Ask Lemmy

Ive known several MAGA people.

One in particular stands out, she was in charge of processing bills for our company, and she basically got all her propaganda from fox news. The company is/was a civil engineering firm (I no longer work there), we specialized partly in large municipal water projects, dams, water infrastructure, injection wells, large scale stormwater percolation, reservoirs etc.

During the big California wildfires (when firefighters kept not getting water out of the hydrants), the head engineer and the lead technical engineer held one of their once-a-month training lunches, and they decided to go over the California wildfires and the effects on the water infrastructure.

This lady stands up, and interrupts the lead technical engineer (who was going over flow/pressure/friction equations to show why hydrants ran dry when there was so much demand), to insist that the reason California is running out of water is that "Newsom drained the reservoir to protect some stupid fish" and other fox news idiocy. Spent a solid 5 minutes trying to tell a bunch of civil engineers a bunch of "information" about water systems that was so hilariously wrong that it was actually impressive.

That was a very awkward few minutes while HR tried to tell this lady that she needs to let the engineers actually learn how to do the job.

A particular fellow student comes to mind who was slow to understand things, made a comparative lot of programming mistakes and so he took more time, but he also worked hard, stuck to a problem until it was solved, coordinated tasks well, and additionally brought positive spirits to any project group. I assume he'd score under 100 but I'd love to have him on my team if he applied with us today.

It's hard to know for sure though, since 100 is the average by definition and most people will be relatively close to it. Not like 97 or 103 makes a big difference. It's half the people you meet in public, like, (by and large) we all go to the same primary schools and supermarkets etc. Outside of those (so tertiary education, workplaces, online bubbles perhaps, etc.), there's still a substantial fraction who learned a lot and/or have a good work attitude and go very far in life amidst people who didn't have to work hard to get anywhere

It frankly seems strange to assume you basically never met anyone who is slightly below the average. From a statistics point of view, one might wonder if that's a dumb thing to say ;) (jk)

I spent 20 minutes (I timed it) on the phone diagnosing a tech support issue and instructing the user on how to fix it. It took about 10 seconds for me to realise that number lock was turned off.

The rest of the 20 minutes was trying to get the user to find and press "Num lock" on the keyboard.

About 10 minutes in, they actually found and pressed it. Apon noticing that nothing had appeared on the screen, they tried pressing it again, then announced it didn't work.

Somehow, just getting them to press the button one more time was not simple, as they now had to begin their logical left-to-right scan of the keyboard again to find this mysterious new "Num lock" button they'd never heard of before.

This person (on another call) would say the name of each key as they pressed it. They would say "Caps lock, A, Caps lock, Enter" when typing a single "A" on a line, but didn't know what "Caps lock" was and couldn't find it on the keyboard when asked to press it immediately after having said and pressed it.

What makes someone an 'actually dumb' person? Because everyone has a different definition of 'dumb.

An atheist might call religious people 'dumb' for believing in a 'Sky Daddy,' while a pro-vax person and an anti-vax person might accuse each other of being 'dumb' for not subscribing to their beliefs.

Yes, I knew someone when I worked in retail who was quite dumb, she was a super sweet person though.

I realized how dumb she was when we encountered a mouse in the back stocking area. It crawled under the door and out to the back of the building. She turned to me and said “I heard the reason mice can crawl under doors like that is because they don’t have any bones”

Me being a biology major with a big interest in all things animals and insects that loves to educate people tried to correct her. I told her about how all mammals have bones and that mice were just very flexible to be able to fit under the gap in the door. I told her about how we used to dissect owl pellets when I was in 3rd grade and put the little skeletons back together. She did not believe me and still thought mice just don’t have bones.

I do sometimes wonder if she ever finished nursing school.

TIL that dumb is defined as having scored less than 100 IQ.

Anyway, I've worked enough customer service to say with some confidence that I've met at least a few people who truly just exist and let the world happen to them with zero curiosity.

Whew.

Buddy, @chunes@lemmy.world is right - you have met people that fall below average. I would easily bet money on it. You either don't recognize it, or think you are immune from it for some high and lofty self-centered reason.

This seems like a pretty trite ego post that only demonstrates how unaware you proudly are of your surroundings and a lack of sonder and empathy for many people you meet. Dunning-Kruger effect in action, if this is even real.

Bubble or not, genuinely stupid people are still human enough to recognize some patterns and play along. They fit in well enough to reproduce. Frequently. All throughout history. Meaning that you are not as good as recognizing them as they are at hiding it.

Shout out to @Pudutr0n@lemmy.world for maybe also calling it.

“Of course I know him. He’s me”

Education and employment level do not preclude stupidity. I too work in stem. I have had antivax colleagues.

I wait tables and deal with the public every day. So, yes.

I literally met someone who called 911 for a broken artificial fingernail.

Spend sometime in the emergency Department and you'll meet plenty.

i had someone assigned under me at work. this person was old enough to have a teenager, yet she could not function. we were painting the halls, she kept setting the paint tray into puddles of paint that she spilled, then kept setting it down on the bare floor. she could not understand how to scrape tape off the tabletops. she could not tell me what her job duties were after 4 months of doing the same shit every day (take trash out, clean bathrooms, sweep, wipe down tables. she could not list that off to me. any time i was giving her direction, she would stare bankly at me slackjawed, like there was no intelligence in her eyes, then 5 minutes later  i would find her on her phone because she couldnt remember what she was supposed to do and didnt even think of asking me to remind her.

she lived a couple houses away from where we work and her mother (who she lives with) would walk over to check on her sometimes. weird.

the last straw came when after 2 hours of work, i came out of the bathroom and all the lights were off and alarm code set, and she was gone. i texted her and asked where she went and she said she thought we were done for the day bc she finished her task and couldnt find me (I WAS IN THE BATHROOM.)

when i got management involved, i was told i didnt try hard enough with her. lol

I can't get away from the idiot. I have to see him in the mirror every morning.

As far as a funny story: My friends brother isn't very bright sometimes. My friends computer chair broke, one of the 5 metal supports that lead out to the plastic wheels snapped. My friends brother was learning how to weld so he tried to fix the support and in trying to test the strength of the weld he started bashing the seat against the floor and broke every plastic wheel... lol

It's incredible how easy it is to remain in a bubble. Family, friends, neighbors, college, work colleagues - all are going to be closer to you than the average person.

Anyone who has worked retail, customer service, or otherwise general public-facing jobs will have this put in perspective pretty quickly.

I've met people who work in management, yes.

Yeah, about a decade back. A friend of my roommate was not very bright. She said stuff like "why would anyone do a PhD, didn't we already research all there is?”.

@1984 you know, over time i met so many people who were dumb, but I often just try to forget about them because it just depresses me.

Yes, I worked in IT support. And I don't even just mean customers, some of the dumbest people were colleagues. Some of them on higher levels, so they earned way more than me as well. Often I think I am the idiot to my colleagues.

You don't know what's going on with people in their lives. Although I still don't think outright maliciousness should be acceptable

When I was in high school, I volunteered for a couple of days in a special ed class, which, I guess by definition, contained people with sub-100 IQ (sub-70, even). I guess that fits your specifications. One thing I remember observing was that the girls were more capable of stringing together coherent sentences than the boys.

Also, a couple of years ago, I worked as a school bus driver for 3 months while looking for a tech job. There seemed to be much more variance in intelligence among my colleagues than I was used to: some seemed to be just as smart as most of the ones in my previous tech jobs, but others, while they were generally nice enough, seemed to fail to grasp basic concepts or retain information very well during the training.

I had a friend in elementary school that was a little slow sometimes. One day we were walking home from school, and out of nowhere, he asks, "Why don't they just make the Playstation 9?"

It took me a minute to figure out what he even meant by that. The Playstation 2 had just came out. Did he think that companies already have the schematics for all of their products decades into the future, but they're just rolling them out one at a time anyway? Does he think that they already know what the PS 3 through 8 are going to be, and they can just...decide to skip those?

It was only about a year ago, right here in a fedi thread, that someone shared this PS2 commercial and I had a giant AH-HAH! moment that was decades in the making.

Well I'm surrounded by religious magas so, yes.

"Earth is 2000 years old. Gay is wrong and unnatural. Dinosaurs didnt exist. Democrats want to turn the US into Russia. Trump should take over Canada"

All actual things said by real life people to me.

Its baffling how stupid most Americans are.

I was in a conscription army. Everyone fit for duty gets called up. I think we can assume that the very extremes wouldn't be fit. But anyone 80+ from the lower side of that bell curve would be there. It's a good mix of the whole country.

I think in most cases you wouldn't realise that someone was on the side of the bell curve unless they had serious problems with social cues.

This one guy didn't know how to shower. He'd strip down, cover himself in soap and then shower it off. I knew this guy from school, and he was bullied a lot. He'd rage out about any little thing, so bullies got a kick out of it. I guess it was a chicken and egg problem.

One guy was nervous about getting drafted, so he showed up shitfaced on the bus that rolled in. As the rest went to stand in like to get signed in and get their gear, he ran and hid in a bush until the MP:s came to get him. Nice enough guy. He hung himself in the forest a few years after conscription.

Another guy really tried to get out of serving by complaining about his knees, hoping to get deemed unfit for service. He got assigned lighter duties, which were to service the fleet of bicycles the army has. When time came around to use them, they all had issues.

Another had been driving trucks before conscription. He claimed he hit 110km/h due to having the sun in his back. He was quite the mythomaniac in general. He didn't make any friends, didn't pick up on social queues and could not clean up his dialect enough to be understood by half of the people there. He came by my bunks asking about a helmet and shovel his friend had borrowed from him, and was supposed to leave with us when friend was discharged. Turns out his "friend" broke into his locker to "borrow" the gear to return for his discharging. I got called in as a witness in that incident, but I hadn't heard anything about it until dumb guy came along for his stuff.

In college I didn't hang out with my classmates much, I mostly hung out with townies. Obviously not all townies were dumb, but some were very dumb, nice though.

But of course! One I know well. He's a very friendly and likable person, and never judges anyone. He has a large social circle, a steady job doing manual tasks. He has a delightful longtime girlfriend. But he can't grasp abstract concepts, or any but the simplest logical concepts. He hides any lack of understanding with a quick joke, but is highly susceptible to propaganda.

I didn't meet anyone that would fit on the left half of the bell curve (less than 100 iq).

I promise you that you have. I don't care what industry you worked in. You were vastly overestimating a lot of people.

Yes bro. I work a customer facing job and drive in traffic. I encounter morons every day.

I once worked with a guy who did not know the sun was a star and didn't know what planets were. This was when I was in the military. I had a an unlabeled world map in my office and whenever someone new(to Germany) came in to be introduced I'd point to the map and say, "I'll buy you a beer if you can point out our location on the map". It was just an icebreaker so pointing at Europe was good enough. It was shocking how many people couldn't locate Germany on a world map and quite a few couldn't locate their home state on that world map.

I worked with another guy(a computer programmer) who thought the earth was 6000 years old. He also once told me that vertigo is when you feel like you're standing still and the earth is spinning and indigo is when it feels like you're spinning and the earth is still.

I work with and interact with professionals and am often reminded of something Richard Feynman said, "Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot."

Dumb is relative.

This dude, is on some other level.
https://lemmy.world/comment/23642747

I don't think we've met yet.

Does anyone know anyone who has ever admitted to getting below 100 on an IQ test?

I'm guessing the answer is no. In which case, presumably none of us can know whether or not we have. You would need to have to know someone who both scored below 100 and was willing to admit that to know for sure.