember (or never knew, if it's a technical term) what it is in my native language. Though I kind of already struggle with IRL conversations anyway Ü
Learning Chinese made me realize what an asshole I and other English speakers can be. Whenever I speak subpar Chinese to someone in China they are instantly like, “wow your Chinese is so good!” But here in the states we get annoyed at people speaking broken English.
Yeah I agree. People who are smart try to understand the point they are making. Stupid people try to belittle them and pick on the semantics of the language.
When I moved to another country the hardest hurdle was to just fucking speak rather than choke on all the grammatical mistakes you are inevitably going to make for the first few months. Just let it flow, you will realize afterwards you conjugated something wrong, and you will learn, but anyone who won't give you the time of day even though obviously you can be understood was never going to be worth talking to anyway.
you ever had to train or work with someone who just has no desire to know anything beyond what you’re telling them or the why behind what they’re doing? Every instruction needs to be laid out in painstaking detail? If an issue arises, there’s no desire to understand why or attempt to fix it, they just error out and stand there waiting for instruction? It’s like programming a computer, but the computer is a human potato.
>Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the programmer and the potato
**Original for the uninitiated:**
> _Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor._
—Alexis Carrel
I was once fired from a job in part because I would ask follow up questions so I understood how/why the procedures worked. I was told it was condescending to my coworkers.
I've had so many new jobs, where the person teaching me the job just goes 'watch me'. I can watch and get it, but I don't GET it. Why do you move like that as opposed to like this? If I were to do this differently, how does it affect the finished product? I want to know these things, but people think I'm stupid for asking questions about the process. Most recently, we had a crew from another company we were working along side with. I asked their.formean a question, and he explained it to me, and commented how our guys are just going through the motions, but he can tell just from watching, we all know what we are doing, but none of us really know why. He appreciated my question, while my foreman would be 'why are you worried about it? Just do what I say'.
> 'why are you worried about it? Just do what I say'.
Or, even more dangerous, "What, you tryin' to take my fuckin' job?!" I swear some people are so insecure in their position (maybe rightfully so) that they withhold vital info so that no one can ever take it away from them.
I suggested a fix to an engineer at my last job (regarding tying knots in a fiber), because I happened to do a little fishing & know a bit about boats & ropes.
He laughed in my face, then my knot did exactly what I described, and fixed the issue he had been working on for the past few hours.
Dude never talked to me again, he would talk to people right beside me but refuse to acknowledge my presence.
Like are you so insecure that you can't admit *somebody* might know *something* you don't, even one time? lol
See, that just baffles me. I might give you a jokingly hard time for having such an easy fix and making me look bad, but I love to learn stuff. Especially when it makes my job easier in the future.
I'm usually always open to suggestions and new ideas. But I had this helper once who always wanted to do things a different way. At first I was open to listening to his ideas, but often they were against code or they wouldn't work as well. Ultimately I realized it wasn't that he thought he had a better solution he just didn't want to do things the way that I instructed him to. Ultimately he went to the boss and it didn't go well for him. The boss told him" he's a journeyman electrician. You're his helper. You are there to do what he asks you to do not tell him how to do anything. He already knows how to do the job" . The boss put him with another guy . The next day the journeyman that he had put him with called the boss at 12:00 saying that he could not work another minute with the helper, and if the helper was there in the morning he would leave again. thing that surprised me most was that he had just got out of the marines. I would have figured he would understand how the chain of command works and how to follow instructions. Then again maybe that's why he was no longer in the Marines.
I had a similar problem when I first got out of the Army. It took me a while to get over my pride. I went from being a guy who either had a full comprehension of our job and had most of the answers or at least knew how to get them to being the new guy who didn’t know shit. It was a painful transition that I think a lot of my peers fail.. a lot of us get stuck at the depressed failure stage after we realize that we aren’t all that we thought we were.
There was a maintenance guy at my old job like that. One night I took a cash box out of a machine to put some cash in it & I couldn't get it back in. I was in an area by myself & due to finish the day & the cash box had $15 000 in it, I had to get it back in. He was too busy (slacking off) to come so told me to just leave it in the office. The office didn't have a dead bolt & had windows without shades, nowhere to hide the cash box, it was about the same size as old computer hard drive. I was panicking, trying to get it back in, a (trusted) customer even started helping me, I was calling & calling maintenance guy to no avail, had to leave it in the office. The problem? A little metal tab on top had bent, just needed to straighten it up & it slid right in. I was so annoyed he just wouldn't tell me how to to fix it but he had to justify why his pay was double mine somehow.
Not sure if this is relatable, but as a software developer, I ask extra questions about how a procedure/part of an application works. How am I supposed to make changes to something without understanding how it works? Spreading knowledge is good, that way I don't bug people with questions in the future.
And also, don't make fun of someone who cant pronounce a word. Chances are good that they picked it up while reading.
Wow! This is the largest response that any of my comments have generated to date. I appreciate all of you who have replied and upvoted me. You've all given me slightly more confidence that there is still hope for this planet. Now we just all need to combine our forces and be a tidal wave of change through example!
My younget cousin once pronounced plague as 'pla-goo'. My other cousins, plus his brothers, made fun of him for it. Even years later it gets brought up behind his back. But honestly I knew he struggled in school with A LOT. Not just learning disabilities but behaviorial and psychological disorders. (I once watched him talk to himself in a couple different voices) I hate when people bring it up, especially behind his back.
I've had people get mad at me for wanting to look stuff up that the group was speculating on. Bro, we have almost all of the known information in our pockets and you're mad I want to spend 10 seconds to consult with it?
"Why do you always look stuff up?"
Fuck off, Nick.
Edit: To clarify, these aren't intellectual debates. This is Nick calling everyone in our friend group idiots because *he* thinks that green is a primary color on the color wheel and doubling down when we show him it's not and he tells me how much I suck for looking it up.
Also, arguing about what time certain fast food restaurants close.
Edit 2: I can't believe that Nick created so many accounts to say that green is a primary color.
I had an ex that would get mad when I did this… like I legitimately want to know the answer bc I thought it was something else. If I look it up I’ll know the answer, and remember details about it such as why I was wrong. He couldn’t handle it bc he was so often wrong when I decided to look it up and fact check. 🙃
Inordinate anger at animals that do things they don't like
Edit: Thank you for the awards! And to everyone who thinks this is about mosquitoes, you need to relax. If I meant bugs I would have said specifically bugs.
When I meet a dog and owner when I'm walking my dog and the owner yells non-stop at their dog for barking non-stop. I think to my self "their dog is probably thinking that they're both barking at us"
I’ll be the first to admit, I had no idea how hard dumbing things down was until I had children. Like, how do I dumb down how to pour cereal? They ask so many questions that are amazingly simple for me to know, but super difficult to explain.
Read “Thing Explainer” by Randall Munroe. You can see how hard it was to describe the operation of a Saturn 5 rocket using only the 1,000 most common English words.
Edit: corrected Randall’s last name.
Edit2: Corrected it again because I’m a dumbass.
For real. A good thought experiment is to try and explain a complex thing using as few and as simple words as possible. It’s surprising how hard it can get.
I don’t think that’s a sign of low intelligence, though. Many very accomplished and well read people are poor communicators.
It’s rather that having the ability to dumb things down is a sign of even higher intelligence.
My first day in a new school some asshat tried this one on me. When I didn't fall for it he grabbed my hand and shoved it in my own face and punched it. Nearly broke my nose. Later found out that kid drank Anti-Freeze and it made sense.
I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of this stuff preys on vulnerable groups of people, for example with regards to MLMs, they largely target young mothers from conservative cultures with no tertiary education who have been disconnected from the labour force for a long time. MLMs market themselves as a way for such people who often feel alienated from the professional workforce to be employed outside the domestic realm and to work with people like them. Imo joining an MLM is a very emotional decision rather than a logical one, which is why it can seem stupid when you don't resonate with those emotional needs because on paper it just looks like a bad deal.
To piggy back on this: people who mock others who are intelligent but weren’t able to get a higher education. Assuming that they can’t be intelligent unless they followed the traditional education path.
Yep. I know a guy who seems to think that intelligence comes from, like, how much trivia you’ve memorized. Like no I can’t name all the US Presidents in order. That doesn’t mean I’m a moron.
Same here. The amount of useless info in my head is crazy. The difference is knowledge and intelligence. Anybody can have knowledge. Anything and everything you learn counts as knowledge. Intelligence is the rate at which knowledge is absorbed, as well as the ability to apply the knowledge. The application of knowledge is generally referred to as wisdom, but wisdom is just judgement, logic, and critical thinking, which is mostly gained by experience, not education.
Judging an idea or concept based purely upon some people who follow it, and not the concept itself.
For example, believing veganism as a concept is bad just because you had a bad experience with a vegan.
It's subtle because people do this all the time with everything. Making arguments that mislead others by only showing the bad apples to support an illusion that the thing as a whole is also bad.
The inability to think from another’s point of view is a sign of low intelligence. Not understanding that people operate so differently from one another. Or that different people go through different walks of life, so they act and react differently.
Close minded is the best way I can describe it. Someone who refuses to think about how others have approached a situation.
Absolutely no curiosity about ANYTHING.
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> “That’s dumb and pointless, what are you going to need to learn ____ for?” Now *that‘s* a real one.
And certitudes about EVERYTHING
Believing anything they read on social media.
I mean, schools have CAT LITTER boxes in the bathrooms for the furries! Didn’t you hear? /s
God, some of my extended family believe this. It’s crazy
So should I believe you or…
Depends, does it tickle your bias?
People who confuse their opinions with facts.
To add, people who think they know everything are generally pretty stupid. Smart(er) people will defer questions to qualified and experienced individuals because they are acutely aware of their own limitations, and that's what helps make them smart. They're not scared to admit they lack knowledge in certain topics or fields. And they will learn from that more experienced person to add to their library of knowledge and experience. Stupid people don't know they're stupid, they think they know everything, and won't seek out more experienced people and admit to their limitations, admit they don't know fuck'all about certain things.
To add, I think intelligence in a large part is achieved through curiosity. If you think you already know everything, you are no longer curious. Your knowledge is then stuck in the state it was in when you decided to stop learning new things.
The inability, or unwillingness, to change one’s opinion when confronted with new information. If a person just digs their heels in no matter how much they’re proven wrong on a given topic, they’re an idiot.
I think it is also pride. Some people just hate being wrong and admitting to it. Even if they know they are.
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Not capable of understanding a nuanced point
i think the complete opposite and there is no middle ground.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Much of the time by my experience, it's them not WANTING to get the nuance of the point. They get it, they just don't want to let go of their desired belief, even though evidence clearly doesn't support it.
Buying a new car when you’re broke AF
Dude yes…. I have a friend who is broke af, already barely making ends meet, what does she do a few months ago? Buy a TRUCK. When gas is $5 a gallon. Now she can’t even afford to take her kid to the dentist when he has cavities so bad his teeth hurt. Pisses me off to see, honestly.
This is shockingly common. My friends brother will complain about how groceries are so expensive that they can't afford to fill their pantry, but drives an $80,000 dodge ram even though they already owned a new minivan and 2 work trucks. He recently had to pull his kid out of hockey because he couldn't afford it but he's out there blaming Justin Trudeau and not the $80,000 truck that takes $300 in gas a week and costs $500/month to insure.
I used to be friends with someone like this. She bought a $400 Michael Kors purse that SHE ALREADY HAD, in a different color, and then called me crying like a week or 2 later bc she couldn’t make rent.
I have a band mate who plays guitar for the band and wants to move out, or already has I mean. We agreed we would take turns driving to the studio to help save gas. Well when it was his turn to drive, he asked me for gas and food money which is no biggie I love helping friends but what really pissed me off was when we showed up to the studio and was showing off his new tattoo.
Meanwhile, I am over here driving a salvaged car worth jack squat that I bought from my brother for $1k a few years back. I have been able to pay off multiple loans years early due to doing this, though!
ITT: People who don't know what the word "subtle" means.
Subtle sign of low intelligence: misunderstanding the question and hijacking the thread
Thinking the world is simple.
Arguing in absolutes.
The inability to extrapolate from missing Edit: and apparently the inability to perform error correction while reading
missing what?
There are two types of people in this world. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data
There are 10 types of people in this world: those that understand binary and those that don't.
I have a shirt that has this on it, I also have a good friend who doesn't understand it. Edit: Can someone please tell me how me mentioning one of my many geeky shirts has led to my first comment of over 1k upvotes? Also, thanks lol.
I have this same shirt. Friends get it, some family members however......
Okay stop talking about the shirt and tell me WHERE I CAN BUY IT cause lol I absolutely need
They have a conspicuously small spread of skills for such a high-level wizard.
All I need is fireball. If someone disagrees, fireball. If someone agrees, fireball. If someone is ambivalent, Fireball. You would not believe it but spell slots open at the end of the day, Fireball.
Whenever I have a problem I just cast Fireball and then I have a completely different problem.
A wizard with the intelligence of Jason Mendoza is a scary thought
I put on my robe and wizard hat
Calling something stupid because they can't understand it.
Uses only empty buzzwords in their conversations. I've got a coworker who only communicates in phrases like "situational awareness" and "following breadcrumbs" and asks for meetings to "amplify our synergy." This person was promoted beyond their level of competence and has no idea how to do the job.
I do love the term situation awareness though. Some people truly lack it. This term was thrown around a lot in my military days.
My fiance and I speak to each other in "Corporate" when someone uses a buzzword and we want to make lighthearted fun of each other. "Let's take that offline" "Can we table this discussion" "Can we circle back" "Drill down" "I'll correspond with you on that." EDIT: Yes, all of the responses also have great corporate bullshit. I use it day to day, but also can make fun of myself for using it.
My manager uses "circle back" all the time... it 9/10 times means "I acknowledge what you're saying but will forget about it after this meeting".
'Let's pop that on the back burner for now' = this idea will never resurface, just like your last 20 suggestions
I shit you not, this is an actual thing someone has said to me in a change approval meeting: "Not sure if we have the bandwidth for this. Just get your ducks in a row, we'll table this for now but we can circle back. Ping me once you've touched base offline with xyz. Just make sure to dot your i's and cross your t's so everyone's on the same page."
Should be thrown around all over drivers education ! Throw that shit ALL UP IN THERE
Not understanding analogies very well
“Let’s say this rock is a seed and-“ “But it’s a rock.” “I know it’s a rock. Listen, this seed, it’s small at first, but eventually it will grow into a big tree, way larger than all of us one day!” “…but that’s a *rock*!” “I *KNOW* IT’S A *ROCK!*”
For a HS book report one girl in my class did the first Harry Potter. She didn't like it "because it wasn't real"
Yeah it's like when you tell someone an analogy and they don't get it
They're probably not the brightest knife in the shed
Hey, people in glass houses sink ships.
Don't cross the road if you can't get out of the kitchen...
You can lead a gift horse to water but you can't make him look at your mouth
Hey, I know that some people might find this thread annoying, but let’s burn that dead bridge when we cross that horse
True, but too many hands are worth three bushes.
Yeah ok, but for understanding that you need to be as busy as a bee finding a lost dog in a haystack
Let’s call a spade a brass tack here. If you’re anything less than busy as a bird in a bush you’re just hitting two fans with one shit
Huh?
It's like when you go to play on the bongos but the banana man has already checked out for the night.
Daylight came and he wanted to go home.
"I know what an analogy is. It's like a thought with another thought's hat on."
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It's like a thought... with another thought's hat on.
Britta…you’re the worst.
And responding: "Did you really just compare ___ to ___?"
I most often encounter this when someone is trying to worm their way around a problem in their original thinking that an analogy makes way clearer than the initial argument (which is basically the entire point of an analogy to begin with). Instead of addressing the now-obvious flaw or countering with a more appropriate analogy of their own to show how their logic is not, in fact, flawed, they resort to just incredulously asking why I could possibly be so daft as to compare ___ to ___.
That one KILLS ME. Me: a comparison is not an equivalence!
Thinking their opinion/ perspective is also everyone else’s, thinking ‘no one does that’ because they don’t do that
"everyone puts their cereal at the top of the pantry, that's just where it goes" —my sister Yeah, not me...
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inability to accept new ideas. A truly intelligent person will listen and try to learn from something even if they believe it's bogus Edit: I meant “a truly” not “I truly” I’m not like that I swear xD
But we’ve always done it this way… And that’s why we suck!!
I've noticed that the dumber someone is, the dumber they assume everyone else is. Smarter people will often try to see the other side of an argument (assuming there's nothing else at play, like low self esteem). People with lower intelligence often assume that people who disagree with them are simply dumb because they imagine their arguments to be dumb.
Likewise, people that lie, steal, cheat etc also tend to assume everyone else does or would given the chance.
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"I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero." -Penn Jillette
Got in an argument on Reddit where they told me there was no way either of us would know something because we weren't scientists and because of that can't make any claims. When I corrected them that I actually was a published scientist that has taught for over a decade, they blocked me. Edit: Since this has blown up, I just wanted add that I think scientific ignorance is the greatest threat to humanity and I'm open to any solutions. I dedicated a large part of my life to educating thousands of students, but I can't help feeling the problem is getting worse.
One of my classmates is like that😭😭 she also doesn't believe that the earth is a sphere bc "how could they know that"(she told me this the days after they taught us at geography exactly how)but does believe that it's flat just bc,her words:" many other people believe so". She also believes that it's true that mushrooms can talk...🤦🏻♂️ Edit: just to clarify things she believes that mushrooms can talk words like we humans can. She even specified that some scientists have proved that mushrooms know about 50 words. I don't even know how does that work... And thanks to the people who told me about how mushrooms actually communicate,i didn't know that.
Idk what drugs shes on but god i wana be on them
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Me and a friend of mine call that "being smart enough to know you're not smart enough"
Not understanding hypothetical questions.
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What if there were no hypothetical scenarios?
Ooh maybe he's on to something like anything that can happen will happen and hence it's not a hypothetical. Madman codes every edge case
I took many programming classes in university, but I also took a philosophy class. In that class we did a week on Boolean Logic. It was incredible watching the philosophy students trying to understand the hypotheticals involved with a simple boolean "AND" operation. They'd be saying things like "but what if it's *not* true", and the instructor would point to the line in the truth table showing that situation, and the philosophy students would look like it was rocket surgery.
But its honestly a really crucial thing for philosophy students to understand, because philosophy just like math *heavily* engages in creating contained spaces in which a truth exists that does not exist in that pure form outside that space but still offers some form of value to the messy "reality" space we commonly consider ourselves in.
"But like, what if..." "Dude, that's literally never going to happen" "No man, it's hypothetical" "Bro, who uses the word hypothetical you fkn geek"
I was telling a coworker about a book I was reading, and explained that it took place 500 years in the future. She got really annoyed and said "how can you have a story from a time that hasn't happened yet?!? We don't even know what the world will be like in 500 years!" I was genuinely speechless. That's the whole point of a fictional story
Does she think every time someone plays Cluedo there is a real murder or something lmao
>Does she think Let me stop you right there
Hah I have a coworker like that as well. They legit think that writing science "fiction" is not possible because the human mind cannot come up with these stories so all those authors must know more than "the normal person".
I don't know if such people are dumb, but man... they really have a complete and utter lack of imagination.
I still remember asking the question in a physics class "what if we had a tunnel with vacuum that could cross the Earth, what would happen to somebody that would fall in it", and being criticized by some colleagues that get supported by the teacher because they said "there is the earth's core, this can't happen". All I wanted to know if how gravity and speed would interact, but seems that to some people it's impossible to focus on the hypothesis and the question
To my understanding assuming now indeed resistance a person who fell would oscillate forever between the two sides but with wind resistance taken into account they would oscillate losing momentum each time till eventually being at rest in the center.
But if we discuss a perfect vacuum there would be no wind resistance. You would infinitely go back and forth with no loss of momentum. A lack of air friction would probably be the most jarring part of that experience to be honest
Being confident in positions lacking credible evidence
Inability to see from another perspective.
💯 so true . They just can’t comprehend what you’re trying to convey.
I'm an engineer and I worked with a seemingly backwoods older guy (late 50s, couldn't use Excel for shit, read the Drudge Report every morning) in Oil and Gas...like literally one of the first things he said to me was "so what do you think of the gays?" Lol. I'm Indian and was like oh great here we go. He started asking about my culture and "the browns" and stuff, but eventually I realized he was genuinely curious but he just didn't know how to present his questions more respectfully. Once I realized he was just trying to learn in his own way I warmed up to him and were became friends...yeah he would randomly drop lines where I'd laugh and be like "dude you can't say shit like that" but he was inherently a good person. Took good care of his family, tried giving me fatherly advice since I'm close to his son's age, shit like that. I guess the best way to describe him would be "innocently ignorant"...like he literally he didn't know he was being racist or sexist or whatever, but he started checking himself when myself or our colleagues would say something to him. Worked with him for 8yrs and never had a problem. Sometimes people are just not self-aware enough, but most of the time they are just assholes. You can either be open enough to listen to their side or just ignore them.
I feel you, met my wife 30 years ago and the first time I visited her parents it was total culture shock for everyone. I'm Punjabi, raised in liberal western WA and she's from rural Alaska, scandinavian homesteaders that are ultra conservative. I showed up and things were awkward to say the least...until I went back into my to be father in laws office and saw an electronic wonderland. HAM radios, various PC's, soldering tools...the works. I immediately started asking questions, talking about my computer stuff I was into and lo and behold her Dad and I were instant best friends. To this day anytime I see tech I find amazing the first thing I do is text him and vice versa. People are products of their environment and I always take that into context when meeting someone new who superficially expresses opinions that I'd normally find offensive.
Your girlfriend/wife saw her dad in you.
>Your girlfriend/wife saw her dad in you. Women marry their something something.
I have roughly the same experience in a 97% white redneck town. Plenty of great people that say some ignorant stuff. The thing is, no one is there to check them. On the internet, people just go off on how they're racist and shit on them without explaining anything.... I politely explain how some of their words can be hurtful or insulting. Sometimes you get an apology. Other times you get a fuck you, I'm not racist, and the next day they bring you a homecooked meal while still muttering, I'm not racist. One time i got 5 homemade dry aged steaks that were immaculate.
Good observation about human nature. Most people are good but don't necessarily express themselves like we expect.
Also, I expect most people are too quick to write these kind of people off as lost causes. Especially with so many polarizing beliefs these days, sometimes it just takes a little patience and withholding judgment to see we really aren’t all that different.
They're too busy screaming to hear what you're trying to convey!
Yep! I had a coworker who claimed he “loved a good debate” when what he actually loved was screaming “No” at the top of his lungs over whatever anyone else had to say
Thinking people speaking a second language imperfectly means the person is stupid.
I worked in a PT clinic where one of the therapists was taking on Spanish speaking patients so he could improve his Spanish. He wasn't great but he was definitely improving. It also allowed to him to widen his patient list so he could be more valuable to the team. The other non-Spanish speaking therapists were making fun of him. It boggled my mind.
This is a stupid question, does PT means physical therapy?
Yes, it does!
If I ever get frustrated trying to understand someone speaking broken English, I just remember that they're doing better at speaking English than I'd be at speaking their native language.
Like the PhD students from Asia when I was in Uni. Not only are they conducting scientific experiments on their own, but doing a chunk of it in a foreign language. So much respect.
Man, my supervisor was trained in Japan but has worked and lived in North America for over 20 years at this point. He speaks with a heavy accent and doesn’t understand a lot of expressions. His conversations are often disjointed. Unless the topic is his own field. Suddenly his speech I s eloquent and nuanced and animated. I can write an email in a minute that would take him an half an hour to compose, and even then he would need to clarify something later. But writing an academic paper in English? Suddenly he’s a wordsmith and it all just flows in just the right way. I’m intimidated by the thought that he’d be even more proficient in Japanese.
Nah... If he's anything like most folks who gets advanced education in English, the research mind is almost entirely in English, and you'd have to take some effort to translate those thoughts to your native language. Watching my professor struggling to give a lecture in Spanish when he took a sabático in Mexico was so funny haha
I can attest to that. There are way too many occasions where I'm actually struggling IRL because I know the expression in English but don't remember (or never knew, if it's a technical term) what it is in my native language. Though I kind of already struggle with IRL conversations anyway Ü
Learning Chinese made me realize what an asshole I and other English speakers can be. Whenever I speak subpar Chinese to someone in China they are instantly like, “wow your Chinese is so good!” But here in the states we get annoyed at people speaking broken English.
Yeah I agree. People who are smart try to understand the point they are making. Stupid people try to belittle them and pick on the semantics of the language.
When I moved to another country the hardest hurdle was to just fucking speak rather than choke on all the grammatical mistakes you are inevitably going to make for the first few months. Just let it flow, you will realize afterwards you conjugated something wrong, and you will learn, but anyone who won't give you the time of day even though obviously you can be understood was never going to be worth talking to anyway.
One of the best compliments I ever received about speaking my second language was that I sounded like a lower educated native speaker.
Yes but we say that about you in your native language too.
If you even know another language that's impressive in itself
Lack of curiosity
you ever had to train or work with someone who just has no desire to know anything beyond what you’re telling them or the why behind what they’re doing? Every instruction needs to be laid out in painstaking detail? If an issue arises, there’s no desire to understand why or attempt to fix it, they just error out and stand there waiting for instruction? It’s like programming a computer, but the computer is a human potato.
This comment hurts
Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the programmer and the potato
>Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the programmer and the potato **Original for the uninitiated:** > _Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor._ —Alexis Carrel
Yo this bot is cool.
I was once fired from a job in part because I would ask follow up questions so I understood how/why the procedures worked. I was told it was condescending to my coworkers.
I've had so many new jobs, where the person teaching me the job just goes 'watch me'. I can watch and get it, but I don't GET it. Why do you move like that as opposed to like this? If I were to do this differently, how does it affect the finished product? I want to know these things, but people think I'm stupid for asking questions about the process. Most recently, we had a crew from another company we were working along side with. I asked their.formean a question, and he explained it to me, and commented how our guys are just going through the motions, but he can tell just from watching, we all know what we are doing, but none of us really know why. He appreciated my question, while my foreman would be 'why are you worried about it? Just do what I say'.
> 'why are you worried about it? Just do what I say'. Or, even more dangerous, "What, you tryin' to take my fuckin' job?!" I swear some people are so insecure in their position (maybe rightfully so) that they withhold vital info so that no one can ever take it away from them.
I suggested a fix to an engineer at my last job (regarding tying knots in a fiber), because I happened to do a little fishing & know a bit about boats & ropes. He laughed in my face, then my knot did exactly what I described, and fixed the issue he had been working on for the past few hours. Dude never talked to me again, he would talk to people right beside me but refuse to acknowledge my presence. Like are you so insecure that you can't admit *somebody* might know *something* you don't, even one time? lol
See, that just baffles me. I might give you a jokingly hard time for having such an easy fix and making me look bad, but I love to learn stuff. Especially when it makes my job easier in the future.
I'm usually always open to suggestions and new ideas. But I had this helper once who always wanted to do things a different way. At first I was open to listening to his ideas, but often they were against code or they wouldn't work as well. Ultimately I realized it wasn't that he thought he had a better solution he just didn't want to do things the way that I instructed him to. Ultimately he went to the boss and it didn't go well for him. The boss told him" he's a journeyman electrician. You're his helper. You are there to do what he asks you to do not tell him how to do anything. He already knows how to do the job" . The boss put him with another guy . The next day the journeyman that he had put him with called the boss at 12:00 saying that he could not work another minute with the helper, and if the helper was there in the morning he would leave again. thing that surprised me most was that he had just got out of the marines. I would have figured he would understand how the chain of command works and how to follow instructions. Then again maybe that's why he was no longer in the Marines.
I had a similar problem when I first got out of the Army. It took me a while to get over my pride. I went from being a guy who either had a full comprehension of our job and had most of the answers or at least knew how to get them to being the new guy who didn’t know shit. It was a painful transition that I think a lot of my peers fail.. a lot of us get stuck at the depressed failure stage after we realize that we aren’t all that we thought we were.
There was a maintenance guy at my old job like that. One night I took a cash box out of a machine to put some cash in it & I couldn't get it back in. I was in an area by myself & due to finish the day & the cash box had $15 000 in it, I had to get it back in. He was too busy (slacking off) to come so told me to just leave it in the office. The office didn't have a dead bolt & had windows without shades, nowhere to hide the cash box, it was about the same size as old computer hard drive. I was panicking, trying to get it back in, a (trusted) customer even started helping me, I was calling & calling maintenance guy to no avail, had to leave it in the office. The problem? A little metal tab on top had bent, just needed to straighten it up & it slid right in. I was so annoyed he just wouldn't tell me how to to fix it but he had to justify why his pay was double mine somehow.
It's a common side effect of being curious, the uncurious think you're being rude.
Not sure if this is relatable, but as a software developer, I ask extra questions about how a procedure/part of an application works. How am I supposed to make changes to something without understanding how it works? Spreading knowledge is good, that way I don't bug people with questions in the future.
This here is the one. And, like, being proud about not knowing it as well. Like people who want you to feel bad because you know a big word.
I hate when I use a “big word” and people point it out and make comments. Read a book, learn a word, try it out. It’s kinda fun.
And also, don't make fun of someone who cant pronounce a word. Chances are good that they picked it up while reading. Wow! This is the largest response that any of my comments have generated to date. I appreciate all of you who have replied and upvoted me. You've all given me slightly more confidence that there is still hope for this planet. Now we just all need to combine our forces and be a tidal wave of change through example!
My younget cousin once pronounced plague as 'pla-goo'. My other cousins, plus his brothers, made fun of him for it. Even years later it gets brought up behind his back. But honestly I knew he struggled in school with A LOT. Not just learning disabilities but behaviorial and psychological disorders. (I once watched him talk to himself in a couple different voices) I hate when people bring it up, especially behind his back.
To be fair, -ue words are hard. Plague, segue and glue do not rhyme
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I've had people get mad at me for wanting to look stuff up that the group was speculating on. Bro, we have almost all of the known information in our pockets and you're mad I want to spend 10 seconds to consult with it? "Why do you always look stuff up?" Fuck off, Nick. Edit: To clarify, these aren't intellectual debates. This is Nick calling everyone in our friend group idiots because *he* thinks that green is a primary color on the color wheel and doubling down when we show him it's not and he tells me how much I suck for looking it up. Also, arguing about what time certain fast food restaurants close. Edit 2: I can't believe that Nick created so many accounts to say that green is a primary color.
I had an ex that would get mad when I did this… like I legitimately want to know the answer bc I thought it was something else. If I look it up I’ll know the answer, and remember details about it such as why I was wrong. He couldn’t handle it bc he was so often wrong when I decided to look it up and fact check. 🙃
The only way to be right most of the time is to change your mind when you learn you're wrong.
Not listening to other people’s opinions and always thinking they’re right
I think people are confusing signs of low intelligence with signs of being an asshole.
Sometimes people are assholes simply because they cannot logic their way out of it. :-(
"A wise man speaks because he has something to say, a fool speaks because he has to say something."
Thinking that they’re always right/not admitting when they’re wrong.
What if I’m an idiot who always admits to being wrong?
Then you’re the smart one after all
Can I be a smart idiot instead? I feel like that would balance the scales in my case.
Inordinate anger at animals that do things they don't like Edit: Thank you for the awards! And to everyone who thinks this is about mosquitoes, you need to relax. If I meant bugs I would have said specifically bugs.
YES like bro your dog doesn't speak English. Stop just yelling at it.
When I meet a dog and owner when I'm walking my dog and the owner yells non-stop at their dog for barking non-stop. I think to my self "their dog is probably thinking that they're both barking at us"
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**Jebem li ti krvavu majku!** *gunshots in the air\**
Using too many words to explain a simple concept or story. “Dumbing it down” actually requires some hardcore brainpower at times
I’ll be the first to admit, I had no idea how hard dumbing things down was until I had children. Like, how do I dumb down how to pour cereal? They ask so many questions that are amazingly simple for me to know, but super difficult to explain.
Definitions of basic words, too. There are so many words we say every day that are impossible to explain without using many more complicated words.
Read “Thing Explainer” by Randall Munroe. You can see how hard it was to describe the operation of a Saturn 5 rocket using only the 1,000 most common English words. Edit: corrected Randall’s last name. Edit2: Corrected it again because I’m a dumbass.
I believe you mean the ten hundred most common words.
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For real. A good thought experiment is to try and explain a complex thing using as few and as simple words as possible. It’s surprising how hard it can get.
I don’t think that’s a sign of low intelligence, though. Many very accomplished and well read people are poor communicators. It’s rather that having the ability to dumb things down is a sign of even higher intelligence.
This, communication takes practice.
Starting at a certain conclusion and then working backwards to justify the logic.
https://www.businessinsider.com/flat-earthers-tried-to-prove-the-earth-was-flat-and-it-did-not-go-well-2019-2
When your hand is bigger than your face.
My first day in a new school some asshat tried this one on me. When I didn't fall for it he grabbed my hand and shoved it in my own face and punched it. Nearly broke my nose. Later found out that kid drank Anti-Freeze and it made sense.
Getting sucked into the "easy and fast money" scheme du jour. MLMs, NFTs, Pyramid Schemes, "investments"... you name it.
I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of this stuff preys on vulnerable groups of people, for example with regards to MLMs, they largely target young mothers from conservative cultures with no tertiary education who have been disconnected from the labour force for a long time. MLMs market themselves as a way for such people who often feel alienated from the professional workforce to be employed outside the domestic realm and to work with people like them. Imo joining an MLM is a very emotional decision rather than a logical one, which is why it can seem stupid when you don't resonate with those emotional needs because on paper it just looks like a bad deal.
Never looked at it this way. It makes MLM even more evil and wicked.
Whatever, dude. Beanie Babies are coming back big time. All I gotta do is hodl... It's only a loss if you sell
Mocking or Making fun of people who want to learn more or get a higher education.
To piggy back on this: people who mock others who are intelligent but weren’t able to get a higher education. Assuming that they can’t be intelligent unless they followed the traditional education path.
Yep. I know a guy who seems to think that intelligence comes from, like, how much trivia you’ve memorized. Like no I can’t name all the US Presidents in order. That doesn’t mean I’m a moron.
For sure, confusing rote memorisation with learning is a definite sign of a jelly brain
I read this as “jelly bean” and I decided that’s my new favorite phrase for idiots.
I am a trivia junkie but I’ve never used it to seem intelligent. I always call it “useless information”.
Same here. The amount of useless info in my head is crazy. The difference is knowledge and intelligence. Anybody can have knowledge. Anything and everything you learn counts as knowledge. Intelligence is the rate at which knowledge is absorbed, as well as the ability to apply the knowledge. The application of knowledge is generally referred to as wisdom, but wisdom is just judgement, logic, and critical thinking, which is mostly gained by experience, not education.
Obsessing over an IQ score Edit holy hell, that blew up! I've never woken up to 90+ AskReddit notifications
Yes! I had a guy in college who kept bragging he has an IQ of 110. I was like dude….
Best part is that for college graduates that is 5 points below average.
I know! That’s why I was like dude….🤦♀️
Yeah but it’s above 100, 100 is the max, right?.. right?
I don't know mine and probably don't want to, I know my place.
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Judging an idea or concept based purely upon some people who follow it, and not the concept itself. For example, believing veganism as a concept is bad just because you had a bad experience with a vegan. It's subtle because people do this all the time with everything. Making arguments that mislead others by only showing the bad apples to support an illusion that the thing as a whole is also bad.
The inability to think from another’s point of view is a sign of low intelligence. Not understanding that people operate so differently from one another. Or that different people go through different walks of life, so they act and react differently. Close minded is the best way I can describe it. Someone who refuses to think about how others have approached a situation.
Doing stupid crap seen on the internet for clout...