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You are Probably Mis-Diagnosing People as Stupid

193 points by healsdata 16y ago

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Easy rule-of-thumb: if you think somebody is stupid, ask "Help me to understand" I've found that once you understand, very, very rarely do you think they are stupid any more.
- mootothemax 16y ago
  I couldn't agree with you more. On a personal note, I must admit that the level of arrogance seen in IT is sometimes quite overwhelming. Just because someone can use a computer does not automatically make them smart; other people have other skills, amazing! ;)
  - LiveTheDream 16y ago
    "She's not troubled, she's a dancer" - Sir. Ken Robinson on a child whose parents feared she might be learning-disabled, thus demonstrating that different types of intelligence exist. Look up the speech on TED Talks; it is incredible.
    - adammichaelc 16y ago
      I know the video you're referring to. It is really cool, and opens up the idea that intellectual intelligence is only 1 type of intelligence. From my personal life, my wife couldn't care less about computers and probably would never watch a TED video, but her "people intelligence" is very high -- she can relate to many different kinds of people and wherever she goes she makes good friends and people around her hold her in high esteem. Her dad is something of a bookworm who knows a little bit about everything and quite a bit about a couple of things. If he were younger (he's in his 70's) he'd probably get his news from HN. I've often wondered if his "intellectual intelligence" was transferred to her but in a different form... like she used it in a different way, in interacting with and reading people, instead of books.
      - Retric 16y ago
        I suspect at the biological level there are vary few differences in "types of intelligence" but people can get vary good at solving the types of problems they have already solved. I think the real trick is not to measure people based on what you are good at but what they are good at. Coders can often walk though large logic problems instantly, but IMO that's the same basic thing as an artist knowing which 12 lines capture the basic idea of a picture. Think of it like the brain missing the correct API's, you can fake it but it's slow and buggy. But, if you start to spend 10,000+ hours solving the same types of problems and you are going to create that foundation. EX: Cab drivers develop much better spatial reasoning skills over time. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm
        phaedrus 16y ago
        @Coders can often walk through large logic problems instantly: I work in an IT shop where we write in house systems to support the business processes of nontechnical people. When we try to hammer out business requirements for systems we'll often have discussions with customer where we carefully question "OK, so it is ALWAYS the case that P and Q implies R", and "It's NEVER the case that P or R implies S" and so forth. The customer will say yes, yes, yes, throughout this, then she'll mention some other case can happen that logically invalidates the rest of everything she said. Only, she doesn't realize this because she doesn't have a coder's hard-edged sense of logic. But when this happens I, my boss, and my boss's boss (the CIO) will all three exchange a quick incredulous look with each other at the same time because we all ran through the logic and found the contradiction nearly instantly. Or, that is to say, as she was talking we were all three building up the same structure in our minds, and the last thing she says brings it crashing down in all three of our heads at the same time. Trying to explain that to a non-coder is not easy to do without appearing arrogant, and I think that is why people in IT can appear rude. How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?"
        michael_dorfman 16y ago
        How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?" You say: "OK, now that we've covered the standard flow, let's talk about the strange cases. What are the weird situations that come up once in a while?" For many users, "ALWAYS" translates to "always, except for the oddball case", and "NEVER" translates to "not usually, but you never know." That's why Requirements Analysis is as much about psychology and anthropology as it is about logic.
    - chriskelley 16y ago
      I was interested and looked it up - here it is if others haven't seen it: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...
  - ErrantX 16y ago
    It's a problem definitely, one that always aggravates me. It's about perception of the job too. I struck up a conversation with a guy on the train the other day; he was a journalist - a field I've always been fascinated by. As soon as I told him what my job he barely spoke about his own - it was just constant banal anecdotes about what I did, how bad he was with computers and how I must be amazing and... On one level it attests to how important computers have become in our daily lives. Mostly it just makes me sad because, really, I'm just an IT guy!
    - trafficlight 16y ago
      I rarely tell people what I do because I hate those stories. I don't care that you broke your printer and your 4 year old niece fixed it by putting more paper in. Yes, she is super smart for actually reading the error message that said "Out of Paper". I also can't stand it when somebody tells me they are just completely computer stupid. And that's before we've even said hello.
      - potatolicious 16y ago
        I find that it's not so much inability so much as fear. A lot of people (especially the older generation) seem to think that if they futz with a computer they'll irreparably break it - so they stop and call an expert as soon as something deviates from normal workflow. You think you're creating a UI that encourages learning by exploration, but a lot of your users are too terrified of their machine to dare click that button. This is something we need to work with and educate users about - they're not stupid, they're overly cautious.
        ajj 16y ago
        Couldn't agree more. My mom can get stuff done (email attachments, etc.) if she is sitting alone and absolutely has to do it. If at all I am available, she will ask help for the smallest stuff fearing she would break something. Sometimes I think its not even about breaking anything, but more about not fancying herself to recover from "even more damage."
        16y ago
- frossie 16y ago
  I don't think I know anybody who I would call stupid. I do, however, know people who are intellectually lazy - they don't know, and they don't want to know. Which is not the same thing at all. [Edit: in case that sounds obnoxious, I was aiming more for "frustrated"]
  - mistermann 16y ago
    "they don't know, and they don't want to know" I agree, this is usually my experience, as most of the people I interact with are fairly highly competent in their field. One thing that bothers me is when I raise an idea, "could we do this...." for example. And they say no, it is not possible. My latest example was, asking if animated characters in a video could have automated lip-synching, based on a text file (this could massively cut production times for new videos). No, it's not possible, was the answer, and when I disagree, everyone in the room kinda looks at me like I'm the idiot. [Of course it can be done, there are lots of products that do just that...and btw, I am the client in this scenario.] Another example....we needed some customization in SharePoint, two specific requirements, that aren't provided out of the box. I went back to my desk, implemented demos for both in about 4 hours using jQuery. Did a demo at the next meeting....yes, that's nice, but jQuery isn't a standard here. So we turned to an outside consulting firm, and they implemented the easy feature using.....jQuery. (I don't think they knew how to do the other one, at least it hasn't gotten done). So where I come from, the idea that you are surrounded by "idiots", which is a bit provocative, is often true. I don't pretend to be an expert in law, engineering, etc, but I constantly encounter experts in their field that behave as if they are experts outside their field. I will always listen to the opposing side of my arguments and always consider that I may be wrong, but I rarely encounter someone I disagree with who is willing to debate the disagreement with an open mind, and consider that perhaps they may be incorrect. How else should we consider these people?
- amalcon 16y ago
  What looks like stupidity is almost always ignorance. What people forget is that, half the time, that ignorance is yours.
- deleted 16y ago
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- WiseWeasel 16y ago
  My practical definition of stupidity is talking authoritatively about a subject one doesn't understand, and is incapable of explaining. Stupid people are often parroting things they've heard in various places, of which they have only the most superficial of understandings. Not being stupid is often knowing when to shut your mouth. At a deeper level, it all comes down to being poor at evaluating the relative value of information sources, placing value in the judgment of people for social and political reasons rather than for their actual expertise in the subject matter. This inability to recognize expertise, easily vulnerable to misguiding, is the essence of idiocy.
  - mistermann 16y ago
    A more realistic and common definition I think would be talking authoritatively about a subject one knows a bit about (have read some articles, or genuinely has some expertise in), without considering who your audience is.....if you're truly intelligent, and someone disagrees with you, you should change into a different mode, determining whether the person actually knows what they are talking about, and the possibility that they know something you don't. It's people like this that bother me...I don't know what the proper term for them is.
- c00p3r 16y ago
  Yeah. If one can't explain the thing "on his fingertips" he doesn't understand the thing either.
- chmike 16y ago
  Sometimes there is nothing to understand. Code produced in my project at work is a good candidate for the daily WTF (http://thedailywtf.com/ http://thedailywtf.com/). I tried to explain the problem to the management but they didn't change anything. Now the project is more than a year late because the thing doesn't quite work. It is quite obvious that there are problems and if nothing is done when told, than the only logical conclusion is that they are stupid. My boss's answer to this now is "that's life". "Help me to understand" is in this case a waste of time and resource. Where is Darwin again ?
  - eru 16y ago
    Change your job?
jgg 16y ago
Part of the problem, particularly with Western culture, is the desire to assign everything a rank, without much clue as to whether or not the metric used is credible at all. Your GPA, SAT/ACT/GRE scores, IQ, credit rating, college major, average income and choice of university all form an impression on people who want a nice box to put you in, whether you like it or not. Sure, some intelligence is probably required to achieve high rankings in some of those areas, but it isn't indicative by itself of who you are or what you're capable of. To the perceptive crowd on Hacker News, this probably seems obvious, but to most of society, these facts and figures define who you are and what you should do with your life. The best hope for humanity, in this regard, is to judge people on what they contribute or accomplish. This will probably never become a viable paradigm for most people, because it isn't inherently concrete; it's much harder to look at someone's entire life and judge their merit relative to someone else, rather than noting that a 3.5 GPA is higher than a 3.2 GPA. In fact, once you look at the big picture, it starts to become rather noticeable that judging people at all is, most of the time, a fruitless task.
- mnemonicsloth 16y ago
  People like linear status orderings. They exist in every culture and get reinvented when there's no culture present at all. That's why we're prepared to believe things about IQ that we'd never believe about processor or compiler benchmarks.
  - jgg 16y ago
    >People like linear status orderings. They exist in every culture and get reinvented when there's no culture present at all. You're right, I think I was just letting my cynicism towards the United states bleed through with that comment. >That's why we're prepared to believe things about IQ that we'd never believe about processor or compiler benchmarks. That's a brilliant parallel, but also a stunningly-accurate one.
  - Tycho 16y ago
    Could you elaborate on the IQ remark? I'm just curious as to what your thoughts are (I have no particular opinion on the matter)
spuz 16y ago
All of these points assume that someone who is "stupid" is someone who disagrees with your point of view. I find that is very rarely an issue in my day to day job. The real question I'd like to know the answer to is how do you deal with people who require more help and guidance than others? How do you help others to think for themselves and come up with great solutions to problems by themselves?
- jasoncrawford 16y ago
  Great question, and something I'm still learning. I touched on some points I know in the article. E.g., if you have data or lessons-learned that they don't, share that information. Probably a whole separate post in helping others see your point of view via questions rather than statements, so they learn your method and not just your conclusions.
- PonyGumbo 16y ago
  Agreed. I'm also not sure that we're all talking about the same kinds of experiences here. To me, there's a difference between having a spirited difference of opinion with a colleague and having to walk through a basic set of instructions (e.g. "The red shirts go in the red basket") for the forty-seventh time with an employee.
deleted 16y ago
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boredguy8 16y ago
Thanks for sharing: this is a pretty succinct summary of a much better way of approaching the world than the "everybody sucks, only I see the light." It's almost NEVER true, and the people who I know that are right often enough to say that, never would. "To know that you do not know is the beginning of wisdom."
latortuga 16y ago
This seems to be sort of a primer on rhetoric - how to effectively address an argument instead of dismissing it as merely stupid. He touches on a number of rhetorical techniques somewhat informally and I like his treatment of the subject. If you found this interesting, I'm in the middle of a book on the subject of argument and rhetoric that is actually quite engaging, called Thank You For Arguing by Jay Heinrichs.
tensor 16y ago
We all have vastly inflated images of ourselves. Every single person.
- BerislavLopac 16y ago
  You mean, everyone is above average? ;)
  - praptak 16y ago
    Well, most people have above-average number of fingers :)
- jdietrich 16y ago
  That is massively, dangerously wrong. Dunning, Kruger and an array of later researchers have shown that while the inept do strongly overestimate their own abilities, the highly able strongly underestimate them. The very able assume that if a task was easy for them it must be easy for everyone, while the completely inept assume that a task seems difficult because it is objectively difficult, and that they must be very able to have made the progress that they did. The lower you estimate your own ability to be, the more likely it is that you are in fact highly able. CF Downing demonstrated that people with high intelligence tend to overestimate the intelligence of people who are similarly intelligent to themselves and underestimate their own. If you think that the people around you are more intelligent than you, you're statistically likely to be the most intelligent person you know. Personally, I think this is a highly pertinent cognitive bias, so pervasive as to affect nearly every aspect of modern life. I think that our most able thinkers keep quiet for fear of being wrong, whilst the stupidest and least informed in our society shout from the rooftops in blissful ignorance. I think that between the natural effect of "the more you know, the more you realise you don't know" and the pervasive anti-intellectualism in our society, we are becoming dominated by the loud and inept. In my work as a gambler, I rejoice in this bias, as it is what pays my bills - bad gamblers can't even conceive the idea that there might be skill involved. Unfortunately, I think it is fucking up society - while professional scientists are careful to speak precisely, avoid hyperbole and only make statements that are backed by strong evidence, their opponents feel free to rant and rave, to extrapolate one anecdote into compelling evidence, even to deny the possibility of objectivity.
jxcole 16y ago
I had a one hour disagreement with someone at my college who was a creationist. Not only did he believe the world was only a few thousand years old, but he also believed that at some point there were floating layers of ice in orbit around the earth. I completely disagreed with him on all fronts. However, I'm not sure that he was stupid. The impression I got was that he was working with a completely different set of axioms than I was. At some level, you can't ask why any more. There has to be some sort of core base to your beliefs. My core belief is in things like science and math. His core belief was in the concrete word for word truth in the bible. Intelligence didn't really play into it. When you think something is stupid, a lot of times it has to be with the core assumptions that underly their beliefs. Unearthing and understanding these beliefs and agreeing to disagree is very important.
- btilly 16y ago
  One of my best friends in grad school was a creationist. We discussed the subject exactly once. He realized that I knew rather more about the debate than he did, I knew there was no percentage in pushing it, and we both knew that neither person was going to change their opinions soon. So we found other things to talk about. I got him through his topology qual so he could get a masters. (He went on to get a PhD in math.) He introduced me to Linux. On the whole I think I got the better long-term bargain.
  - eru 16y ago
    Seems reasonable. One interesting question you can ask each other is "What would it take to change your mind?". In a certain sense--which may remind you of Karl Popper, the weaker the conditions you can offer on which you'd change your mind, the stronger your standpoint is. Of course asking this question can be quite uncomfortable for yourself. For example, I like to think of atheism as the reasonable person's natural point of view. But I could not offer good conditions that would make me change my mind. Because I suspect I'd rather doubt my sanity than accept sensations that would be incompatible with no-gods.
- deleted 16y ago
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microcentury 16y ago
Obvious as all this seems, I've found in managing people that it's generally something they have to learn for themselves from scratch. And it was something I had to learn for myself. It's so much easier to wrap yourself in the comfortable delusion that you're right and everyone else is a moron - those idiots in Department X have no idea how anything works and have no sense of the strategy etc etc. Engaging with the full complexity of a situation and still finding a path forward is something that comes with maturity.
jrockway 16y ago
Remember when that article about Facebook had 100 comments along the lines of "what have you done with the old Facebook login page? I hate this one!"? We are probably not misdiagnosing them as stupid.
- pavs 16y ago
  They are computer illiterate (or internet illiterate to be more precise), but not stupid.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    Or just plain illiterate.
    - pavs 16y ago
      How did you come to that conclusion? There are a lot of things I don't know and some things I am very new to. If I were to sit down with Brian cox and argue about the nuances of quantum physics I will come off as someone who is Quantum Physics illiterate, not stupid. To some people the internet is new, mysterious and complicated like quantum physics, simply because they are not very familiar with it or interested in the technical aspects of the internet doesn't make them stupid.
      - jrockway 16y ago
        How can you confuse a newspaper article with a login form if you have any ability to read and understand what you read? Yeah, the word facebook is used, and the facebook logo is on the page. But if you RTFA... Anyway, acting stupid is as bad as being stupid. Worse, even.
        pavs 16y ago
        I used to be arrogant like that (still to some extend) and I absolutely understand where you are coming from. Seeing other people screwing up on things that seems extremely obvious and no-brainer can be annoying and can be confused as being stupid.
bena 16y ago
The interesting thing about this article is that it's assumed that the problem is on the other end. Are they afraid of the conclusion? Are environmental stresses degrading their judgment? Are they intimidated by you? consider these potential cognitive and psychological problems They may have good judgment but poor communication skills. They may have raw intelligence, but poor thinking habits—patterns of absorbing, processing, and filing information. They may have general insecurities that make them afraid of looking stupid or give them a psychological need to win arguments. They may have a problem with you personally. What if it's not them, but you, with the problem? What if (gasp) you're wrong? This article isn't about how to work with "stupid" people, it's about how to pander like an asshole.
- jacobolus 16y ago
  Trying to overcome communication barriers and understand where other people are coming from is not “[pandering] like an asshole.”
  - mistermann 16y ago
    Yes, but what if they are actually wrong, then what?
ramidarigaz 16y ago
I think it's partially the environment. When I'm in an environment with people who are interested in the things that I am, I am constantly amazed at how bright people can be. E.g. at university programming classes, some of the students are... crazy smart... However, when I'm around people who don't share my interests, it can get tedious trying to explain things.
chaostheory 16y ago
stupidity isn't very common... but laziness and indifference are a different story.
- kscaldef 16y ago
  I don't know why you wouldn't assume that stupidity is roughly as common as intelligence. By definition, 50% of the population is below the median.
  - eru 16y ago
    That says nothing about the distribution, or the absolute levels. Most people are pretty competent in breathing, they don't suffocate. Still half of them are below median in their breathing abilities.
  - chaostheory 16y ago
    I'm assuming you're going by academic measures of intelligence. I was referring something more general like EQ.
tobtoh 16y ago
Good article. I wish more of those smug arrogant idiots who think everyone else is an idiot would read this :P
hassenben 16y ago
"stupid refers to lack of ability while ignorant refers to lack of knowledge" -- Therasus You can educate ignorance, you can't rewire stupidity.
shalmanese 16y ago
I've often found that people who "don't have the patience for stupid people" are really masking a deep seated insecurity. They figure out the one or two areas they regard as their strengths and arbitrarily define that as "intelligence" (and, sometimes, they really aren't even great at those cf: Dunning-Kreuger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dun... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dun...). That way, they can look at the world and see that the majority of people are "stupider" than them. In reality, we all have areas of strengths and areas of weakness. Some people are great conceptual thinkers, some are great communicators, some are brilliant at being detail oriented etc. When I meet somebody for the first time, I really try and find where they are strong & I am weak so that I can learn something from them. Over so many dimensions of human endeavor, there's usually at least one or two major areas in which I feel like I gained something from that encounter. Once in a while, you genuinely will meet someone who has nothing to teach you and nothing you want to associate with them. In those cases, I just put up a wall, be pleasant and engineer to be away from that person as soon as possible. But I pretty much approach everybody with an open mind and a humble heart and it's worked wonders for me.
yason 16y ago
Isn't there a saying that all people are logical and rational, but everybody just starts from unique assumptions.

193 points by healsdata 16y ago

Easy rule-of-thumb: if you think somebody is stupid, ask "Help me to understand" I've found that once you understand, very, very rarely do you think they are stupid any more.

mootothemax 16y ago
I couldn't agree with you more. On a personal note, I must admit that the level of arrogance seen in IT is sometimes quite overwhelming. Just because someone can use a computer does not automatically make them smart; other people have other skills, amazing! ;)
- LiveTheDream 16y ago
  "She's not troubled, she's a dancer" - Sir. Ken Robinson on a child whose parents feared she might be learning-disabled, thus demonstrating that different types of intelligence exist. Look up the speech on TED Talks; it is incredible.
  - adammichaelc 16y ago
    I know the video you're referring to. It is really cool, and opens up the idea that intellectual intelligence is only 1 type of intelligence. From my personal life, my wife couldn't care less about computers and probably would never watch a TED video, but her "people intelligence" is very high -- she can relate to many different kinds of people and wherever she goes she makes good friends and people around her hold her in high esteem. Her dad is something of a bookworm who knows a little bit about everything and quite a bit about a couple of things. If he were younger (he's in his 70's) he'd probably get his news from HN. I've often wondered if his "intellectual intelligence" was transferred to her but in a different form... like she used it in a different way, in interacting with and reading people, instead of books.
    - Retric 16y ago
      I suspect at the biological level there are vary few differences in "types of intelligence" but people can get vary good at solving the types of problems they have already solved. I think the real trick is not to measure people based on what you are good at but what they are good at. Coders can often walk though large logic problems instantly, but IMO that's the same basic thing as an artist knowing which 12 lines capture the basic idea of a picture. Think of it like the brain missing the correct API's, you can fake it but it's slow and buggy. But, if you start to spend 10,000+ hours solving the same types of problems and you are going to create that foundation. EX: Cab drivers develop much better spatial reasoning skills over time. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm
      - phaedrus 16y ago
        @Coders can often walk through large logic problems instantly: I work in an IT shop where we write in house systems to support the business processes of nontechnical people. When we try to hammer out business requirements for systems we'll often have discussions with customer where we carefully question "OK, so it is ALWAYS the case that P and Q implies R", and "It's NEVER the case that P or R implies S" and so forth. The customer will say yes, yes, yes, throughout this, then she'll mention some other case can happen that logically invalidates the rest of everything she said. Only, she doesn't realize this because she doesn't have a coder's hard-edged sense of logic. But when this happens I, my boss, and my boss's boss (the CIO) will all three exchange a quick incredulous look with each other at the same time because we all ran through the logic and found the contradiction nearly instantly. Or, that is to say, as she was talking we were all three building up the same structure in our minds, and the last thing she says brings it crashing down in all three of our heads at the same time. Trying to explain that to a non-coder is not easy to do without appearing arrogant, and I think that is why people in IT can appear rude. How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?"
        michael_dorfman 16y ago
        How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?" You say: "OK, now that we've covered the standard flow, let's talk about the strange cases. What are the weird situations that come up once in a while?" For many users, "ALWAYS" translates to "always, except for the oddball case", and "NEVER" translates to "not usually, but you never know." That's why Requirements Analysis is as much about psychology and anthropology as it is about logic.
  - chriskelley 16y ago
    I was interested and looked it up - here it is if others haven't seen it: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...
- ErrantX 16y ago
  It's a problem definitely, one that always aggravates me. It's about perception of the job too. I struck up a conversation with a guy on the train the other day; he was a journalist - a field I've always been fascinated by. As soon as I told him what my job he barely spoke about his own - it was just constant banal anecdotes about what I did, how bad he was with computers and how I must be amazing and... On one level it attests to how important computers have become in our daily lives. Mostly it just makes me sad because, really, I'm just an IT guy!
  - trafficlight 16y ago
    I rarely tell people what I do because I hate those stories. I don't care that you broke your printer and your 4 year old niece fixed it by putting more paper in. Yes, she is super smart for actually reading the error message that said "Out of Paper". I also can't stand it when somebody tells me they are just completely computer stupid. And that's before we've even said hello.
    - potatolicious 16y ago
      I find that it's not so much inability so much as fear. A lot of people (especially the older generation) seem to think that if they futz with a computer they'll irreparably break it - so they stop and call an expert as soon as something deviates from normal workflow. You think you're creating a UI that encourages learning by exploration, but a lot of your users are too terrified of their machine to dare click that button. This is something we need to work with and educate users about - they're not stupid, they're overly cautious.
      - ajj 16y ago
        Couldn't agree more. My mom can get stuff done (email attachments, etc.) if she is sitting alone and absolutely has to do it. If at all I am available, she will ask help for the smallest stuff fearing she would break something. Sometimes I think its not even about breaking anything, but more about not fancying herself to recover from "even more damage."
      - 16y ago
frossie 16y ago
I don't think I know anybody who I would call stupid. I do, however, know people who are intellectually lazy - they don't know, and they don't want to know. Which is not the same thing at all. [Edit: in case that sounds obnoxious, I was aiming more for "frustrated"]
- mistermann 16y ago
  "they don't know, and they don't want to know" I agree, this is usually my experience, as most of the people I interact with are fairly highly competent in their field. One thing that bothers me is when I raise an idea, "could we do this...." for example. And they say no, it is not possible. My latest example was, asking if animated characters in a video could have automated lip-synching, based on a text file (this could massively cut production times for new videos). No, it's not possible, was the answer, and when I disagree, everyone in the room kinda looks at me like I'm the idiot. [Of course it can be done, there are lots of products that do just that...and btw, I am the client in this scenario.] Another example....we needed some customization in SharePoint, two specific requirements, that aren't provided out of the box. I went back to my desk, implemented demos for both in about 4 hours using jQuery. Did a demo at the next meeting....yes, that's nice, but jQuery isn't a standard here. So we turned to an outside consulting firm, and they implemented the easy feature using.....jQuery. (I don't think they knew how to do the other one, at least it hasn't gotten done). So where I come from, the idea that you are surrounded by "idiots", which is a bit provocative, is often true. I don't pretend to be an expert in law, engineering, etc, but I constantly encounter experts in their field that behave as if they are experts outside their field. I will always listen to the opposing side of my arguments and always consider that I may be wrong, but I rarely encounter someone I disagree with who is willing to debate the disagreement with an open mind, and consider that perhaps they may be incorrect. How else should we consider these people?
amalcon 16y ago
What looks like stupidity is almost always ignorance. What people forget is that, half the time, that ignorance is yours.
deleted 16y ago
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WiseWeasel 16y ago
My practical definition of stupidity is talking authoritatively about a subject one doesn't understand, and is incapable of explaining. Stupid people are often parroting things they've heard in various places, of which they have only the most superficial of understandings. Not being stupid is often knowing when to shut your mouth. At a deeper level, it all comes down to being poor at evaluating the relative value of information sources, placing value in the judgment of people for social and political reasons rather than for their actual expertise in the subject matter. This inability to recognize expertise, easily vulnerable to misguiding, is the essence of idiocy.
- mistermann 16y ago
  A more realistic and common definition I think would be talking authoritatively about a subject one knows a bit about (have read some articles, or genuinely has some expertise in), without considering who your audience is.....if you're truly intelligent, and someone disagrees with you, you should change into a different mode, determining whether the person actually knows what they are talking about, and the possibility that they know something you don't. It's people like this that bother me...I don't know what the proper term for them is.
c00p3r 16y ago
Yeah. If one can't explain the thing "on his fingertips" he doesn't understand the thing either.
chmike 16y ago
Sometimes there is nothing to understand. Code produced in my project at work is a good candidate for the daily WTF (http://thedailywtf.com/ http://thedailywtf.com/). I tried to explain the problem to the management but they didn't change anything. Now the project is more than a year late because the thing doesn't quite work. It is quite obvious that there are problems and if nothing is done when told, than the only logical conclusion is that they are stupid. My boss's answer to this now is "that's life". "Help me to understand" is in this case a waste of time and resource. Where is Darwin again ?
- eru 16y ago
  Change your job?

jgg 16y ago

Part of the problem, particularly with Western culture, is the desire to assign everything a rank, without much clue as to whether or not the metric used is credible at all. Your GPA, SAT/ACT/GRE scores, IQ, credit rating, college major, average income and choice of university all form an impression on people who want a nice box to put you in, whether you like it or not. Sure, some intelligence is probably required to achieve high rankings in some of those areas, but it isn't indicative by itself of who you are or what you're capable of. To the perceptive crowd on Hacker News, this probably seems obvious, but to most of society, these facts and figures define who you are and what you should do with your life. The best hope for humanity, in this regard, is to judge people on what they contribute or accomplish. This will probably never become a viable paradigm for most people, because it isn't inherently concrete; it's much harder to look at someone's entire life and judge their merit relative to someone else, rather than noting that a 3.5 GPA is higher than a 3.2 GPA. In fact, once you look at the big picture, it starts to become rather noticeable that judging people at all is, most of the time, a fruitless task.

mnemonicsloth 16y ago
People like linear status orderings. They exist in every culture and get reinvented when there's no culture present at all. That's why we're prepared to believe things about IQ that we'd never believe about processor or compiler benchmarks.
- jgg 16y ago
  >People like linear status orderings. They exist in every culture and get reinvented when there's no culture present at all. You're right, I think I was just letting my cynicism towards the United states bleed through with that comment. >That's why we're prepared to believe things about IQ that we'd never believe about processor or compiler benchmarks. That's a brilliant parallel, but also a stunningly-accurate one.
- Tycho 16y ago
  Could you elaborate on the IQ remark? I'm just curious as to what your thoughts are (I have no particular opinion on the matter)

spuz 16y ago

All of these points assume that someone who is "stupid" is someone who disagrees with your point of view. I find that is very rarely an issue in my day to day job. The real question I'd like to know the answer to is how do you deal with people who require more help and guidance than others? How do you help others to think for themselves and come up with great solutions to problems by themselves?

jasoncrawford 16y ago
Great question, and something I'm still learning. I touched on some points I know in the article. E.g., if you have data or lessons-learned that they don't, share that information. Probably a whole separate post in helping others see your point of view via questions rather than statements, so they learn your method and not just your conclusions.
PonyGumbo 16y ago
Agreed. I'm also not sure that we're all talking about the same kinds of experiences here. To me, there's a difference between having a spirited difference of opinion with a colleague and having to walk through a basic set of instructions (e.g. "The red shirts go in the red basket") for the forty-seventh time with an employee.

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boredguy8 16y ago

Thanks for sharing: this is a pretty succinct summary of a much better way of approaching the world than the "everybody sucks, only I see the light." It's almost NEVER true, and the people who I know that are right often enough to say that, never would. "To know that you do not know is the beginning of wisdom."

latortuga 16y ago

This seems to be sort of a primer on rhetoric - how to effectively address an argument instead of dismissing it as merely stupid. He touches on a number of rhetorical techniques somewhat informally and I like his treatment of the subject. If you found this interesting, I'm in the middle of a book on the subject of argument and rhetoric that is actually quite engaging, called Thank You For Arguing by Jay Heinrichs.

tensor 16y ago

We all have vastly inflated images of ourselves. Every single person.

BerislavLopac 16y ago
You mean, everyone is above average? ;)
- praptak 16y ago
  Well, most people have above-average number of fingers :)
jdietrich 16y ago
That is massively, dangerously wrong. Dunning, Kruger and an array of later researchers have shown that while the inept do strongly overestimate their own abilities, the highly able strongly underestimate them. The very able assume that if a task was easy for them it must be easy for everyone, while the completely inept assume that a task seems difficult because it is objectively difficult, and that they must be very able to have made the progress that they did. The lower you estimate your own ability to be, the more likely it is that you are in fact highly able. CF Downing demonstrated that people with high intelligence tend to overestimate the intelligence of people who are similarly intelligent to themselves and underestimate their own. If you think that the people around you are more intelligent than you, you're statistically likely to be the most intelligent person you know. Personally, I think this is a highly pertinent cognitive bias, so pervasive as to affect nearly every aspect of modern life. I think that our most able thinkers keep quiet for fear of being wrong, whilst the stupidest and least informed in our society shout from the rooftops in blissful ignorance. I think that between the natural effect of "the more you know, the more you realise you don't know" and the pervasive anti-intellectualism in our society, we are becoming dominated by the loud and inept. In my work as a gambler, I rejoice in this bias, as it is what pays my bills - bad gamblers can't even conceive the idea that there might be skill involved. Unfortunately, I think it is fucking up society - while professional scientists are careful to speak precisely, avoid hyperbole and only make statements that are backed by strong evidence, their opponents feel free to rant and rave, to extrapolate one anecdote into compelling evidence, even to deny the possibility of objectivity.

jxcole 16y ago

I had a one hour disagreement with someone at my college who was a creationist. Not only did he believe the world was only a few thousand years old, but he also believed that at some point there were floating layers of ice in orbit around the earth. I completely disagreed with him on all fronts. However, I'm not sure that he was stupid. The impression I got was that he was working with a completely different set of axioms than I was. At some level, you can't ask why any more. There has to be some sort of core base to your beliefs. My core belief is in things like science and math. His core belief was in the concrete word for word truth in the bible. Intelligence didn't really play into it. When you think something is stupid, a lot of times it has to be with the core assumptions that underly their beliefs. Unearthing and understanding these beliefs and agreeing to disagree is very important.

btilly 16y ago
One of my best friends in grad school was a creationist. We discussed the subject exactly once. He realized that I knew rather more about the debate than he did, I knew there was no percentage in pushing it, and we both knew that neither person was going to change their opinions soon. So we found other things to talk about. I got him through his topology qual so he could get a masters. (He went on to get a PhD in math.) He introduced me to Linux. On the whole I think I got the better long-term bargain.
- eru 16y ago
  Seems reasonable. One interesting question you can ask each other is "What would it take to change your mind?". In a certain sense--which may remind you of Karl Popper, the weaker the conditions you can offer on which you'd change your mind, the stronger your standpoint is. Of course asking this question can be quite uncomfortable for yourself. For example, I like to think of atheism as the reasonable person's natural point of view. But I could not offer good conditions that would make me change my mind. Because I suspect I'd rather doubt my sanity than accept sensations that would be incompatible with no-gods.
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microcentury 16y ago

Obvious as all this seems, I've found in managing people that it's generally something they have to learn for themselves from scratch. And it was something I had to learn for myself. It's so much easier to wrap yourself in the comfortable delusion that you're right and everyone else is a moron - those idiots in Department X have no idea how anything works and have no sense of the strategy etc etc. Engaging with the full complexity of a situation and still finding a path forward is something that comes with maturity.

jrockway 16y ago

Remember when that article about Facebook had 100 comments along the lines of "what have you done with the old Facebook login page? I hate this one!"? We are probably not misdiagnosing them as stupid.

pavs 16y ago
They are computer illiterate (or internet illiterate to be more precise), but not stupid.
- jrockway 16y ago
  Or just plain illiterate.
  - pavs 16y ago
    How did you come to that conclusion? There are a lot of things I don't know and some things I am very new to. If I were to sit down with Brian cox and argue about the nuances of quantum physics I will come off as someone who is Quantum Physics illiterate, not stupid. To some people the internet is new, mysterious and complicated like quantum physics, simply because they are not very familiar with it or interested in the technical aspects of the internet doesn't make them stupid.
    - jrockway 16y ago
      How can you confuse a newspaper article with a login form if you have any ability to read and understand what you read? Yeah, the word facebook is used, and the facebook logo is on the page. But if you RTFA... Anyway, acting stupid is as bad as being stupid. Worse, even.
      - pavs 16y ago
        I used to be arrogant like that (still to some extend) and I absolutely understand where you are coming from. Seeing other people screwing up on things that seems extremely obvious and no-brainer can be annoying and can be confused as being stupid.

bena 16y ago

The interesting thing about this article is that it's assumed that the problem is on the other end. Are they afraid of the conclusion? Are environmental stresses degrading their judgment? Are they intimidated by you? consider these potential cognitive and psychological problems They may have good judgment but poor communication skills. They may have raw intelligence, but poor thinking habits—patterns of absorbing, processing, and filing information. They may have general insecurities that make them afraid of looking stupid or give them a psychological need to win arguments. They may have a problem with you personally. What if it's not them, but you, with the problem? What if (gasp) you're wrong? This article isn't about how to work with "stupid" people, it's about how to pander like an asshole.

jacobolus 16y ago
Trying to overcome communication barriers and understand where other people are coming from is not “[pandering] like an asshole.”
- mistermann 16y ago
  Yes, but what if they are actually wrong, then what?

ramidarigaz 16y ago

I think it's partially the environment. When I'm in an environment with people who are interested in the things that I am, I am constantly amazed at how bright people can be. E.g. at university programming classes, some of the students are... crazy smart... However, when I'm around people who don't share my interests, it can get tedious trying to explain things.

chaostheory 16y ago

stupidity isn't very common... but laziness and indifference are a different story.

kscaldef 16y ago
I don't know why you wouldn't assume that stupidity is roughly as common as intelligence. By definition, 50% of the population is below the median.
- eru 16y ago
  That says nothing about the distribution, or the absolute levels. Most people are pretty competent in breathing, they don't suffocate. Still half of them are below median in their breathing abilities.
- chaostheory 16y ago
  I'm assuming you're going by academic measures of intelligence. I was referring something more general like EQ.

tobtoh 16y ago

Good article. I wish more of those smug arrogant idiots who think everyone else is an idiot would read this :P

hassenben 16y ago

"stupid refers to lack of ability while ignorant refers to lack of knowledge" -- Therasus You can educate ignorance, you can't rewire stupidity.

shalmanese 16y ago

I've often found that people who "don't have the patience for stupid people" are really masking a deep seated insecurity. They figure out the one or two areas they regard as their strengths and arbitrarily define that as "intelligence" (and, sometimes, they really aren't even great at those cf: Dunning-Kreuger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dun... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dun...). That way, they can look at the world and see that the majority of people are "stupider" than them. In reality, we all have areas of strengths and areas of weakness. Some people are great conceptual thinkers, some are great communicators, some are brilliant at being detail oriented etc. When I meet somebody for the first time, I really try and find where they are strong & I am weak so that I can learn something from them. Over so many dimensions of human endeavor, there's usually at least one or two major areas in which I feel like I gained something from that encounter. Once in a while, you genuinely will meet someone who has nothing to teach you and nothing you want to associate with them. In those cases, I just put up a wall, be pleasant and engineer to be away from that person as soon as possible. But I pretty much approach everybody with an open mind and a humble heart and it's worked wonders for me.

yason 16y ago

Isn't there a saying that all people are logical and rational, but everybody just starts from unique assumptions.