I was thinking about this. I went to university, and I worked in tech for decades. I met many assholes but I didn’t meet anyone that would fit on the left half of the bell curve (less than 100 iq).
Since I’ve been living in that bubble my entire life, I’m curious of your stories. Have you met someone who was actually quite dumb (not just having opinions you don’t agree with) and do you have an example situation you remember you can share?
Hopefully this becomes more funny than hateful since intelligence is not the value of a person, but it can be funny to read the stories.
If you haven’t met a dumb person, you are the dumb person.
I’d rather be the dumbest in the room than the smartest :)
Amen. I told a coworker this in a meeting recently that I felt like the dumbest person on the call and I loved it. They’re doing development stuff I never would have thought in my dreams I could do and yet here I am lol
Haha yeah, could be. :)
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.
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.
Yeah I have seen examples of this behavior on YouTube. People become very convinced about something and it warps their entire view of reality. And yeah, some people don’t realize that other people can be much, much better at something than they are, and they should listen, not talk in that situation. :)
Plenty
I hear there were some intelligent people on my dad’s side of the family. But my mom’s side is kinda dumb.
My wife’s family has some dumbos as well, dunno how you got away from all that.
Now, my immediate bubble is full of professors, engineers, etc. So, I dunno. It’s a mixed bag, and i kinda assumed everyone had that experience given that i have a few data points of that.
¯\(ツ)/¯
Anyone here thinking that they’ve never met a dumb person probably IS the dumb person lol
Well, but that is natural if everyone, really everyone around you is smarter…
I got that comment a few times in this thread. :) Yeah maybe!
It’s just a variation on the old saying: if you run into one asshole, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day long…
Not calling you dumb OP
Certainly. Probably not enough because this time period still threw me for a loop. So although I have met them they did not seem predominant. Honestly how smart a dumb a person is not such a big deal as much as how smart they are vs how much they think they are. Like there are folks who realize they were not the head of the class and sorta keep quite and identify folks to get advice from and then there are some who completely do not realize how little they understand things and will be insistive of all sorts of crap. Honestly one mark of intelligence I often see is a massive realization of how much they don’t know.
Yes, but I’m of the general opinion that people are usually willfully dumb. If you have passion and drive, I think you’ll more likely than not have some level of strong intelligence.
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)
Some people have understood what I meant. We tend to live in our own bubbles with people from the same social class. Everyone around us went to university, all the colleagues, our friends and so on.
And I meant that I have never seen anyone act in a very dumb way. There are stories in this thread about conscripts, where you see examples of what I mean. Or customer service jobs, where you meet all kinds. I have never had any job like that.
Perhaps I could have explained it better.
The person I was talking about in the first paragraph was in a school that’s internationally considered a university! People in “we all went to university” bubbles may not all be that type of smart, although - yes - many of them will be. Degrees primarily show whether someone thrives in a structured school setting, and most people not acting very dumb is not surprising when they’re near (but below) the average
I’ve completed the highest and the lowest mainstream education levels in my country. Long story how that came to be, but what that taught me is that while university students frequently have an easier time memorising facts on paper than those who “work with their hands” (not sure if that’s how you say it in English), it’s not a given. There were kids smarter than me at the lowest level: they just couldn’t be bothered to do homework and wanted to skip class to buy or sell drugs. Some others in that school sounded really dumb whenever they asked a question, but when this came up with a teacher once, the teacher asked if I knew what grades the student in question ended up scoring (I didn’t) and that this is just their way of learning the subject matter effectively. Okay, at least for some of them :P. Meanwhile, not everyone whom I know with a university degree can hold a job
Btw, what I also found interesting is that people score differently on IQ tests through the ages, way too short timescales for brains to evolve at a population level so our actual smartness as a species isn’t what changed. I wrote some stuff here but then checked my facts and actually this is a better article so I’ll just link the Wikipedia instead :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect. But that’s not what you’re talking about since you don’t mean IQ scores literally but just how people act around you, if I understand correctly now. Just thought it interesting as an aside
I’d say that attitude, mental health, learning styles, social skills… lots of things play a role in how we perceive people’s wits besides their actual wits. People are hard to capture by one metric. Which is also why I’d call many of the examples in this thread into question btw: service workers often interact with someone only on a single topic, often even only during a single session (support call for example). It could sometimes also just be some neurons not making the right connection in that moment, rather than the person’s intellect. Or regarding the attitude they gain towards the general public: who needs support most frequently? Surely not the people that are particularly resourceful and make smart decisions. There’s a massive selection bias there
Okay, last anecdote. Two people with a university degree (one of them has even two university degrees in IT) are put in front of an Apple device which is of course super intuitive and needs no manual. It’s so easy that neither of us can figure out how to complete the unskippable device setup wizard. We call Apple support. The solution? Scrolling down. I tried that, but the part of the screen that I touched wasn’t a scrollable element and so I concluded there was nothing to scroll to, which of course the support person couldn’t know. The person receiving that call would fit right in in this thread with a story about someone not realising in 2026 that there is such a thing as scrolling down to find the ‘continue’ button below the form. Nobody (afaik) considers either of us dumb and yet there’s plenty of ways to end up as one of the service job examples in a thread like this xD
In my experience I have come across people who presented as “stupid.” I have worked with rotating casts of temps at a couple of jobs - the “stupid” people are just as common in management as in the temps.
Usually I think it is because they are not present in their moment/don’t care about what is happening, so they aren’t really stupid but are just… vacant. Once you get them talking about a project they are actually passionate about, you can see the light of their intellect. Some folks however really do have a hard time understanding the world through logic, even when they are really trying.
Vacant - I know exactly what you mean, and that’s a good word for it.
So, I am normally very skeptical about people yelling about bubbles…but I went from working in IT like you to working blue collar, and thus essentially went from being mildly smarter than most of my coworkers to being very obviously the smartest in the room barring infrequent encounters with others like me.
There are folks around me in blue collar work that are very experienced at what they do and wise in that specific niche due to their experience, but in general my overall mental capacity seems quicker and more flexible than most individuals I meet now, which wasn’t showcased nearly as much when I was with other nerds in IT.
So yes, you’re in a bubble. I had also been in a bubble for many years and had forgotten WHY I had fled to IT and nerd shit, and got a pretty pointed reminder.
Most of the people I’ve met in IT seem a lot more intelligent than average - clearly better analytical skills, can keep more details in their heads, understand complex subjects more quickly, etc - which makes sense because you kind of have to be that way to do the work.
Makes a lot of sense. :)
Yes, I have visited the United States of America, thank you for asking
I work in mental health and I’ve definitely met patients who have low IQ scores. However, even without getting into clinically significant low IQ ranges, I can virtually guarantee you that you’ve met people who have sub-100 IQs. 100 is the average human IQ score. You haven’t gone through life this far without meeting people who fall a few points below it, just as you haven’t failed to meet people who score above it. A person with a 95 IQ is not going to be able to be distinguished from a person with a score of 105 by someone who doesn’t have substantial training in assessing IQ (and even then, most experts would have to formally test people to detect subtle differences like that).
If you are walking through a crowd somewhere, keep in mind that about half the people around you have an IQ of 100 or less.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
Part of it is because IQ is unscientific and ignores variance in person’s abilities in one task over the other.
It takes a person to fail at just about everything for us to declare them dumb.
So you might have been not in much of a bubble to begin with.
That’s true. Humans have so many skills and talents, and we are usually good at some things, all of us.
The definition of dumb is very elastic.
There is one summer student who came to work at my software company. He was in a very specialized and elite program at a top-flight Canadian university. Both his parents were professors at this university.
One day he came to our boss, and said that his family always went to Europe for 2 weeks in the summer, and he needed time off. My boss explained that he had been hired because we wanted to do a special project during the summer, and it would be very difficult to not have him on the team for a significant part of it.
My boss asked the student when the vacation was going to start. The student replied, “tomorrow”.
At first, my boss was angry, but then realized that the student actually had no understanding that this was an unusual and onerous request. That’s about the time I started learning about autism (and later realized that I was somewhere on the spectrum as well, just not as far along it).
