!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
Well maybe not 90% but I do feel like smarter* than average but then again half of the population is so that hardly makes me special.
Try driving in Rhode Island you’ll feel like the number is way higher than 90%
If you "don't feel like I'm significantly smarter than most people" but view "90%" of people, which I think is well into "most" territory, are stupid then one can reasonably infer you're putting yourself into that category.
Additionally, what does stupid even mean? If I were to try to engage with the spirit of your question, I ironically find myself reflecting on a wise insight my uncle once gave me. Someone who would fall under "stupid" if I am to understand your question right. Anyways, my uncle once said that smart or dumb don't have an all-encompassing nature (IQ eat your heart out). Instead, one can be smart or dumb with respect to specific domains. My uncle knows a lot about guns, not so much about the internet.
So to answer your question, yes most people are "stupid" about most things, but are often quite smart in specific fields related to their life experiences. That's why we have experts in various fields of study. You and I are no different, and employing empathy seems to be the best strategy to bridging knowledge gaps with others, if that's your goal.
My take is most people have a lot more intellectual capacity than people think, but the majority don't know how to use it.
Trivial proof;
Ask somebody to solve a propositional logic question. Give them all instructions they need. Then ask them if some person cheated in a hypothetical social situation. The majority instantly solves the latter correctly, the majority has no idea how to handle the former. Note: social rules can be directly translated to propositional logic, the two types of questions are effectively equivalent. The same thing applies to advanced math like statistics and many other fields.
Humans have the capacity. They just don't know how to generalize correctly. They don't know how to deal with problems of an unknown form. The have a hard time following instructions if they feel to abstract. All of this can be trained, if people want to learn. Unfortunately most people don't want to learn.
Most people just don't care enough in my opinion. When it comes to politics, all they want is to be left alone. They just look for the first piece of media that confirms their biases and be content with that. I think that's why conservative fearmongering works so well. All they have to do is to convince those persons that the left wants to tell them how to live and that is enough for those people to trust that conservative media.
Everyone is stupid some of the time and after we've noticed all that it feels like we're surrounded by idiots.
Truth is we're just not seeing the competence.
Human intelligence is segmented and specialized. People who are smart at few things are usually very dumb at others. A person who can speak 9 languages can't do more than basic math. An expert computer programmer, who can't figure out how to keep a plant alive. Etc...
Polymaths are very rare. Very few people have advanced understanding and skills in multiple areas.
Maybe people tend to specialize because they've been told that's how they should do it. The reality is there is no limit known to what the human mind can learn. I've found that I can do just about anything I set my mind to do.
I can do car repairs, electronics design and repair, plumbing (which I avoid if at all possible), music (guitar, keyboard, bass, and drums), painting, drawing, computer systems design and repair, basic programming (powershell and bash scripting mostly), carpentry, farming, chemistry, cooking, hunting, and math. Math was always pretty easy to me until I got into Calculus which kicked my ass initially.
When I was growing up we didn't have the internet or cable TV so I read books all the time. I've read hundreds of novels, and it gave me an excellent grasp of language and a massive vocabulary. Everybody should do that too.
By what standards do you rank us? Half of us are stupider than average. We're all of very limited intelligence - the best we can do is to team together to function as one gigantic brain of humanity, drawing from the strongest qualities of all of us. That way the world can be brought forward by brilliant scientists who are completely stupid in their own way, and who would never survive a week on their own.
Politics are tricky, but I think it's more fruitful to think of people as brainwashed than stupid. The amount of propaganda we're subject to these days is unprecedented.
As for general stupidity, be charitable; judge people by what they're best at. Most people have one thing or another they are great at, and our differences is what makes humanity occasionally great.
Yep. Wanted to ask the same thing a while back, but was afraid of backlash.
And it's well over 90%, I'd say like closer to 95, 96.
I was feeling the same. I saw 90% and was immediately impressed at their optimism.
I think a lot of it is that we all have topics which we are knowledgeable about. Common discourse then takes different topics, and some people will contribute to the discussion who don't understand the underlying stuff so much, they have different interests.
The problem is when you read a tech article as a tech worker, you laugh at how stupid the journalist and the commenters are. Then you read an article on some geopolitical event, or some natural phenomenon, and you take what is written as gospel, and even comment on it on forums, despite not having the same level of understanding as in your favourite topic. And you don't feel you're part of the stupid 90% then and there.
Thinking is hard work and with easy access to pre-cooked opinions online, they don't need to put in any effort.
I feel this, but more along the line of chosen ignorance rather than actual stupidity. Either a new topic us overwhelming or they worry\fear they'll get it "wrong". Also, being from the south, where so much has been politicized, they fear the tribal back lash of thinking for themselves. I don't know what's wrong with me, I was never the type to "go with it".
Yes, myself included.
Excuse me! I resemble that remark!
Well, that's the thing about average person. Half of them are below the average and other half is above.