I was thinking about this. I went to university, and I worked in tech for decades. I met many assholes but I didn’t meet anyone that would fit on the left half of the bell curve (less than 100 iq).
Since I’ve been living in that bubble my entire life, I’m curious of your stories. Have you met someone who was actually quite dumb (not just having opinions you don’t agree with) and do you have an example situation you remember you can share?
Hopefully this becomes more funny than hateful since intelligence is not the value of a person, but it can be funny to read the stories.
I’ve worked with some mentally challenged people in the past and through customer service. I’d much rather deal with someone with limited reasoning skills than someone who is genuinely intelligent. Intelligent people fail to see their own limitations and don’t know when to be humble. Some of the dumbest people on this planet are academics, top of their field, highly educated. Those people don’t know shit about anything because they’re hyper focused on one teeny tiny aspect of the universe. At least the mentally challenged know that they have limited reasoning skills and are fairly skilled at asking for help and knowing their limitations.
Yeah those people can be super frustrating, and they also enjoy playing games, acting not so subtle superior sometimes. Its common that they are assholes, but not always.
Yes. One person in particular comes to mind - very nice guy, but has some obvious learning disabilities. He mispronounces words very often and mistates stuff frequently (a lot of ‘hims is’, that kind of thing). He doesn’t seem to have much of an inner life, though perhaps its more that he doesn’t have the facility with language to express himself well. He also doesn’t seem to understand a lot of things that people around him talk about.
But he’s a kind dude - frankly, that’s the important bit imo.
Most of the other folks I’ve met and considered dumb were seen only for limited duration and in specific contexts. They might indeed be, on the whole, dumb. But I’ve always felt those small interactions aren’t enough evidence of that - after all, I’ve met objectively brilliant people that, in certain contexts, have done phenomenally dumb things. Heck, we all do (or rather, I sure as fuck have).
I can’t get away from the idiot. I have to see him in the mirror every morning.
As far as a funny story: My friends brother isn’t very bright sometimes. My friends computer chair broke, one of the 5 metal supports that lead out to the plastic wheels snapped. My friends brother was learning how to weld so he tried to fix the support and in trying to test the strength of the weld he started bashing the seat against the floor and broke every plastic wheel… lol
It’s incredible how easy it is to remain in a bubble. Family, friends, neighbors, college, work colleagues - all are going to be closer to you than the average person.
Anyone who has worked retail, customer service, or otherwise general public-facing jobs will have this put in perspective pretty quickly.
Indeed, contact with the public will do it quickly.
I work with a long list of clients at my work who seem to lack any type of critical thinking skills whatsoever, a significant fraction of them are apparently functionally illiterate, and a shocking number of them are actually incapable of understanding abstract concepts. These people cruise through life just as happy as you please, at least until they run up against some frustration that they can’t understand at which point their default response is typically to get violently angry, and as an outside observer it’s equal parts fascinating and deeply troubling. I can’t imagine existing that way. Being unable even to read, and with every new concept or technology being an inscrutable puzzle box so terrifying that your only recourse is to scream and tantrum and threaten until someone else comes along and makes it go away.
And yet, most of these same stupid people are highly derisive of smart people. This notwithstanding that without these purported nerds, geeks, Poindexters, and wimps they’d be freezing in the dark as they starved to death. Somehow they’ve managed to get jobs, afford cars and mortgages, and they’re allowed to vote, procreate, and even buy guns. It’s enough to make me never want to leave my IT dungeon or, perhaps, never return from the mountains. But I have to, so here I am.
I interact with truly stupid people on a daily basis. I could tell you all some whoppers from my time in the trenches.
I worked in a call center that involved a lot of repeat calls as a matter of course. Most were elderly, some had mental issues. We had some characters for sure. A lot of people who clearly didn’t have access to a good education growing up, or who burned their brains out on drugs when they were younger, or who were literally high right then and there.
Education and employment level do not preclude stupidity. I too work in stem. I have had antivax colleagues.
I still am amazed at how many engineers I work with came out as anti Vax during 2020-2022.
I don’t think antivax requires stupidity. Some people just don’t trust the health system, and often for good reason. Black people, for example, have faced some horrible things due to the government, in the name of “science”.
I think there are two types of antivax. There’s the distrusting kind, which I think is pretty reasonable honestly. There’s a lot of history behind it. Then there’s the “I’ve done my own research” kind, which are stupid and will buy anything someone else says if it agrees with their preconceived ideas.
I guess it depends on how you define stupidity.
Distrusting governments and distrusting vaccines are totally different things. There is vast scientific consensus that vaccines work, if you’re antivax you’ve made a conscious decision to ignore that, which is stupid in my book. Distrusting government advice on vaccines, depending on where you are, may be totally justified.
Well, again, many groups have has the scientific establishment lie to them in order to experiment on them. I can’t really blame people who have that in their cultural memory for being skeptical of the current scientific establishment too. I can’t view that as stupid. For example, even if the Nazis have the scientific establishment backing them up (they did in some cases), I don’t want people trusting them. I don’t think that’s wrong. It’s often hard to impossible to separate science and the state.
I don’t think that’s happening today though, at least not to a large extent. I think science is a lot more open now, and there’s too many people watching for the same things to happen without us knowing. There are probably some pretty fucked up small experiments happening today, but not on the scale of vaccines. However, I feel it’s important to see where people are coming from, especially if you want to convince them of something. If you want to convince marginalized groups to trust the concensus on vaccines, you need to understand why they’d be skeptical so you can overcome that skepticism.
Doubting an experimental vaccine is different to being antivax.
There no ambiguity on vaccines, the science is settled, and anyone who doubts vaccines as a concept because of localised corruption isn’t harbouring a healthy amount of caution. I call it stupidity, but others might say brainwashed.
There are some I have worked for that also believe the earth is 6k years old and that evolution is fake and that dinosaurs weren’t real… plenty of idiots in stem fields.
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I didn’t meet anyone that would fit on the left half of the bell curve (less than 100 iq).
I promise you that you have. I don’t care what industry you worked in. You were vastly overestimating a lot of people.
I’ve mostly moved in the same sort of bubbles as OP (I think) and while it wasn’t super common, I definitely met people in that bubble, who had to be on the other side of the curve. I don’t have many funny stories about it; people struggling to keep up with their peers in competitive environments are more often sad or frustrating.
OK, there was one kinda funny thing where a PM at a household name tech company cornered me (an engineer with a math degree) to emphatically detail his “system” for craps. I tried so hard to explain why it’s impossible to have a “system” for predicting the outcome of dice rolls, he just wouldn’t hear it. I later told a friend about the encounter who replied “that ought to be a fireable offense”.
That wasn’t the dumbest thing that dude ever said nor the reason l flipped the bozo bit but it was the funniest.
To clarify , he was talking about playing in a casino and wasn’t talking about using altered dice or doing slight of hand where you’re not really throwing the dice.
To be fair, there is a way to bet in craps that minimizes the house odds and gets it to a roughly 52% chance the house will win. This is very simple and pretty boring, i.e. not much of a system. As it turns out, these are the lowest house odds for any game found in a casino.
I spent 20 minutes (I timed it) on the phone diagnosing a tech support issue and instructing the user on how to fix it. It took about 10 seconds for me to realise that number lock was turned off.
The rest of the 20 minutes was trying to get the user to find and press “Num lock” on the keyboard.
About 10 minutes in, they actually found and pressed it. Apon noticing that nothing had appeared on the screen, they tried pressing it again, then announced it didn’t work.
Somehow, just getting them to press the button one more time was not simple, as they now had to begin their logical left-to-right scan of the keyboard again to find this mysterious new “Num lock” button they’d never heard of before.
This person (on another call) would say the name of each key as they pressed it. They would say “Caps lock, A, Caps lock, Enter” when typing a single “A” on a line, but didn’t know what “Caps lock” was and couldn’t find it on the keyboard when asked to press it immediately after having said and pressed it.
Man this reminds me. I was helping an engineer support my company remotely and after a month or so of everything working fine, he emails frantically and says “THE SCREEN IS BROKEN!”
After some time, I finally figured out that he means he can’t log on to the VPN. Probably two hours of testing in and we didn’t figure it out, so we left it. The third fucking day of this I eventually was annoyed and wanted a coffee break, so i told him to reboot again. He actually rebooted this time and it works.
Caps lock had been on for like 3 days. Everything he typed was yelling because he just didn’t notice.
I later met someone in IT at his company who said that this is a fairly regular occurrence from him
That’s actually hilarious. :) Its always the best stories from tech support.
I used to do phone tech support for a device that hooked up to TVs to filter out profanity.
I would give very explicit instructions on what to plug where. It was really common for me to have people unplug everything and start over because they did something wrong, and I had no way of knowing what because they were all unreliable narrators.
On a second, third, fourth attempt I’d often hear a “OH! You said to plug that into the TOP ROW! I’ve been plugging it in to the bottom row.” Or something like that.
A call less than 30 minutes was a good call. Calls over an hour were not uncommon. If I had someone who could follow instructions, it could be as quick as a handful of minutes.
I don’t think we’ve met yet.
Yes bro. I work a customer facing job and drive in traffic. I encounter morons every day.
Yeah, every customer service worker has met loads. 😬
If you haven’t met a dumb person, you are the dumb person.
I’d rather be the dumbest in the room than the smartest :)
Amen. I told a coworker this in a meeting recently that I felt like the dumbest person on the call and I loved it. They’re doing development stuff I never would have thought in my dreams I could do and yet here I am lol
Haha yeah, could be. :)
TIL that dumb is defined as having scored less than 100 IQ.
Anyway, I’ve worked enough customer service to say with some confidence that I’ve met at least a few people who truly just exist and let the world happen to them with zero curiosity.
I’ve worked enough customer service.
I feel this so hard. Nothing like working with the general public to realize how fucking dumb so many are. Critical thinking skills are scarce on this planet.
I did both fast food and big box retail, and holy shit people are dumb. For anyone here who wants to say that’s mean or I don’t understand, I counter with you’ve never had a cheeseburger thrown at you because apparently they wanted a cheeseburger with no cheese and how dare you not know that.
Yeah you are right. It’s not dumb to be on the left side, unless it’s quite far on the left side. And even then, it’s not at all the most important human quality at all.
I meant that I have lived in a bubble a bit, with friends, colleagues, girls all being university students. I have never worked customer service or been in the military.
Many of the examples in this thread are experiences I haven’t had. So I just wanted to ask people about their experiences.
Is being bellow 100 really the definition of dumb?
It used to be unable to talk.
Also if 100 is average being slightly bellow average shouldn’t be considered “dumb”
Yes, I knew someone when I worked in retail who was quite dumb, she was a super sweet person though.
I realized how dumb she was when we encountered a mouse in the back stocking area. It crawled under the door and out to the back of the building. She turned to me and said “I heard the reason mice can crawl under doors like that is because they don’t have any bones”
Me being a biology major with a big interest in all things animals and insects that loves to educate people tried to correct her. I told her about how all mammals have bones and that mice were just very flexible to be able to fit under the gap in the door. I told her about how we used to dissect owl pellets when I was in 3rd grade and put the little skeletons back together. She did not believe me and still thought mice just don’t have bones.
I do sometimes wonder if she ever finished nursing school.
Ah, yes. Boneless mice, also known as terrestrial quadropodes. I’m pretty sure they’re related to the chickens we get boneless wings from.
It would be amazing if they didn’t have any bones. Just a big blob of flesh. :)
Yeah, like I said, she was a really sweet gal. She cared about people, her family, and coworkers. She was a hard worker and I enjoyed having her as a colleague. I really liked her, she just wasn’t very smart.
My brother-in-law heard and believed that cats could squeeze into tight places because they have “collapsible skeletons.” Like, they could sense a tight place and detach their bones on demand and pop them back in later.
Now that’s an interesting one. I don’t get where people get this kind of stuff. Like, do you not pay any attention in science class? It’s some of the most basic of basic biology. But I was also the kid who used to read biology textbooks for fun lol
Not every low IQ person is the same, but generally they are just frustrating to deal with and need a lot of slow, extra handholding. If you give them a paper with directions/explanations, they’re not going to read it and try to understand it. They’re going to ask you to explain it, and they may just give up on trying to understand it. If you need them to look something up and figure it out for themselves, they just won’t. If there’s a consequence, they don’t modify their behavior or seem to care. They’ll do what they’ll do, and whatever happens after will happen after. They operate through the world with really poor understandings of everything that goes on around them, and it doesn’t bother them. Someone else will tell them what to do.
Ive known several MAGA people.
One in particular stands out, she was in charge of processing bills for our company, and she basically got all her propaganda from fox news. The company is/was a civil engineering firm (I no longer work there), we specialized partly in large municipal water projects, dams, water infrastructure, injection wells, large scale stormwater percolation, reservoirs etc.
During the big California wildfires (when firefighters kept not getting water out of the hydrants), the head engineer and the lead technical engineer held one of their once-a-month training lunches, and they decided to go over the California wildfires and the effects on the water infrastructure.
This lady stands up, and interrupts the lead technical engineer (who was going over flow/pressure/friction equations to show why hydrants ran dry when there was so much demand), to insist that the reason California is running out of water is that “Newsom drained the reservoir to protect some stupid fish” and other fox news idiocy. Spent a solid 5 minutes trying to tell a bunch of civil engineers a bunch of “information” about water systems that was so hilariously wrong that it was actually impressive.
That was a very awkward few minutes while HR tried to tell this lady that she needs to let the engineers actually learn how to do the job.
Yeah I have seen examples of this behavior on YouTube. People become very convinced about something and it warps their entire view of reality. And yeah, some people don’t realize that other people can be much, much better at something than they are, and they should listen, not talk in that situation. :)
But of course! One I know well. He’s a very friendly and likable person, and never judges anyone. He has a large social circle, a steady job doing manual tasks. He has a delightful longtime girlfriend. But he can’t grasp abstract concepts, or any but the simplest logical concepts. He hides any lack of understanding with a quick joke, but is highly susceptible to propaganda.
