this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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Science Memes
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Just look how stupid the average person is. Half of the people are more stupid. Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The last few years have taught me that the difference between stupid and not stupid is oceans wider than I thought.
I turns out stupid people are closer to what I thought the intelligence of an animal was.
These people literally don’t think. They basically pattern match and that’s it. There’s no deeper reasoning. There’s no capacity for nuance, no understanding or extension of empathy. They can barely read. If you string the gibberish from an AI they’ll blindly trust that it’s correct above all evidence.
Meanwhile we’re seeing all these nuanced multi step problem solving behaviours from birds and all animals and even bumblebees…
I read something from someone on the internet who claimed to work with bear-proof garbage cans and apparently it’s harder than one might expect. There’s some overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest people.
I’m sure the bears are more motivated, but still…
The quote “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.” is usually attributed to a Yosemite National Park Ranger taking about the issue with designing bear proof trash cans.
Thanks!
I think you mean then median person. ☝️🤓
Can't speak for anyone else, but I was taught that mean, median, and mode are three different types of average.
Oh crap. Translating average to my language yields the same word as mean. But you're right.
Because mean means average. I wouldn’t consider the median or the mode to be an average. Not sure what that commenter means by different “types of average”.
What they mean is that all three are different kinds of averaging. This is correct, but I don't think people in general think 'median' when they hear 'average'
Not a native English speaker here. Today I learned, too. Thank you.
Under a normal distribution/bell curve mean and median are the same.
Considering intelligence/stupidity isn't defined, it's a lot to assume that its distribution can be approximated by a Gaussian.
I don’t totally disagree, I’ve never seen an actual distribution of random iq scores
And there's plenty of criticism of IQ tests as a proxy for intelligence, even if we did have the data.