It's depressing, man

Growing up being called “gifted” only to reach adulthood and discover the bar is simply really low.

God damn this is too real

“There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.” - Park Rangers talking about me

Related: “I would never want to be part of a club that would have me as a member.”

Thank you for this wisdom

I get the idea and have said similar things in the past, but defining intelligence is where I get hung up. Socially speaking it makes a lot of sense though.

A problem is that people are both very stupid and very smart, just not about the same things.

A lot of “stupidity” you see in the world is a result of anxiety and exhaustion proximately caused by individual poverty and bad infrastructure* imo

*Infrastructure includes hard systems like transit and housing and soft systems like community organizations and government agencies imo

It’s also kind of surprising how much education mattered. When you’re going through it a lot of it doesn’t feel useful.

But then you meet people who really can’t read or write effectively or understand simple concepts.

Even people here on Lemmy are more likely to take the feeling of each word than to understand the sentences as a whole.

Image description: A screenshot of the main character from the film “Idiocracy” looking very uncomfortable with his circumstances.

Yeah, I was always shocked by the popsci factoid stats about communication happening primarily via tone and such, it seemed crazy to me that some people use that as primary meaning and not in addition to fully understanding the semantics of being said, or that they could even be influenced by the actual choice of words even if the meaning is unchanged, but I guess I was just lucky.

What’s really shocking above all for me lately is how few people care about intellectual honesty, and will blatantly go for the most self-serving falsehood no matter how blatant.

I wouldn’t claim something I couldn’t back up in some way not because I’m just inherently a saint - on a purely selfish animalistic superego esque way - I wouldn’t do it because it would hurt my self-esteem to blatantly lie in a self-serving manner because it’s just kinda pathetic to have to resort to that.

I hope so. I really don’t know anymore though, at a certain point it’s a choice. Maybe it’s what they’d like me to think to betray my fellow workers to the man, but it’s harder and harder to justify people falling over and over for obvious corporate traps when alternatives are extremely available and it would take just the tiniest bit of agency on their behalf to go for that and information is more available than ever.

Yeah maybe, but that’s more to do with knowledge rather than intelligence.

IMO, for successful reasoning you need two things:

1. Correct assumptions - what you think
2. Correct reasoning - how you think

The former is tough, even scientific consensus changes often due to new better studies, sometimes due to externalities and the human element etc etc. It’s understandably impossible to know everything about everything.

But the latter is about how you think, whether you’re able to reason properly, your conclusions and steps actually logically flow from your premises which are based on your assumptions.

I think a lot of perceived stupidity isn’t misinformation, but the lack of this second ability to reason properly, and even an unwillingness to do so because the conclusions are unpleasant. It’s like people became (or always were) too comfortable with lying to themselves to avoid discomfort.

I wrote a paper for English in college, which I wouldn’t write the same way today.

I started with a shocking, racist statement that I held up as an example of things that aren’t acceptable. I spent the rest of the paper both refuting that and drawing parallels to other things that shouldn’t be acceptable.

My shocking statement was effectively taken at face value, and I was originally given a D on the paper. I went back and argued it into a B, because it really wasn’t what it seemed at first, if you just read it.

That attention getter sure got attention though. I don’t remember if that was part of the assignment.

I tend to have this writing style often enough that my super power is convincing people to do the opposite of whatever I’m advocating for. There’s at least one famous Lemmy example from me.

Yes because almost everyone in the planet agrees with the sentiment, even the people we consider stupid (who use a different metric).

When I had intense legal problems I found myself being stupid and then regretted decades ago judging all the kids at school who may have had horrific home lives.

Not true, because a fuckton of those stupid people erroneously believe they’re smarter than everyone else in the world. The number of times I have heard “if I were in charge, everything would be straightened out” from these troglodytes is too damn high. I’m actually smart enough to know how insanely demanding “being in charge” and “doing things right” actually fucking is so I god damned know I am not up for the challenge so, yeah, actually they’re still actually fucking stupid. Sorry, not sorry.

Yeah I know: Dunning-Kruger effect.

Emotional space is easier to navigate than semantic space, and people are lazy. The best LLMs have parameters in the multiple 100s of billions and they’re not able to parse at a human-level. That’s more neurons than’s in the human brain (~86B). I’m not even sure what my point is, too lazy to keep the thread. I’ma take a nap. You take care.