The strange dichotomy of stupidity

[rong]

This thread makes me want to add something about the people who say, "yeah, he's smart, but he's book smart," as though they are trying to both admit they, themselves, are not as smart but at the same time assert that they are just as capable.

Maybe it means I draw the line at people who are able to recognize intelligence?

[LMNO]

I've been trying to notice how I behave and react to people because of this thread. 

And if I experience something that sets me off, I try to figure out what's going on.

My job is mainly regulatory, so I have to know an entire stack of rules and tax code, and how that applies to the various products and exchanges that pass through the office on their way to gambling whether someone will die on time or not.

Some of my co-workers don't understand all the rules, for various reasons.  Sometimes it's because they haven't heard it before, and I have no problem explaining it out for them.  Most of the time, if we hired the right people, they catch on and everything's great.  But then there's one or two people who just... stare at me when I'm talking to them, and I know they don't understand a single thing I'm saying.  So I break it down, simplify, start over.  And they still are looking at me like a brain dead hamster.  And I grow frustrated, and angry.

So then I think, bringing it back to the abstract, that what maybe pisses me off about stupid people is that I simply can't communicate with them in the way I'm hoping.  Much in the same way we here at PD don't want to go back and rehash topics we've already talked to death just because someone new wasn't here when that happened, I don't really want to have to retrace older ideas that I build new ideas on, just to get someone up to speed.  Even worse when I realize a person won't even have the ability to do that.  So I avoid them, or resign myself to pop cultural references to Honey Boo Boo or House.

The thing is, I know I'm on the other end of it, too, where my eyes just glaze over and I can't make sense of some convoluted international political shenanagin, or when I'm faced with a complex math equation that someone's trying to explain to me, and I just know they're thinking to themselves, "ugh, why don't we just talk about last week's Project Runway or something."

But that's not really the point, is it?  I'm squirming my way out, here.  The OP is about socially recognized retardation vs socially recognized stupidity, and how we treat one over the other.

If we're stripping it down to painful truths, I have adverse reactions to both types of people.  I've never really known what to do or how to act around mentally challenged people -- Volunteering at the Special Olympic when I was a kid was kind of a weird experience because of that.  At the same time, I try to avoid hanging out with the merely stupid, as well.  Even if they're nice, and I know plenty of nice, friendly, stupid people who are perfectly happy in their stupidity, and I simply can't handle being around them.  I mean, I try not to be rude, and it's not like I'll leave the room if they're there, but I just prefer, if I had the choice, not to be around them.

This is really making me sound like a dick.

[Eater of Clowns]

I don't think there's anything wrong with preferring the company of people who are closest to your own abilities. Good conversation is based on stimulation and exchange. If people are unable to provide that with one another, why should they force themselves to engage in discussion? The feeling on the other end is probably mutual, LMNO. I think people have a tendency to avoid talking about things that they have aren't able to understand, and are probably likely to find the topic boring. The behavior, as Nigel pointed out with her comment that intellectuals are often subjects of ridicule, goes in both directions; not a smart thing, or a stupid thing, but a people thing.

We have a new co-worker who's been having a hard time grasping all the little details of our job. The other day he was ridiculed by our bosses because he didn't know the difference between the three classifications of inmates we have at the jail. In our tracking system, each has a different background color, orange for one, dark green for another, and light green for the third.

Later in the day, when they'd left, he came up to me with a pen and paper and asked me to tell him what each of the colors meant. Now he's a pretty nervous dude, so I was pretty sure he just had an anxiety block on the information and rather than telling him I prompted him to try and remember. Ultimately, he couldn't do it. He said thank you, and, earnestly, told me he would go home and study the paper.

Stupidly, I said, "You don't really need to study it - it's three colors."

He looked at me and said, "No, no, I do."

We're all pretty smart here, at PD, to varying degrees but all pretty smart, I think. I could not fathom having to study three colors. I commend the guy for doing it, I think it's awesome that he's working so hard at it, but the idea is incomprehensible to me, and I imagine it is for just about everyone reading this.

The idea I've been tossing around in my head for quite a while, a few years now possibly, is what the most valuable thing is that a person can bring to a conversation. Knowledge is an easy answer. Someone who understands the subject at hand and can present it in a clear manner. But that necessitates a conversation based ultimately on consumption. The person with the knowledge is just a vessel, in that case, spouting it out with little feedback. As an example I can remember a number of times where Cain posted a brilliant piece of political analysis and not a single goddamn one of us were able to provide adequate feedback. His understanding of it was simply too many levels beyond ours.

Intelligence is another possibility, but I think that's what leads us to the OP, a disdain for people who aren't able to "keep up" with us.

My answer is perspective. Perspective is the most important thing a person can offer. It's about people providing a way of looking at things that we actually cannot.

[Eater of Clowns]

By the way, that lack of understanding of the three colors that my co-worker expressed is how I feel about Bayesian reasoning. I'd have to study that like he did his three lines of notes.

The difference is that he actually did that, and here I sit no closer to grasping Bayesian reasoning because I never put forth the effort.

What does that say about the fucking importance of intelligence?

[P3nT4gR4m]

We're all a walking venn diagram of what we know. Stupid people know fuck all so the overlap is small. The other end of the scale - people we consider really intelligent - tend to be mainly posessed of certain stock skills like critical thinking, literacy, numeracy, etc and one or two specialist interests, which are like long spikes pointing off the perimeter. The more expert we are, the longer the spike, the rarer the intersection.

When you are in this position, it's easy to recognise a "stupid" who doesn't understand the basic shit like how to spell and how to count so we maybe try to distance ourselves from them, because the experience is unrewarding. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. A prejudice is born.

Then we forget that not everyone knows quantum theory or integrated circuits or microbiology like we do and when we're trying to explain that shit to a smart person we mistake them for stupid, on account of we're experiencing the exact same kind of frustration we do when trying to explain what 14:30 means to someone who doesn't get the 24hour clock!

Whenever we do this, we fail at being smart

[Junkenstein]

A concept I've mentioned a few times here and one that I beat into myself is "Smart enough to know I'm stupid". Just because you've got a handle on something doesn't mean you've got a grip on EVERYTHING.

Probably worth noting a perception/reality problem here too. Here's an example, in many business situations it can be very wise to play dumb. There's more than a few people I meet that I try to ensure consider me the stupidest man alive. I do this because it tends to result in profit for me at a later date. I'm reasonably certain that if you asked their opinion of me, it would be around the level of "drooling moron". Is that the reality? Well, partly, probably. What I'm getting at here is that just because you think someone is (Whatever) they may not actually be (Whatever).

As an aside, This whole topic needs e-priming to fuck, by the by.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This thread makes me want to add something about the people who say, "yeah, he's smart, but he's book[\i] smart," as though they are trying to both admit they, themselves, are not as smart but at the same time assert that they are just as capable.

Maybe it means I draw the line at people who are able to recognize intelligence?

The "book smart" thing is interesting, because it can be used to disparage people, the implication being that "book smart" is not a useful kind of smart. At the same time, it is also true that street smart/farm smart/other applied smarts are also a valid form of intelligence, and some of the same people who are street smart would also do very well with a more formal, book-based educational setting.

And, of course, there is also the classic condition of being unable to accurately assess one's own competence, and a lot of people who consider themselves "street smart" aren't... but it's always someone else's fault when things go wrong for them, so they are able to dismiss their failures as being a result of outside interference, and not a result of their own misjudgment. The ability to learn from one's mistakes, of course, is a pretty fundamental measure of any type of intelligence.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I've been trying to notice how I behave and react to people because of this thread. 

And if I experience something that sets me off, I try to figure out what's going on.

My job is mainly regulatory, so I have to know an entire stack of rules and tax code, and how that applies to the various products and exchanges that pass through the office on their way to gambling whether someone will die on time or not.

Some of my co-workers don't understand all the rules, for various reasons.  Sometimes it's because they haven't heard it before, and I have no problem explaining it out for them.  Most of the time, if we hired the right people, they catch on and everything's great.  But then there's one or two people who just... stare at me when I'm talking to them, and I know they don't understand a single thing I'm saying.  So I break it down, simplify, start over.  And they still are looking at me like a brain dead hamster.  And I grow frustrated, and angry.

So then I think, bringing it back to the abstract, that what maybe pisses me off about stupid people is that I simply can't communicate with them in the way I'm hoping.  Much in the same way we here at PD don't want to go back and rehash topics we've already talked to death just because someone new wasn't here when that happened, I don't really want to have to retrace older ideas that I build new ideas on, just to get someone up to speed.  Even worse when I realize a person won't even have the ability to do that.  So I avoid them, or resign myself to pop cultural references to Honey Boo Boo or House.

The thing is, I know I'm on the other end of it, too, where my eyes just glaze over and I can't make sense of some convoluted international political shenanagin, or when I'm faced with a complex math equation that someone's trying to explain to me, and I just know they're thinking to themselves, "ugh, why don't we just talk about last week's Project Runway or something."

But that's not really the point, is it?  I'm squirming my way out, here.  The OP is about socially recognized retardation vs socially recognized stupidity, and how we treat one over the other.

If we're stripping it down to painful truths, I have adverse reactions to both types of people.  I've never really known what to do or how to act around mentally challenged people -- Volunteering at the Special Olympic when I was a kid was kind of a weird experience because of that.  At the same time, I try to avoid hanging out with the merely stupid, as well.  Even if they're nice, and I know plenty of nice, friendly, stupid people who are perfectly happy in their stupidity, and I simply can't handle being around them.  I mean, I try not to be rude, and it's not like I'll leave the room if they're there, but I just prefer, if I had the choice, not to be around them.

This is really making me sound like a dick.

I will be honest here, and maybe this will make you feel better: I don't generally enjoy spending time with a whole raft of various categories of people. This includes, basically, everybody who doesn't have enough in common with me to allow me to relate to them, particularly in the arenas of intelligence, social analysis, and education (formal or informal). People with mental retardation make me uncomfortable and I don't like to talk to stupid people for very long if I can help it because it makes me feel like I'm dying on the inside. I will outright avoid conservatives, anarchists, and Libertarians, I become exasperated with people who are intelligent but ignorant or misinformed, privileged liberals make me tired, and I have limited ability to enjoy spending time with certain categories of people I *like*, such as children and old people. I love children, and I love them the most when they aren't talking to me. I am even more likely to spontaneously smile at someone who has a similar skin tone to my own.

In short, on some level I am an intolerant asshole who would like to insulate herself in a special snowflake bubble of similar people if I could.

And that is completely normal, and while it is something to be aware of, it's not something to be ashamed of. We are prone to liking people who are like ourselves, and that's OK.

But on the flip side, being conscious of these internal biases allows us to be more compassionate toward people who are unlike ourselves, especially those who may not have control over the ways in which they are unlike ourselves, and I think that's basically what I'm aiming for.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Needless to say, this whole "compassion" thing is incredibly difficult to the point I don't even bother trying when it comes to shit like anti-vaccine freaks, homophobes, science deniers, etc.

The cognitive dissonance this creates for me, personally, is that I know I'm being intolerant and biased when it comes to these issues, but I think that I'm justified, just like they think they're justified.

[Reginald Ret]

By the way, that lack of understanding of the three colors that my co-worker expressed is how I feel about Bayesian reasoning. I'd have to study that like he did his three lines of notes.

The difference is that he actually did that, and here I sit no closer to grasping Bayesian reasoning because I never put forth the effort.

What does that say about the fucking importance of intelligence?

Maybe your coworker expected there to be another layer of meaning behind the colours?

I agree that effort is a thousand times more important than intelligence.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I don't think there's anything wrong with preferring the company of people who are closest to your own abilities. Good conversation is based on stimulation and exchange. If people are unable to provide that with one another, why should they force themselves to engage in discussion? The feeling on the other end is probably mutual, LMNO. I think people have a tendency to avoid talking about things that they have aren't able to understand, and are probably likely to find the topic boring. The behavior, as Nigel pointed out with her comment that intellectuals are often subjects of ridicule, goes in both directions; not a smart thing, or a stupid thing, but a people thing.

We have a new co-worker who's been having a hard time grasping all the little details of our job. The other day he was ridiculed by our bosses because he didn't know the difference between the three classifications of inmates we have at the jail. In our tracking system, each has a different background color, orange for one, dark green for another, and light green for the third.

Later in the day, when they'd left, he came up to me with a pen and paper and asked me to tell him what each of the colors meant. Now he's a pretty nervous dude, so I was pretty sure he just had an anxiety block on the information and rather than telling him I prompted him to try and remember. Ultimately, he couldn't do it. He said thank you, and, earnestly, told me he would go home and study the paper.

Stupidly, I said, "You don't really need to study it - it's three colors."

He looked at me and said, "No, no, I do."

We're all pretty smart here, at PD, to varying degrees but all pretty smart, I think. I could not fathom having to study three colors. I commend the guy for doing it, I think it's awesome that he's working so hard at it, but the idea is incomprehensible to me, and I imagine it is for just about everyone reading this.

The idea I've been tossing around in my head for quite a while, a few years now possibly, is what the most valuable thing is that a person can bring to a conversation. Knowledge is an easy answer. Someone who understands the subject at hand and can present it in a clear manner. But that necessitates a conversation based ultimately on consumption. The person with the knowledge is just a vessel, in that case, spouting it out with little feedback. As an example I can remember a number of times where Cain posted a brilliant piece of political analysis and not a single goddamn one of us were able to provide adequate feedback. His understanding of it was simply too many levels beyond ours.

Intelligence is another possibility, but I think that's what leads us to the OP, a disdain for people who aren't able to "keep up" with us.

My answer is perspective. Perspective is the most important thing a person can offer. It's about people providing a way of looking at things that we actually cannot.

I like this. Well said.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Needless to say, this whole "compassion" thing is incredibly difficult to the point I don't even bother trying when it comes to shit like anti-vaccine freaks, homophobes, science deniers, etc.

The cognitive dissonance this creates for me, personally, is that I know I'm being intolerant and biased when it comes to these issues, but I think that I'm justified, just like they think they're justified.

Nice and succinct. I think you've pretty much nailed down the heart of  "Stupidity" because I think what you've just described is true of many (perhaps everyone)

Even the dumbest person you ever meet will have a tale of "some idiot who was so thick they didn't even know..."

Maybe a lot of stupid is a subjective judgement call. Made by both the observer and the idiot

[LMNO]

The last few posts make me feel better about myself.  I guess, just like the privilege thing, the point isn't to "fix" it in one's self, it's to KEEP TRYING.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

For me, the entire dichotomy is largely explained by the bedrock of social psychology: the fundamental attribution error. We have a strong tendency to make snap judgments about people's character without considering their situation, except if very obvious cues (such as those associated with Down Syndrome) tell us otherwise. In ambiguous situations we're not apt to spend the extra energy to find out unless we have to, so if someone is borderline mentally retarded but looks very normal, we'll just go with the fundamental attribution error instincts and "normal person" schema of interacting. Considering people's situation takes a lot of psychological energy so we just can't do that all the time.

I noticed this at my old job, where people would call in incredibly irate about some computer issue. Nine times out of ten, they were completely justified in being so angry and had their professional reputations and a lot of client money tied up in the problem. Yet my co-workers would talk mad shit about how stupid our callers were day in and day out. One particular guy who had been there for years, would mute his mic and let out a stream of petty hate toward the caller on just about every call. Even grannies that never owned a computer before (my favorite) would get the 3rd degree on mute.

I'd look at this guy and think, "what a douche," and then catch my hypocrisy. He'd been working in that shitty corporate environment for years being underpaid and dicked around by a site manager that literally could not make a distinction between software and hardware. And who knows what sort of bag of shit he has to deal with when he gets home? Was the abusive stream of epithets related to Tourette's? I struggle with the ambiguous line implicit in the fundamental attribution error as well: does this person's cirucumstances excuse or mitigate their responsibility for their behavior? How will I ever know unless it's super obvious?

[The Johnny]

And if one gets really crazy about it, one could justify just about any behaviour by looking at the why's of a given persons clinical and biographical history, but counter correlate that with the battered housewife syndrome threshold and you get a really muddled frontier.