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.
I’ve worked with some mentally challenged people in the past and through customer service. I’d much rather deal with someone with limited reasoning skills than someone who is genuinely intelligent. Intelligent people fail to see their own limitations and don’t know when to be humble. Some of the dumbest people on this planet are academics, top of their field, highly educated. Those people don’t know shit about anything because they’re hyper focused on one teeny tiny aspect of the universe. At least the mentally challenged know that they have limited reasoning skills and are fairly skilled at asking for help and knowing their limitations.
Yeah those people can be super frustrating, and they also enjoy playing games, acting not so subtle superior sometimes. Its common that they are assholes, but not always.
I met a good deal of people with intellectual disabilities in the past. Few of them were a bit difficult, but most of them were innocent and very authentic. Frankly, that authenticity made it chill to be around them.
Every time I look in the mirror. I do posses a healthy amount of self-loathing though.
You are not alone, I think probably 10 people said something similar.
I have a few.
They arent necessarily hostile or mean. but there is a definite laziness to their intellect where they get super insecure if even minor challenged and refuse to admit to any learning disability or any level disability (and look down on those with a disability) and they believe because they are older = know everything.
One took it upon herself to explain walking poles to me…and i didnt even ask. Mainly because she requires to be explained to how to use basic functions of a toaster. So she believes she is at the intellect of everyone else around her by asserting herself to explain how to use even most basic of things only a very young child would struggle with and entirely gives up if the task entirely if it has any complexity. Such as just checking oil in the car. A stick in a hole. this is too hard apparently.
At first i thought she was just acting stupid like some women famously do this where they dampen their intellect around others but living around this person ive come to suspect a learning disability she refuses to accept about herself.
- Corrects people’s pronounciation constantly incorrectly without anyone even asking her and sees this as ‘helping’
- nods along agreeing but not listening to what she has agreed to.
- also laughs at things that are tragic stories because shes not listening or even looking. just tuned right out and i guess laughing is her basic npc response.
- doesnt have an emergency response and relies on other people’s response. number of times ive had to rush to a problem someone has like a neighbor yelling then she shows up later after relying on my response. but then lacks ability to think through the issue and act. i will just do, she nods along. then she will be like ‘I’ll always be there for them’ while shit just happens around her.
- has been in danger. hasnt responded to it. other people got her out of the problem and she just stands there and later tells the story like she had it entirely under control and calls others who would be worried as ‘overeacting’ or anxious.
- thinks things ‘always work out’ without having a plan.
- will get on a suspicious elevator without pre thought. elevator will break. will goofily say she should have listened to someone after calling them worried prior beforehand.
- not using basic observation to know when she has been around someone dangerous and just wants to lazily believe everyone else has her personal safety as their main interest. calls this ‘believing in the best in everyone’
- thinks everything from the store is ‘safe’ and will not harm her to excuse any executive decisions as a consumer(believing its the capitalist who is responsible and magiclly culpable to do their homework and have her personally in mind to keep her safe)
A true dunning kreuger if i ever saw one.
Meanwhile she would give you the shirt off her back.
met a lot of these type in a conservative country town but occassionally i will run into one in the city.
i think the trouble comes from them thinking if having a learning disability means inlovable. which is in many ways sad and just really mean against those who have owned it and worked on their’s.
What part of tech are you in? If you interact with end-users ever, they’re everywhere.
I didnt, no. It was devops, building infrastructure for stuff the company wanted to do. End users would just connect to databases and use sql for their analytics.
So yeah not public tech support, more like building tech environments for analytics.
I’m in a similar boat as you, as an M365, Azure, etc. Consultant, where most of the people I work with are CIOs, other IT people, and like, director level and above.
Even in those cohorts where you would think intelligence is generally above average you get a few.
I started out in help desk though, and occasionally run training classes. They’re at all levels.
Yes. One person in particular comes to mind - very nice guy, but has some obvious learning disabilities. He mispronounces words very often and mistates stuff frequently (a lot of ‘hims is’, that kind of thing). He doesn’t seem to have much of an inner life, though perhaps its more that he doesn’t have the facility with language to express himself well. He also doesn’t seem to understand a lot of things that people around him talk about.
But he’s a kind dude - frankly, that’s the important bit imo.
Most of the other folks I’ve met and considered dumb were seen only for limited duration and in specific contexts. They might indeed be, on the whole, dumb. But I’ve always felt those small interactions aren’t enough evidence of that - after all, I’ve met objectively brilliant people that, in certain contexts, have done phenomenally dumb things. Heck, we all do (or rather, I sure as fuck have).
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.
Indeed, contact with the public will do it quickly.
I work with a long list of clients at my work who seem to lack any type of critical thinking skills whatsoever, a significant fraction of them are apparently functionally illiterate, and a shocking number of them are actually incapable of understanding abstract concepts. These people cruise through life just as happy as you please, at least until they run up against some frustration that they can’t understand at which point their default response is typically to get violently angry, and as an outside observer it’s equal parts fascinating and deeply troubling. I can’t imagine existing that way. Being unable even to read, and with every new concept or technology being an inscrutable puzzle box so terrifying that your only recourse is to scream and tantrum and threaten until someone else comes along and makes it go away.
And yet, most of these same stupid people are highly derisive of smart people. This notwithstanding that without these purported nerds, geeks, Poindexters, and wimps they’d be freezing in the dark as they starved to death. Somehow they’ve managed to get jobs, afford cars and mortgages, and they’re allowed to vote, procreate, and even buy guns. It’s enough to make me never want to leave my IT dungeon or, perhaps, never return from the mountains. But I have to, so here I am.
I interact with truly stupid people on a daily basis. I could tell you all some whoppers from my time in the trenches.
I worked in a call center that involved a lot of repeat calls as a matter of course. Most were elderly, some had mental issues. We had some characters for sure. A lot of people who clearly didn’t have access to a good education growing up, or who burned their brains out on drugs when they were younger, or who were literally high right then and there.
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.
I’ve mostly moved in the same sort of bubbles as OP (I think) and while it wasn’t super common, I definitely met people in that bubble, who had to be on the other side of the curve. I don’t have many funny stories about it; people struggling to keep up with their peers in competitive environments are more often sad or frustrating.
OK, there was one kinda funny thing where a PM at a household name tech company cornered me (an engineer with a math degree) to emphatically detail his “system” for craps. I tried so hard to explain why it’s impossible to have a “system” for predicting the outcome of dice rolls, he just wouldn’t hear it. I later told a friend about the encounter who replied “that ought to be a fireable offense”.
That wasn’t the dumbest thing that dude ever said nor the reason l flipped the bozo bit but it was the funniest.
To clarify , he was talking about playing in a casino and wasn’t talking about using altered dice or doing slight of hand where you’re not really throwing the dice.
To be fair, there is a way to bet in craps that minimizes the house odds and gets it to a roughly 52% chance the house will win. This is very simple and pretty boring, i.e. not much of a system. As it turns out, these are the lowest house odds for any game found in a casino.
Education and employment level do not preclude stupidity. I too work in stem. I have had antivax colleagues.
I don’t think antivax requires stupidity. Some people just don’t trust the health system, and often for good reason. Black people, for example, have faced some horrible things due to the government, in the name of “science”.
I think there are two types of antivax. There’s the distrusting kind, which I think is pretty reasonable honestly. There’s a lot of history behind it. Then there’s the “I’ve done my own research” kind, which are stupid and will buy anything someone else says if it agrees with their preconceived ideas.
I guess it depends on how you define stupidity.
Distrusting governments and distrusting vaccines are totally different things. There is vast scientific consensus that vaccines work, if you’re antivax you’ve made a conscious decision to ignore that, which is stupid in my book. Distrusting government advice on vaccines, depending on where you are, may be totally justified.
Well, again, many groups have has the scientific establishment lie to them in order to experiment on them. I can’t really blame people who have that in their cultural memory for being skeptical of the current scientific establishment too. I can’t view that as stupid. For example, even if the Nazis have the scientific establishment backing them up (they did in some cases), I don’t want people trusting them. I don’t think that’s wrong. It’s often hard to impossible to separate science and the state.
I don’t think that’s happening today though, at least not to a large extent. I think science is a lot more open now, and there’s too many people watching for the same things to happen without us knowing. There are probably some pretty fucked up small experiments happening today, but not on the scale of vaccines. However, I feel it’s important to see where people are coming from, especially if you want to convince them of something. If you want to convince marginalized groups to trust the concensus on vaccines, you need to understand why they’d be skeptical so you can overcome that skepticism.
Doubting an experimental vaccine is different to being antivax.
There no ambiguity on vaccines, the science is settled, and anyone who doubts vaccines as a concept because of localised corruption isn’t harbouring a healthy amount of caution. I call it stupidity, but others might say brainwashed.
I still am amazed at how many engineers I work with came out as anti Vax during 2020-2022.
There are some I have worked for that also believe the earth is 6k years old and that evolution is fake and that dinosaurs weren’t real… plenty of idiots in stem fields.
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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.
Man this reminds me. I was helping an engineer support my company remotely and after a month or so of everything working fine, he emails frantically and says “THE SCREEN IS BROKEN!”
After some time, I finally figured out that he means he can’t log on to the VPN. Probably two hours of testing in and we didn’t figure it out, so we left it. The third fucking day of this I eventually was annoyed and wanted a coffee break, so i told him to reboot again. He actually rebooted this time and it works.
Caps lock had been on for like 3 days. Everything he typed was yelling because he just didn’t notice.
I later met someone in IT at his company who said that this is a fairly regular occurrence from him
That’s actually hilarious. :) Its always the best stories from tech support.
I used to do phone tech support for a device that hooked up to TVs to filter out profanity.
I would give very explicit instructions on what to plug where. It was really common for me to have people unplug everything and start over because they did something wrong, and I had no way of knowing what because they were all unreliable narrators.
On a second, third, fourth attempt I’d often hear a “OH! You said to plug that into the TOP ROW! I’ve been plugging it in to the bottom row.” Or something like that.
A call less than 30 minutes was a good call. Calls over an hour were not uncommon. If I had someone who could follow instructions, it could be as quick as a handful of minutes.
I don’t think we’ve met yet.
Yes bro. I work a customer facing job and drive in traffic. I encounter morons every day.
Yeah, every customer service worker has met loads. 😬
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. :)
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.
It would be amazing if they didn’t have any bones. Just a big blob of flesh. :)
Yeah, like I said, she was a really sweet gal. She cared about people, her family, and coworkers. She was a hard worker and I enjoyed having her as a colleague. I really liked her, she just wasn’t very smart.
My brother-in-law heard and believed that cats could squeeze into tight places because they have “collapsible skeletons.” Like, they could sense a tight place and detach their bones on demand and pop them back in later.
Now that’s an interesting one. I don’t get where people get this kind of stuff. Like, do you not pay any attention in science class? It’s some of the most basic of basic biology. But I was also the kid who used to read biology textbooks for fun lol
