"If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole." -Raylan Givens, Justified
I believe the same applies to stupid. Yes, you will occasionally run into stupid people (or as the OP states "people being stupid"). But if it happens more often than not, look in the mirror.
"There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid."
I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.
Although perhaps the terminology is a bit dichotomous - smart vs. stupid, which could be misleading also. I mean it's a bit ridiculous to condense ability and wisdom along many dimensions into this single dimension. And it further seems that in common parlance, stupid can mean a variety of things based on context...
Although I get the spirit of the article, I think it's just too much of a simplification to be useful.
I feel like the ability of making connections is relative to the domain, and more learned by exposure rather than innate.
For example, someone doing system engineering will be able to understand how the networking of a system works, while someone being a movie critics will find the hidden meanings and connections in the movies they watch. Similar for a musician.
Probably indeed the semantic is important. Someone can say something stupid in a specific occasion or all the time in a specific domain, but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrounded_by_Idiots for the case that people generally aren't stupid, they're just different - personality, upbringing, culture, etc. Being smart is knowing how to spot those fundamental differences, interpreting them for what they are and adapting your behaviour.
100% and there are a large groups of people who just don't care/motivated about the things you do and that doesn't make them stupid. The trick is not getting caught trying to spend all your time with people who don't care about similar things unless you need them to care.
Also agree with your statement that there is a huge cross-section of intellectual capability as well.
My first-year philsophy professor gave a similar warning. He offered words to the effect that if we (the students) started thinking that the philosophy we were reading made no sense, was idiocy, or just nonsense, pause for a moment and imagine whether we thought it was likely that Plato was an idiot and everyone hasd missed it for millenia, or that we might be misinterpeting something. There’s always the chance that we’ll have an insight that others might not have had, but there’s a reasonable chance the the philosophers we were to study might not be exclusively stupid.
As I am sure many HN type people are familiar with, growing up and into my adulthood, people have often commented on me being "the smart one". It confused me, because I honestly have never felt particularly smart. I have always felt like I have been playing catch up.
I have been a member of a local makerspace for the past couple of years, and one thing that being a member has crystallized for me is that pretty much everyone is smart in their own way. It feels obvious to say, but being a member there really made that click for me. People just think I'm smart because I have interests often associated with smart people, not because my capacity for learning or the size of the set of things that I know are all that different from other people.
The other big thing that I think makes people think I'm smart is that I have absolutely no issue saying "I don't know", or just asking questions about something, like the article says. I think people don't really weigh statements or questions like that into their understanding of the knowledge you actually have nearly as much as if you do something like guess incorrectly. I have a habit of shutting up and letting people talk, and people just assume that I know more than I do :P
There is not really that much deviation in intelligence among most adults. People just have different experiences, and therefore different knowledge sets. The way those sets intersect, and the way that non-overlapping sections are treated during interactions seem far more influential for how "smart" someone is perceived, than the actual size of those sets, or even the rate at which one can change that set (how fast they can learn).
The line of thinking progresses like this - it starts at ignorance, then it comes to the showcased "there are no stupid people" partially because of the still remaining ignorance in the "unimportant" humanities areas usually "STEM and economics is all that's needed to be smart!". And partially because of the combination of self-censoring and social virtue signalling "Look, I'm super duper extremely tolerant and avoid even a slight mention of the "bad words", please praise me!". And then, rarely, a person understands that a) there are no "bad words" and opinion of others is more or less worthless with the exception of friends and family, and b) a lot of people are actually stupid in a clear biological or medical sense. Like for example, the oft incorrectly remembered IQ score. It is quite openly in the definition of that score, that score 100 is around the median. And word median implies that there are not only higher scores than 100. but also lower too. It's really obvious, and after virtue signalling is no longer in the picture, it is very easy to explain.
The primary argument of this article can be simplified and rephrased as “Only stupid people call other people stupid” which really points the finger back at them.
Exactly because calling out someones intelligence, whether it is strong or weak, is the equivalent of trying to be-little someone. And that is a complete a-hole move.
I don't think this is a good marker for intelligence, but I think if you avoid dismissing issues because other people are dumb you will generally think harder and in the end will have a better understanding of the issue.
I have a personal rule that goes along the lines of "If I can't explain why a smart and kind person thinks the opposite of me it means I don't really understand the issue". It doesn't mean that I have to agree with them, but I always try to understand where they came from.
Smart people do not default to thinking that others are stupid.
They go through the answer space, exhausting the other options and then settle on "that guy must be an idiot" with a confidence level somewhere in the high 90%.
It has to be this way, because stupid people do in fact exist.
So there must be a process of which the outcome is thinking that someone might be stupid.
i forget where i heard it first, but people may still forgive you after burning down their house, killing their parents, kidnapping their daughters, but will never for calling them stupid.
I guess I’m stupid, then, because I think a lot of other people are stupid. Like holy crap, so stupid. Have you seen people? They are by and large not smart.
When I was younger, I used to think most people were dumb as well. But then you realize that you are just as dumb sometimes, and your most cheerished people can be as well. It's just human nature. Thinking everything and everyone is dumb can probably be characterized as being stupid, since you're not thinking about this very deeply.
Albert Einstein, who was accused of being stupid in his youth, once stated "We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us."
This has the smell of enterprise corporate positivity. In a corporate setting, you have to keep the peace.
But no, there are absolutely maliciously intentionally stupid people out there.
The other fallacy is the author who says "smart people don't think others are stupid", makes an assumption that this Derek Severs is a " smart person".
There are lots of smart people on all "sides" of the political spectrum, but in online forums (especially Reddit in my experience) people on dismiss the other side as stupid or evil, rather than trying to see the issue from a different perspective and understand the other persons point of view
I think the anonymity of being online brings out the worst in people. Having a discussion in person tends to be much more civil, even if you completely disagree with the other person
This may seem like a trivial article, so it probably won't survive on the front page, but it's one of the hardest points to get across. We see it all the time on HN, where drive-by dismissals are an art form (I'm as guilty as everyone). Often, our main interest in an article is the possibility that the author is an idiot and we can quickly correct them for internet points. Maybe with "correlation isn't causation" or some other perennial comeback that isn't as clever as it seems.
I guess the internet tests you because it exposes you to more stupidity than you might have thought existed, and some of it is engineered to keep you outraged or otherwise glued to the screen. But I think we have a choice between fewer more meaningful engagements and higher numbers of drive-by quips, and we should probably be choosing the former.
Unfortunately, it's another thing made worse by AI, because when the volume of long-form punditry is up 10x due to LLM-generated blogs and social media posts, how do you even choose what's worth engaging with? Increasingly, there's no human on the other end who cares about what you have to say. It's just karma / reach farming at a scale, and it makes no difference if you respond with a thoughtful argument or a singular "this is dumb".
It looks trivial because it is. Overuse of stupid as a label does not mean that there are no stupid people and noticing their existence does not make you automatically join their group.
What about the alternative possibility - the author is a rather intelligent being, but what they've written in this instance is idiotic?
Just because I like to think of myself as a non-idiot, doesn't mean I haven't brought strings of words into existence that were ill-conceived. In those cases, having someone come along and say something like "eh mate - you're confusing correlation with causation here!" is valuable feedback.
> So if you decide someone is stupid, it means you’re not thinking, which is not being smart.
What if, according to the author's definition, after thinking through, one has decided someone really is stupid. Then one's decision that the person is stupid is just true. Isn't it being smart according to author's own definition.
It appears the author didn't think it through essentially making the author "stupid" according to author's own definition.
He doesn't acknowledge it explicitly, but my reading is that the author will acknowledge that he himself sometimes jumps to conclusion. This is his definition of stupid, so he likely does agree that he's stupid sometimes. He's trying to do it less, but it's impossible to get through life without making assumptions -- we don't have the time or energy to thoroughly analyze every little thing.
I am smart enough to realize the smartest people I ever met indeed did not think others were stupid, they considered them to be complete imbeciles instead.
"If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole." -Raylan Givens, Justified
I believe the same applies to stupid. Yes, you will occasionally run into stupid people (or as the OP states "people being stupid"). But if it happens more often than not, look in the mirror.
I like Nassim Taleb's take - the Intellectual Yet Idiot.
He needs to look in the mirror.
"There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid."
I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.
Although perhaps the terminology is a bit dichotomous - smart vs. stupid, which could be misleading also. I mean it's a bit ridiculous to condense ability and wisdom along many dimensions into this single dimension. And it further seems that in common parlance, stupid can mean a variety of things based on context...
Although I get the spirit of the article, I think it's just too much of a simplification to be useful.
I feel like the ability of making connections is relative to the domain, and more learned by exposure rather than innate.
For example, someone doing system engineering will be able to understand how the networking of a system works, while someone being a movie critics will find the hidden meanings and connections in the movies they watch. Similar for a musician.
Probably indeed the semantic is important. Someone can say something stupid in a specific occasion or all the time in a specific domain, but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrounded_by_Idiots for the case that people generally aren't stupid, they're just different - personality, upbringing, culture, etc. Being smart is knowing how to spot those fundamental differences, interpreting them for what they are and adapting your behaviour.
But there are also proper idiots.
100% and there are a large groups of people who just don't care/motivated about the things you do and that doesn't make them stupid. The trick is not getting caught trying to spend all your time with people who don't care about similar things unless you need them to care.
Also agree with your statement that there is a huge cross-section of intellectual capability as well.
My first-year philsophy professor gave a similar warning. He offered words to the effect that if we (the students) started thinking that the philosophy we were reading made no sense, was idiocy, or just nonsense, pause for a moment and imagine whether we thought it was likely that Plato was an idiot and everyone hasd missed it for millenia, or that we might be misinterpeting something. There’s always the chance that we’ll have an insight that others might not have had, but there’s a reasonable chance the the philosophers we were to study might not be exclusively stupid.
As I am sure many HN type people are familiar with, growing up and into my adulthood, people have often commented on me being "the smart one". It confused me, because I honestly have never felt particularly smart. I have always felt like I have been playing catch up.
I have been a member of a local makerspace for the past couple of years, and one thing that being a member has crystallized for me is that pretty much everyone is smart in their own way. It feels obvious to say, but being a member there really made that click for me. People just think I'm smart because I have interests often associated with smart people, not because my capacity for learning or the size of the set of things that I know are all that different from other people.
The other big thing that I think makes people think I'm smart is that I have absolutely no issue saying "I don't know", or just asking questions about something, like the article says. I think people don't really weigh statements or questions like that into their understanding of the knowledge you actually have nearly as much as if you do something like guess incorrectly. I have a habit of shutting up and letting people talk, and people just assume that I know more than I do :P
There is not really that much deviation in intelligence among most adults. People just have different experiences, and therefore different knowledge sets. The way those sets intersect, and the way that non-overlapping sections are treated during interactions seem far more influential for how "smart" someone is perceived, than the actual size of those sets, or even the rate at which one can change that set (how fast they can learn).
The line of thinking progresses like this - it starts at ignorance, then it comes to the showcased "there are no stupid people" partially because of the still remaining ignorance in the "unimportant" humanities areas usually "STEM and economics is all that's needed to be smart!". And partially because of the combination of self-censoring and social virtue signalling "Look, I'm super duper extremely tolerant and avoid even a slight mention of the "bad words", please praise me!". And then, rarely, a person understands that a) there are no "bad words" and opinion of others is more or less worthless with the exception of friends and family, and b) a lot of people are actually stupid in a clear biological or medical sense. Like for example, the oft incorrectly remembered IQ score. It is quite openly in the definition of that score, that score 100 is around the median. And word median implies that there are not only higher scores than 100. but also lower too. It's really obvious, and after virtue signalling is no longer in the picture, it is very easy to explain.
The primary argument of this article can be simplified and rephrased as “Only stupid people call other people stupid” which really points the finger back at them.
Exactly because calling out someones intelligence, whether it is strong or weak, is the equivalent of trying to be-little someone. And that is a complete a-hole move.
No. That's a stupid (pardon me, but the opportunity and all) thing to say.
It _can_ be wielded as such, yes, but saying that each usage of that must be of the petty kind is not fitting the data known to us as reality.
Theory falls flat quickly when discovering there's actualy people who will never think 1 step futher.
I wonder if people who call people stupid for calling other people stupid might also be stupid. But I’m not jumping to conclusions. Just a thought
I don't think this is a good marker for intelligence, but I think if you avoid dismissing issues because other people are dumb you will generally think harder and in the end will have a better understanding of the issue.
I have a personal rule that goes along the lines of "If I can't explain why a smart and kind person thinks the opposite of me it means I don't really understand the issue". It doesn't mean that I have to agree with them, but I always try to understand where they came from.
Smart people do not default to thinking that others are stupid.
They go through the answer space, exhausting the other options and then settle on "that guy must be an idiot" with a confidence level somewhere in the high 90%.
It has to be this way, because stupid people do in fact exist. So there must be a process of which the outcome is thinking that someone might be stupid.
some people are being stupid all the time though. stupid is a shorter way to say it
i forget where i heard it first, but people may still forgive you after burning down their house, killing their parents, kidnapping their daughters, but will never for calling them stupid.
I guess I’m stupid, then, because I think a lot of other people are stupid. Like holy crap, so stupid. Have you seen people? They are by and large not smart.
When I was younger, I used to think most people were dumb as well. But then you realize that you are just as dumb sometimes, and your most cheerished people can be as well. It's just human nature. Thinking everything and everyone is dumb can probably be characterized as being stupid, since you're not thinking about this very deeply.
The issue is conflating words "sometimes" and "systematically". Being stupid systematically and a majority of the time is, well, stupid.
Smart, and not so smart, people realise you can't categorise people in such binary ways
You could replace smart with mature.
It took time for me to mature and see others this way.
Albert Einstein, who was accused of being stupid in his youth, once stated "We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us."
It seems there is indeed room for some humility.
This has the smell of enterprise corporate positivity. In a corporate setting, you have to keep the peace.
But no, there are absolutely maliciously intentionally stupid people out there.
The other fallacy is the author who says "smart people don't think others are stupid", makes an assumption that this Derek Severs is a " smart person".
You see this in political discourse all the time
There are lots of smart people on all "sides" of the political spectrum, but in online forums (especially Reddit in my experience) people on dismiss the other side as stupid or evil, rather than trying to see the issue from a different perspective and understand the other persons point of view
I think the anonymity of being online brings out the worst in people. Having a discussion in person tends to be much more civil, even if you completely disagree with the other person
I believe you are right. I wish this belief was more widely held.
This may seem like a trivial article, so it probably won't survive on the front page, but it's one of the hardest points to get across. We see it all the time on HN, where drive-by dismissals are an art form (I'm as guilty as everyone). Often, our main interest in an article is the possibility that the author is an idiot and we can quickly correct them for internet points. Maybe with "correlation isn't causation" or some other perennial comeback that isn't as clever as it seems.
I guess the internet tests you because it exposes you to more stupidity than you might have thought existed, and some of it is engineered to keep you outraged or otherwise glued to the screen. But I think we have a choice between fewer more meaningful engagements and higher numbers of drive-by quips, and we should probably be choosing the former.
Unfortunately, it's another thing made worse by AI, because when the volume of long-form punditry is up 10x due to LLM-generated blogs and social media posts, how do you even choose what's worth engaging with? Increasingly, there's no human on the other end who cares about what you have to say. It's just karma / reach farming at a scale, and it makes no difference if you respond with a thoughtful argument or a singular "this is dumb".
It looks trivial because it is. Overuse of stupid as a label does not mean that there are no stupid people and noticing their existence does not make you automatically join their group.
> the possibility that the author is an idiot
What about the alternative possibility - the author is a rather intelligent being, but what they've written in this instance is idiotic?
Just because I like to think of myself as a non-idiot, doesn't mean I haven't brought strings of words into existence that were ill-conceived. In those cases, having someone come along and say something like "eh mate - you're confusing correlation with causation here!" is valuable feedback.
> So if you decide someone is stupid, it means you’re not thinking, which is not being smart.
What if, according to the author's definition, after thinking through, one has decided someone really is stupid. Then one's decision that the person is stupid is just true. Isn't it being smart according to author's own definition.
It appears the author didn't think it through essentially making the author "stupid" according to author's own definition.
Does the author think he is smart? And smart compared to whom?
He doesn't acknowledge it explicitly, but my reading is that the author will acknowledge that he himself sometimes jumps to conclusion. This is his definition of stupid, so he likely does agree that he's stupid sometimes. He's trying to do it less, but it's impossible to get through life without making assumptions -- we don't have the time or energy to thoroughly analyze every little thing.
I mean, Einstein said there is no limit to stupidity... Do you think he said it about himself?
I am smart enough to realize the smartest people I ever met indeed did not think others were stupid, they considered them to be complete imbeciles instead.
[dead]
[dead]