Image description: A screenshot of the main character from the film “Idiocracy” looking very uncomfortable with his circumstances.
Related: “I would never want to be part of a club that would have me as a member.”
it’s not about smart vs stupid. it’s about skeptical vs gullible.
plenty of very smart people are gullible. and most people are gullible because it’s ‘nice’.
most of us who are skeptical are see as cold, mean, and anti-social. hence to be pro-social you have to be ‘stupid’ and believe in the nonsense everyone else is going on about.
I haven’t seen this perspective before. What makes you think healthy skepticism needs to be demeaning or rude?
They’re saying skeptics are perceived that way, not that they necessarily are acting that way. Just that other people clock you as “not nice” when you don’t always take what they say at face value.
yep. they don’t like being questioned or doubted. especially so if they are spouting bullshit and lies.
The conmen whom you question will make the effort to color your skepticism as demeaning and rude.
it isn’t.
but people interpret it that way. because it’s not ‘friendly’ to ask questions or be skeptical. people typically get angry if you ask them why they do something… and they regard your blind acceptance of them as positive.
A lot of “stupidity” you see in the world is a result of anxiety and exhaustion proximately caused by individual poverty and bad infrastructure* imo
*Infrastructure includes hard systems like transit and housing and soft systems like community organizations and government agencies imo
speak for yourself.
I live in Cambridge MA. one of the smartest/richest places on the planet. Lots of people are stupid here and anxious and exhausted even making 300-400K a year and living lives of luxury and privilege.
the crux of it is they are just selfish jerks who don’t care about anyone else and are supremely overconfident about how genius they are… and that arrogance makes them incredibly gullible and stupid when a charming personality tries to convince them that vaccines cause autism. and their biggest complaint about their lives is that they don’t have more luxury and privledge and that they are actually ‘struggling’ in life because they can’t afford to charter jets and have to ‘suffer’ first class plane travel.
I feel like it’s pretty common for kids to see the actions of adults and think they’re all stupid until they themselves become adults and finally see what motivated those actions in the first place.
The few adults I’ve run into who maintained the whole “everyone else is such a moron” both overestimated their own intelligence by an order of magnitude and were cripplingly narcissistic.
I totally get that. I routinely remind the dumbest people online that I am orders of magnitude intellectually superior to them, and they immediately assume I’m calling myself smart. Nope. I’m not that smart.
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