"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".
> ...but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
This is a reasonable assumption if you've spent your life in places where the average person is well-educated, but, if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated. Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
I do think there's a distinction to be made between "stupid" and "uneducated" but in terms of how you experience interactions, it's a distinction without a difference.
I think it is very difficult to discern innate ability because it can be so easily masked by effort. Lack of effort registers as lack of ability. Sometimes it's hard to keep making an effort when you lack ability. So are you slacking because you are lazy, or are you slacking because it's exhausting?
Sometimes you can help somebody find their smart by sparking their interest. Their smart was there all along. They just needed the right motivation to find it. They can learn all sorts of smart things as long as you relate it to kites, or Napolean, or horses, or whatever they find interesting.
Sure, there are some people with specific intellectual disabilities, brain injuries and the like.
But beyond that it gets woolly - how do you separate aptitude, interest, effort, and opportunity? And even if it were possible, would the work needed to identify a (presumably small) set of 'truly stupid' people really be worth the effort?
> "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.
Even if it's not technically true, IMHO it's better to strike "stupid" from your conceptual vocabulary, because it just gets you into a better mindset to live with others.
That's especially true for software engineers and other people who've often built an identity around being "smart." That mindset usually leads to arrogance and "smart people being stupid."
"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.
While not wrong, this quote assumes a healthy self-regulating society that isn't being actively driven off a cliff by algorithms optimizing everything for short-term benefits.
Meaning that it might actually be that the assholes one runs into all day are in fact assholes.
Even more so when we consider that one during a normal day does not run into a representative sample of society, but tiny tiny bubbles. We made sure to atomize everyone into that and separate the social classes from each other.
__
We can of course not expect our quotes like that to serialize all the assumed preconditions into their writing, but we should remember that those exist when replicating them.
This is a strong anti-signal for me. When you work for someone who thinks every other team / counterparty we interact with is stupid / we could do their jobs / blah blah blah.. hugely demotivating behavior.
This line of thinking is common but it’s only a self serving implicit bias.
Yes, everyone around you could very well be more stupid or the bigger asshole. This is a perception issue void of evidence either way. The people most prone to poor perception analysis are those least capable of perceiving, which is the foundation of Dunning-Kruger.
For everyone else there are things like measures and accomplishments.
Just an FYI but the foundation of Dunning-Kruger is bad math/charting. The data from the experiment shows that generally people understand how good they are at things. But they charted the data on a bad variable.
In my experience, this is true even when they _should_ believe that someone is stupid. It seems that the very intelligent make two errors: humility, and then the same theory of mind error that every makes.
The "humility problem" is well-intended but incorrect; they don't want to claim they're above anyone, at at least in the same of some very intelligent people this is not just a social signal. They seem to think that other people must be just as intelligent as they are, but there's some other explanation for why they don't understand things. This ties into the next problem:
I don't have a clever name for the next problem, but I would call it "the same theory of mind error that every makes." When we try to model other people, we use our own mind as a model. We do this even when we've been proven wrong over a lifetime. We do this when we know better. We slip back into this when we've previously corrected for this. How many extroverts do you know who can tell when an introvert has had "enough" social interaction. It's exceedingly rare. But the extroverts aren't bad people. They just have no real way to slip into the introvert's perspective. They're modeling the introvert as being more or less the same as them, but just with a few quirks. The model fails over and over.
The in case of intelligent people, they seem to have no understanding what a very unintelligent mind would look like, and instead seem to believe that apparently unintelligent people _could_ be brilliant if they just read more, or were not so closed minded. Or maybe they had a poor upbringing, or are dealing with trauma. They don't seem to understand that for stupid people, abstractions are often impossible, impulse control is fleeting, and emotions rule their mind more than thoughts. They cannot really place themselves in the stupid person's mind, so they try to ask "how much would need to go wrong for _me_ to come to such an incorrect conclusion." And so they come up with a false hypothesis, such as "their school teachers must have failed them."
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).
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.
I read and love all from Derek. I like that he always makes you think through, even when starting from simple and stupid ideas.
Personally I tend to dismiss myself as stupid, because many times I detect I'm being misguided by lazyness and not wanting to think things through, which obviously makes me feel so smart that I could spend all day trapped in this stupid paradox.
Smart people typically turn out to be disrespectful towards stupid people if in their life such stupid people made their life more difficult. And smart people often have a good memory.
If they never had any problems with stupid people in life, smart people are in most cases much more respecting.
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.
And smart people suffer [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] exactly because they, first, think that others can have the same scrutiny about things and get surprised/disappointed when they find out how other people reach conclusions. Loneliness is the most common.
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
Only problem is that there are people that are actually stupid in the actual medical sense of the word. And a side effect is that they’re not great at thinking things through.
idk this sort of thinking just feels very “everyone gets a participation trophy” when much of the world doesn’t work that way
Or shouldn't, for that matter, because once we leave bullshit office jobs, real lives kinda depend on an accurate assessment of reality, no matter how hurtful that might be to a person.
Ideally delivered without hurt, of course, but there is only so much one can do.
It's fascinating to see this in things as life-or-death-to-millions-important like global politics, and the you-know-who. And his team of this kind of people...
Fascinating in the sense of "How did you get here!? And can't you see this move will blow up in your face in the near future!?".
I guess if you have 50-60 years of adulthood where you made dumb moves but got away with it...
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.
But generations of philosophers who have described the next couple of thousand years as "footnotes to Plato", and treat philosophy as if it can only be understood in terms of one very dead guy... It turned me off philosophy for a very long time. Maybe they aren't stupid, but they at least lack the tool kit for showing me the merit of their position.
I think it's a question of internalization. When you have internalized the correct way to think about it, it feels obvious. And wrong ways to think about it seem absurd. We stand on the shoulders of giants, Plato being one of them. We have internalized their philosophy. And that's why it feels idiotic.
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.
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.
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.
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
Yeah, no. When someone is constantly being stupid they are stupid. That is what that word means. Sugar coating that is just fake positivity.
"Smart" people realize that smartness is not binary and that there all sorts of things that can influence people's smartness in a situation or on a topic other than intelligence. Very intelligent people absolutely do stupid shit. Emotions, ideology, pride, wishful thinking, laziness, arrogance, just refusing to understand something etc. can make the most intelligent people really dumb fucks.
But there absolutely are stupid people. Sometimes they have the potential to be smarter by actually using the brain capacity they have but don't use for one of the aforementioned reasons. Sometimes people are just really unintelligent; Which is fine. There is no moral failing in this. Being unintelligent but good person is perfectly okay. The real issue here is that we judge people based upon their intelligence – or rather our perception of their intelligence, which is often skewed – rather than what they do with the intelligence they have, something they can control. Nothing wrong with being unintelligent, but being purposefully stupid because it serves your point or interest is unacceptable.
In the end smartness is also an overloaded term that we project all kinds of different things into.
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.
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".
Though, there's also plenty of completely innocent, decent, but stupid people. Be it innately or just as a result of a terrible set of environmental factors
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."
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
> 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.
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.
> What about the alternative possibility - the author is a rather intelligent being, but what they've written in this instance is idiotic?
With respect, I think you're doing the same thing. You picked a word to squabble about while ignoring the context of the sentence. If you take the sentence and replace "is an idiot" with "has an idiotic point", my argument isn't weakened. Neither is the argument in the original article: we make this assumption more often than we should, because the game we choose to play is to be the smartest guy on the internet.
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
The author needs to touch grass and meet more people - maybe go to your local prison or skid row and have a chat to the people there. Prison has some smart ones for sure, but it’s also got some profoundly stupid people; skid row is almost wholly stupid people who have also fried their brains. There are of course plenty of stupid people in almost all other places, too, but pound for pound skid row probably wins.
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.
Of course there's stupid people. A lot of them. It's simply dishonest, manipulative or plain stupid or say otherwise.
If this article was more insightful, thoughtful, etc it would be saying that a smart, decent, wise etc person wouldn't belittle anyone for the combination of innate intelligence and environmental factors that caused them to not be thoughtful, creative, able/willing to learn etc.
And they'd moreover perhaps even take the responsibility upon themselves to try to do something about it - addressing inequality, social and educational systems, changing culture, better family planning, and endless other things.
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.
"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".
> ...but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
This is a reasonable assumption if you've spent your life in places where the average person is well-educated, but, if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated. Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
I do think there's a distinction to be made between "stupid" and "uneducated" but in terms of how you experience interactions, it's a distinction without a difference.
>if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated.
poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education.
these attributes are not the divider between smart and stupid.
I think it is very difficult to discern innate ability because it can be so easily masked by effort. Lack of effort registers as lack of ability. Sometimes it's hard to keep making an effort when you lack ability. So are you slacking because you are lazy, or are you slacking because it's exhausting?
Sometimes you can help somebody find their smart by sparking their interest. Their smart was there all along. They just needed the right motivation to find it. They can learn all sorts of smart things as long as you relate it to kites, or Napolean, or horses, or whatever they find interesting.
Sure, there are some people with specific intellectual disabilities, brain injuries and the like.
But beyond that it gets woolly - how do you separate aptitude, interest, effort, and opportunity? And even if it were possible, would the work needed to identify a (presumably small) set of 'truly stupid' people really be worth the effort?
> "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.
Even if it's not technically true, IMHO it's better to strike "stupid" from your conceptual vocabulary, because it just gets you into a better mindset to live with others.
That's especially true for software engineers and other people who've often built an identity around being "smart." That mindset usually leads to arrogance and "smart people being stupid."
"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.
While not wrong, this quote assumes a healthy self-regulating society that isn't being actively driven off a cliff by algorithms optimizing everything for short-term benefits.
Meaning that it might actually be that the assholes one runs into all day are in fact assholes.
Even more so when we consider that one during a normal day does not run into a representative sample of society, but tiny tiny bubbles. We made sure to atomize everyone into that and separate the social classes from each other.
__
We can of course not expect our quotes like that to serialize all the assumed preconditions into their writing, but we should remember that those exist when replicating them.
This is a strong anti-signal for me. When you work for someone who thinks every other team / counterparty we interact with is stupid / we could do their jobs / blah blah blah.. hugely demotivating behavior.
I like Nassim Taleb's take - the Intellectual Yet Idiot.
He needs to look in the mirror.
This line of thinking is common but it’s only a self serving implicit bias.
Yes, everyone around you could very well be more stupid or the bigger asshole. This is a perception issue void of evidence either way. The people most prone to poor perception analysis are those least capable of perceiving, which is the foundation of Dunning-Kruger.
For everyone else there are things like measures and accomplishments.
Just an FYI but the foundation of Dunning-Kruger is bad math/charting. The data from the experiment shows that generally people understand how good they are at things. But they charted the data on a bad variable.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruge...
>Smart people don't think others are stupid
In my experience, this is true even when they _should_ believe that someone is stupid. It seems that the very intelligent make two errors: humility, and then the same theory of mind error that every makes.
The "humility problem" is well-intended but incorrect; they don't want to claim they're above anyone, at at least in the same of some very intelligent people this is not just a social signal. They seem to think that other people must be just as intelligent as they are, but there's some other explanation for why they don't understand things. This ties into the next problem:
I don't have a clever name for the next problem, but I would call it "the same theory of mind error that every makes." When we try to model other people, we use our own mind as a model. We do this even when we've been proven wrong over a lifetime. We do this when we know better. We slip back into this when we've previously corrected for this. How many extroverts do you know who can tell when an introvert has had "enough" social interaction. It's exceedingly rare. But the extroverts aren't bad people. They just have no real way to slip into the introvert's perspective. They're modeling the introvert as being more or less the same as them, but just with a few quirks. The model fails over and over.
The in case of intelligent people, they seem to have no understanding what a very unintelligent mind would look like, and instead seem to believe that apparently unintelligent people _could_ be brilliant if they just read more, or were not so closed minded. Or maybe they had a poor upbringing, or are dealing with trauma. They don't seem to understand that for stupid people, abstractions are often impossible, impulse control is fleeting, and emotions rule their mind more than thoughts. They cannot really place themselves in the stupid person's mind, so they try to ask "how much would need to go wrong for _me_ to come to such an incorrect conclusion." And so they come up with a false hypothesis, such as "their school teachers must have failed them."
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).
[delayed]
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.
I read and love all from Derek. I like that he always makes you think through, even when starting from simple and stupid ideas.
Personally I tend to dismiss myself as stupid, because many times I detect I'm being misguided by lazyness and not wanting to think things through, which obviously makes me feel so smart that I could spend all day trapped in this stupid paradox.
My experience is rather:
Smart people typically turn out to be disrespectful towards stupid people if in their life such stupid people made their life more difficult. And smart people often have a good memory.
If they never had any problems with stupid people in life, smart people are in most cases much more respecting.
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.
And smart people suffer [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] exactly because they, first, think that others can have the same scrutiny about things and get surprised/disappointed when they find out how other people reach conclusions. Loneliness is the most common.
[0] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00328.x
[1] https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12181
[2] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2020.101465
[3] https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/28009
[4] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43076-023-00313-8
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
Only problem is that there are people that are actually stupid in the actual medical sense of the word. And a side effect is that they’re not great at thinking things through.
idk this sort of thinking just feels very “everyone gets a participation trophy” when much of the world doesn’t work that way
> when much of the world doesn’t work that way
Or shouldn't, for that matter, because once we leave bullshit office jobs, real lives kinda depend on an accurate assessment of reality, no matter how hurtful that might be to a person.
Ideally delivered without hurt, of course, but there is only so much one can do.
Theory falls flat quickly when discovering there's actualy people who will never think 1 step futher.
It's fascinating to see this in things as life-or-death-to-millions-important like global politics, and the you-know-who. And his team of this kind of people...
Fascinating in the sense of "How did you get here!? And can't you see this move will blow up in your face in the near future!?".
I guess if you have 50-60 years of adulthood where you made dumb moves but got away with it...
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.
Plato wasn't an idiot.
But generations of philosophers who have described the next couple of thousand years as "footnotes to Plato", and treat philosophy as if it can only be understood in terms of one very dead guy... It turned me off philosophy for a very long time. Maybe they aren't stupid, but they at least lack the tool kit for showing me the merit of their position.
I think it's a question of internalization. When you have internalized the correct way to think about it, it feels obvious. And wrong ways to think about it seem absurd. We stand on the shoulders of giants, Plato being one of them. We have internalized their philosophy. And that's why it feels idiotic.
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.
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.
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.
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
some people are being stupid all the time though. stupid is a shorter way to say it
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
Yeah, no. When someone is constantly being stupid they are stupid. That is what that word means. Sugar coating that is just fake positivity.
"Smart" people realize that smartness is not binary and that there all sorts of things that can influence people's smartness in a situation or on a topic other than intelligence. Very intelligent people absolutely do stupid shit. Emotions, ideology, pride, wishful thinking, laziness, arrogance, just refusing to understand something etc. can make the most intelligent people really dumb fucks.
But there absolutely are stupid people. Sometimes they have the potential to be smarter by actually using the brain capacity they have but don't use for one of the aforementioned reasons. Sometimes people are just really unintelligent; Which is fine. There is no moral failing in this. Being unintelligent but good person is perfectly okay. The real issue here is that we judge people based upon their intelligence – or rather our perception of their intelligence, which is often skewed – rather than what they do with the intelligence they have, something they can control. Nothing wrong with being unintelligent, but being purposefully stupid because it serves your point or interest is unacceptable.
In the end smartness is also an overloaded term that we project all kinds of different things into.
100%
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.
Smart, and not so smart, people realise you can't categorise people in such binary ways
This. And in a great many contexts, things that we'd call smart are worse than things we'd call stupid.
I'm smart and I think others are stupid
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".
Indeed.
Though, there's also plenty of completely innocent, decent, but stupid people. Be it innately or just as a result of a terrible set of environmental factors
It's an engagement bait by some TED speaker style guy and it is being very successful at that. Just content marketing.
I have been contributing to its success too and continue doing so while typing the next character right now.
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.
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.
> 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.
I know for sure I am stupid because HN reminds me about it from time to time with downvotes when I write dumb comments
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.
> What about the alternative possibility - the author is a rather intelligent being, but what they've written in this instance is idiotic?
With respect, I think you're doing the same thing. You picked a word to squabble about while ignoring the context of the sentence. If you take the sentence and replace "is an idiot" with "has an idiotic point", my argument isn't weakened. Neither is the argument in the original article: we make this assumption more often than we should, because the game we choose to play is to be the smartest guy on the internet.
> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.
The author needs to touch grass and meet more people - maybe go to your local prison or skid row and have a chat to the people there. Prison has some smart ones for sure, but it’s also got some profoundly stupid people; skid row is almost wholly stupid people who have also fried their brains. There are of course plenty of stupid people in almost all other places, too, but pound for pound skid row probably wins.
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.
This is just... stupid...
Of course there's stupid people. A lot of them. It's simply dishonest, manipulative or plain stupid or say otherwise.
If this article was more insightful, thoughtful, etc it would be saying that a smart, decent, wise etc person wouldn't belittle anyone for the combination of innate intelligence and environmental factors that caused them to not be thoughtful, creative, able/willing to learn etc.
And they'd moreover perhaps even take the responsibility upon themselves to try to do something about it - addressing inequality, social and educational systems, changing culture, better family planning, and endless other things.
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.