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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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The feeling of the intelligence or stupidity in others is all relative.
For example an IQ around 170 or above makes somebody have a 1-in-a-million level of intelligence, so for such a person 99.9999% of the population feels less intelligent, with the level felt as "stupid" being a lot higher than average intelligence, to the point that for such a person "entry level" geniouses - those people with an IQ just above 120 - often feel "stupid".
And then there is the whole non-IQ factor to the feeling that somebody is "stupid" - for example, intelligence (even the 170 IQ level) can be "stupid" (more broadly "fool", "gullible", "weird" and so on) because of lack of wisdom, life experience (in the sense of having lived, as age by itself means little for those who don't do much living) or even just social awkwardness. (The Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, though a stereotypical portrait, is quite a good example of that difference between "intelligence" and "smarts" or "wisdom")
You could say that IQ is computing power but with the wrong software or bad data, it's still going to underperform.
Personally, I think it's best not to go around passing judgment in such absolutist terms as "stupid" since we're all "stupid" in some domains and often one's "I'm so much smarter than these people" feeling is nothing more than a case of the Dunning-Krugger Effect.
High intelligence people, especially, need to learn that IQ by itself is not enough and take to hearth Socrate's dictum: "All I know is that I know nothing" (or, as I read it: "The more I learn, the more find out I have yet to learn")
There's also what another comment pointed out. It's not so much that most of us are stupid but that we're not really equipped for the internet as a species. We get bombarded with too much crap from all directions, get stuck on echo-chambers, and don't really fact-check, even when we do, because you can't just fact-check everything that's thrown at you 24/7. It's a lot easier to not care, or care too much without substantiating your beliefs.
For example, Covid wasn't the first time the anti-mask, anti-Vax, conspiracy theorist, all-around crazy movement popped out their head. It wasn't the first time money beat forethought. It wasn't the first for much of the negative shit we saw, and yet for me it marked the moment I lost hope for the future of our species, after all, how can we hope to deal with stuff as huge and hard to see as climate change if we can't even believe the existence of a virus that's actively killing us? Are they all stupid for not putting in some effort to prevent this virus from spreading and killing millions? Am I stupid for thinking they would? Am I stupid for losing hope due to listening to all these stories of people fighting masks and vaccines? How many people worldwide actually fought back and resisted? You see it in my own words, I'm sort of convinced the crazies got riled up, and for sure in some parts of the world they did, but the scope of the internet spreads all sentiments on the matter to every corner of our interconnectedness, before we're even aware it's happening. All of a sudden we're seeing conclusions from all sides without checking for how they all got where they did nor how many people actually believe it, we pick one side, maybe skim over another, and decry the rest as insane and sometimes even malevolent. These republicans sure want their voters dead or at the very least are too stupid to understand the dangers of the virus, this bill gates guy sure wants everyone microchipped or at the very least wants the medical world in his hands, these Chinese fellows for sure developed and released the virus or at the very least had it slip from their fingers. How am I supposed to know, or care, for all of it? How is any of us? Is it our personal responsibility to know and clear every fact we can? Spread awareness and fact-check everything? Just shut up and don't get involved? What the fuck do we do, what can we do? Do we fight dissenting voices online? Do we march on the streets over beliefs we might not fully grasp nor could we?
We're just a bit too overloaded with everything to make a good job as a species about anything. At least that's what I think, at least for the individuals that make up our species. Whatever you choose to believe, whatever actions you choose to take in response, someone somewhere will see you and think you're an absolute idiot.... And, I think, there's not much to do about it.
That stuff was mainly an US phenomenon and, IMHO, was quite a good display of how easy it is to tickle people's emotions so that they override reason: mask-wearing and vaccination was turned into a kind of tribalist signal by manipulative politicians and for the vast majority of people the need to fit in (an other emotional aspects of tribalism) easilly override rationalism (which isn't even practiced in any sistematic way by most people) so you ended up with people treating the whole thing in the most irrational way and denialism being almost entirelly a phenomenon of just one political and social tribe in the American society.
In countries were tribes are less adversarial (for example, places with voting systems that do not mathematically favour a power duopoly) or were none of the dominant tribes turned Covid denialism into a tribal thing, vaccination takes were much higher and refusal to wear a mask near non-existent (especially because the kicking out of the handful of mask-wearing refusers from places like supermarkets was approved by an overwhelming majority of people).
Mind you, had some local tribe taken that up as a tribal flag, you would see the same phenomenon as the US, maybe not as much because almost no other Democracy has such a rigged voting system and hence the power split into two sides with a wide chasm in between when it comes to social and moral issues.
In my opinion as a species we might have came up with quite a lot of fancy tech in the last handfull of millenia but we haven't evolved that much as intelligent beings, both individually and in our social structures.