About 74 stupidity units, give or take
I recently discovered that I’m in the top 1% of IQ scores (if that’s the kind of smart you’re talking about!), which was surprising to me. I knew I was smart, but not that smart. Looking back through my life, though, I do notice a trend. I pick up new skills and knowledge very quickly. Like I frequently surprise myself “how do I know that?” When I stated out as a young person, this was a big disadvantage. School was intensely boring to me, which caused me to lack interest and focus and check out of it. So I did poorly. In the working world, starting out, I was on the same level as everyone else, I had no real advantage. I learned things quicker, so I advanced quicker. Now, towards the end of my career, I see that the faster acquisition of knowledge, while not really too much faster than my peers, was enough that now I have a dramatically different perspective than other people. The cumulative effect of which is that I have been able to remove lots of glass ceilings and allowed me to avoid lots of obstacles that many others of my peer group have not been able to do. All of that said, I also agree with a lot of the other posters… there are so many types of Intelligence, the IQ score is merely this one aspect and is NOT a great predictor of actual success, although in my experience it has been a great advantage.
TL;DR for the IQ type of intelligence, it basically just means faster knowledge and skill application. Depending on how you apply that it could provide a cumulative long-term advantage, but brings its own challenges as well.
I love how tactfully you avoided the actual question of how fucking stupid everyone else is. Kudos!
I love the tone of this comment. Genuine? Sarcastic or snarky? Who knows! Kudos!
LOL! Well it does astound me sometimes the things that come out of other peoples’ mouths! :-) That said, I don’t always have all the information, either, so it’s not super productive to view others as dumb, everyone just has different information, so I like to listen to what others have to say and how they formed their opinions. That helps me test whether I have all the facts or have considered all the perspectives. It’s hard not to be arrogant and rush to judgment, but I have learned that I am wrong just as often as everyone else, so I need to listen to other people!
I’ll come right out and say it. You’re dumb as a rock. But so are the rest of us.
I say we make BBQThunder our new leader and then murder them when they fail to bring about a perfect utopia.
There’s this worry that high intelligence itself drives you to be more dismissive of other people. I don’t really think that’s the case. I think intelligence can help you understand and sympathize better with other people.
Anyway, if you go by IQ, the upper one percentile score about 135 or higher, so that’s where your dividing line would be in raw numbers.
But since intelligence is distributed in a continuum, it wouldn’t make sense for everyone at or above 135 to consider everyone else equally ‘dumb’ - even if they did choose to use the IQ-scale to gauge everyone’s ‘stupidity’.
To do so would be like you getting first place in a spelling contest by a single point and then concluding that the person in second place (and everyone following) must be completely illiterate.
All that being said, the one percent really are very far from average. One way of putting it is that these people are further from the average than average people are from the ‘extremely low’ range (>69).
Not particularly dumb. The truly dumb as rocks people are probably about 30% - otherwise it’s usually just a question of knowledge specialization… if you can Encyclopedically recite every card in MtG then you’ll generally be looked down on but only because it’s not a monetizable knowledge.
There’s lots of different kinds of intelligence.
Many types of intelligence are no help in a rap battle or a race to grab the high score in Galaga. So choose wisely.
What usually happens is that you’re top 1% in certain skill. There are still other skills where you’re not top 1%. Most people always keep learning from other people. A top 1% mathematician may not be top 1% anxiety manager.
Exactly this. I like to think I’m pretty fuckin smart when it comes to sysadmin. I’m an actual moron when it comes to software development. Just all depends on the skills you learn.
And I don’t know Jack shit about either of those, but I can do a lot of different shit on a forklift efficiently and safely!
Same, but reversed.
Same here. I absolutely dread the days where I need to touch my companies infrastructure repo. A simple infra chsnge turns into a week of pain for me
There’s quite a range within that 1%. Someone in the top .001% would see the average person very differently than someone at .999%.
If you’ve met 1000 people, on average the top 10 of those would be in this hypothetical 1%. But there’s quite a range in what those 10 people are like, isn’t there? If you think about the 10 smartest people you’ve met, they’re not all Stephen Hawking types. They’re not all sci fi/fantasy fans. They don’t all wear glasses. They don’t all build servers as a hobby.
So, to answer your question, the opinions of those 10 people on how smart the average person is will likewise vary greatly.
To the top 1% truly smart people the other 99% are dumb as a box of rocks. But exactly how fucking stupid is that 99% ?
Do you actually think that they think that basically everyone is that dumb?
Do you really think that there is a magical line dividing people who have a difference of a fraction of a percentage of mental capacity?
Top 1% is IQ of 135 or higher. They probably get along fine with 115 and up. It’s basically on a bell curve, you can go lol that up.
Don’t get to excited about 1%
NdGT points out that 1% difference in DNA has within it somewhere the difference between chimps and humans. Think about that 1% between us and the post humans that come after us, or aliens that are out there already.
The average American reads at the 7th- to 8th-grade level.
Well that’s worse than I thought it would be. And judging from the graph at the bottom, it’s not just a US only issue. Many other major countries (Germany, Denmark, England) have basically the same score.
The scores for the top countries (Japan and Finland) don’t seem that high either (US had 270, Japan had 296), but I might be underestimating how much improvement that score change represents. Edit: was re-reading the article, and the literacy score is out of 500. So 296 as a score still has a long way to go.
I’m terms of abilities, there’s problems other people can solve that I never will even with years of study and training, and there are problems I can solve that my immediate peers never would, even with years of study and training.
I’m terms off knowledge, everybody you meet knows something you don’t. (They might not have the ability to help you find what it is though)
In terms of skills, behaviors it seems like nobody ever considers trying and finding out for themselves, which is endemic across all levels of academia, government, business, and profession, and in that matter they are all as dumb as a bunch of rocks.
Look up a bell curve, most measurements of intelligence that have been conceived end up making a bell curve distribution. That’s your answer, most people pool up around the middle with smaller tails on either end.
Exactly.
Which is to say, the average person is in fact not stupid, they are average. By definition.
The 99% are exactly as dumb as everybody.
If you are one of the 99% dumb ones, then you are unable to recognize the truly smart ones. For you, everybody appears exactly the same dumb.
If you are one of the 1%% truly smart ones, then you know that you should not call the other ones dumb, and you should also not tell anybody that you are 100x smarter than they are.
So in the end, you never know, and everybody remains the same dumb as everybody.
I have a few issues with this, but I’ll just point out the obvious one: being in the top 1% of something doesn’t mean you’re 100x better at it.
I don’t think the math of the post was the takeaway there.
Uuuh look at mister monocle speaking aaahh oooh
When I was a kid, I was a huge asshole without realizing it because I thought all the other kids weren’t trying or were specifically being coy with me. I thought they weren’t trying their best like I was. I would get really mean about it. Turns out they were trying their best maybe.
As far as I’ve seen, so many people don’t think their way through things but imitate their impression of those things instead.
We once had this girl about a year younger than I was over at the house and we were gonna have her drive my go-kart. Everything seemed fine until she blasted off into the corn field and we had to chase her down and get her out of there. She just pressed the gas and the brakes at the same time(breaks were a one tire friction band POS) and wiggled the steering wheel back and forth because that’s what she thought driving was. She had absolutely no idea that she was supposed to be directing the go-kart’s functions.
It completely shattered my impression of other people. I had no idea anyone could be so absurdly stupid. She basically thought of vehicles as magic and I suspect many people navigate through life thinking the same.
This is part of why I worry about self driving cars and the kids who are growing up without seeing the incremental progress of stuff like computing and AI.
