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.
Plenty
Anyone here thinking that they’ve never met a dumb person probably IS the dumb person lol
I got that comment a few times in this thread. :) Yeah maybe!
It’s just a variation on the old saying: if you run into one asshole, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day long…
Not calling you dumb OP
Wait haven’t you ever had to go to like, the DMV or a Walmart, or a CVS at 11pm? I’m not saying the professions are filled with dummies but the cross section of public you encounter there is sure to have a few dummies.
So, I am normally very skeptical about people yelling about bubbles…but I went from working in IT like you to working blue collar, and thus essentially went from being mildly smarter than most of my coworkers to being very obviously the smartest in the room barring infrequent encounters with others like me.
There are folks around me in blue collar work that are very experienced at what they do and wise in that specific niche due to their experience, but in general my overall mental capacity seems quicker and more flexible than most individuals I meet now, which wasn’t showcased nearly as much when I was with other nerds in IT.
So yes, you’re in a bubble. I had also been in a bubble for many years and had forgotten WHY I had fled to IT and nerd shit, and got a pretty pointed reminder.
Makes a lot of sense. :)
I hear there were some intelligent people on my dad’s side of the family. But my mom’s side is kinda dumb.
My wife’s family has some dumbos as well, dunno how you got away from all that.
Now, my immediate bubble is full of professors, engineers, etc. So, I dunno. It’s a mixed bag, and i kinda assumed everyone had that experience given that i have a few data points of that.
¯\(ツ)/¯
Yes, I have visited the United States of America, thank you for asking
I work in mental health and I’ve definitely met patients who have low IQ scores. However, even without getting into clinically significant low IQ ranges, I can virtually guarantee you that you’ve met people who have sub-100 IQs. 100 is the average human IQ score. You haven’t gone through life this far without meeting people who fall a few points below it, just as you haven’t failed to meet people who score above it. A person with a 95 IQ is not going to be able to be distinguished from a person with a score of 105 by someone who doesn’t have substantial training in assessing IQ (and even then, most experts would have to formally test people to detect subtle differences like that).
In my experience I have come across people who presented as “stupid.” I have worked with rotating casts of temps at a couple of jobs - the “stupid” people are just as common in management as in the temps.
Usually I think it is because they are not present in their moment/don’t care about what is happening, so they aren’t really stupid but are just… vacant. Once you get them talking about a project they are actually passionate about, you can see the light of their intellect. Some folks however really do have a hard time understanding the world through logic, even when they are really trying.
Yes, but I’m of the general opinion that people are usually willfully dumb. If you have passion and drive, I think you’ll more likely than not have some level of strong intelligence.
The definition of dumb is very elastic.
There is one summer student who came to work at my software company. He was in a very specialized and elite program at a top-flight Canadian university. Both his parents were professors at this university.
One day he came to our boss, and said that his family always went to Europe for 2 weeks in the summer, and he needed time off. My boss explained that he had been hired because we wanted to do a special project during the summer, and it would be very difficult to not have him on the team for a significant part of it.
My boss asked the student when the vacation was going to start. The student replied, “tomorrow”.
At first, my boss was angry, but then realized that the student actually had no understanding that this was an unusual and onerous request. That’s about the time I started learning about autism (and later realized that I was somewhere on the spectrum as well, just not as far along it).
I’m not sure I understand the question.
Yes.
Almost all of my co-workers.
If you haven’t met a dumb person, you are the dumb person.
Haha yeah, could be. :)
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
When I was an undergrad in the late '90s, I got a clerical job in the facilities management (FM) department.
The president of the university had a fleet vehicle as a perk of his job. It was a very nice car that was donated by a local car dealer but since it technically belonged to the university, all maintenance was handled through FM.
Late '90s meant that the stereo had a 5-disc CD changer. And the president’s most frequent complaint about the car was that the stereo didn’t work. Every single time he had that complaint, it was because there were at least two extra CDs stuck in the changer.
You had to really force it to get extra CDs in those things. And that happened at least half a dozen times that I know of.
Met one? I am one
