To clarify here, I don’t feel like I’m significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying “facts.”
To clarify here, I don’t feel like I’m significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying “facts.”
Keep in mind that you, along with everyone else, know very little all in all.
The things you do know will be important to you, naturally. Their understanding and their importance will also feel obvious, also naturally.
So anyone not knowing these obvious important things will instinctively feel like an absolute idiot to you.
This is a mental trap. Try to avoid it. The less respect you have for others, the less able you will be to really listen to other standpoints and learn from them, leading to a vicious cycle of alienation.
Right, but when these important things are also very basic things everybody needs to know, like how to boil an egg, how to vote, how to dry wet clothes, how to treat people and items carefully and with respect, etc, I don’t have much sympathy for adults who come across as an idiot in these ways, you know?
There’s things that other people don’t know because they’re not as interested in them of course, but that’s not what bothers me, it’s all the stuff they should all know that they’re ignorant of… :-(
I couldn’t boil an egg. I don’t like them, I don’t eat them, and I have no particular need to prepare them for anyone else.
By your standards, I guess I’m an idiot?
So, sure, you may not currently know the procedure. But you could easily boil an egg if you had 60s to google it first.
Some people wouldn’t be able to figure it out. Stupidity isn’t really accurate though in my experience, I think it’s more being overwhelmed and sometimes just having an aversion in general to change and learning. People can often have really bad experiences early in life (ironically, at the hands of people like OP who categorize them as morons for their honest ignorance) that set them up to want to never leave their comfort zone, which is itself again seen as “stupid” by the same people, thus perpetuating the cycle forever.
It even goes beyond this.
Everyone thinks they’re smarter than everyone else. Smarter than doctors, scientists, and engineers. Definitely smarter than whatever the political or ideological “other side” is.
It’s ruining our society. When George Carlin did his bit about “how stupid the average person is”, he forgot to mention how 99% of us assume we skew into the “smarter than average” side.
I can’t have conversations with people I used to respect, relatives, old friends, or even casual acquaintances without everyone blathering on about how stupid these people are or that group is. I hate it.