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The Ironic Truth About Stupid People

• ergo98 16y ago
  Not irony (not even the pseudo-irony that has become the norm). This reads like one of those "feel smart by setting up a strawman" things that, ironically (yuk yuk), "stupid" people resort to.
  • Tycho 16y ago
    I disagree. Basically it's saying that it's the stupid ones who underestimate the intelligence of people they try to cheat. The sort of incongruity that irony is made of. If, say, only the worst martial artists picked fights with strangers, that would also be ironic.
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• shin_lao 16y ago
  Unfortunately abusing someone is not always a question of "intelligence". A lot of con-men are not especially intelligent, they just know how to exploit one's weakness. And we all have our weaknesses, and no amount of intelligence can shield them enough. Funny story nonetheless.
• maushu 16y ago
  The reverse is also true, some (not all) people think others are intelligent like them (or close to). This is optimistic thinking. It never ends well.
• bherms 16y ago
  I think this is more related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, where incompetent people are very confident in their competence (inversely, competent people are not confident). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
• SamAtt 16y ago
  This is a little off topic but I was a little taken aback at the elitist attitude regarding University graduates. Look at these quotes: "Rather shocked that someone who had, in fact, gone to university and was working for a major corporation, considered it okay to blatantly copy someone else’s article" "I don’t know which I found more appalling: that someone had made it through university and into a major corporation believing it was acceptable to plagiarize" What about "going to University" imbues someone with automatic moral virtue? Does this person believe the unwashed masses think it's absolutely acceptable to plagiarize? While the elite University students are somehow above that? Maybe I'm just over sensitive as someone who didn't go to college but it really bugged me.
  • kd0amg 16y ago
    The idea is not that those who haven't gone to university don't know better, but that going through university (which is assumed to have and take seriously an academic integrity policy) would teach them (even though many would already know better). To say that something is typically true of members of a group does not mean that it is typically not true of non-members.
    • NumberFiveAlive 16y ago
      Yes, this. There isn't really a single avenue of study at University you can choose where you shouldn't encounter this. Unless you can make it through a degree without writing a single paper. The idea that you can plagiarize anything in any context at all is basically anathema in almost all academic circles. Not that it doesn't happen, but most people that even attempt it are smart enough to do more than change the font size to hide it.
      • mike-cardwell 16y ago
        I did a BSC in Computer Science at University. About half my class failed our first ever programming assignment because of plagiarism. Loads of people had just shared the code between them, character for character. There were a few cases where they even left the original authors name in the comments at the top of the code. Instances of plagiarism dropped after that. At least they learned how to change variables, function names, comments and whitespace enough to get around the automated plagiarism detection tool.
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• acconrad 16y ago
  This is incredibly condescending and to be honest, you're not that intelligent if you have to resort to the faceless ridiculing of someone in a public forum. I had to work with plagiarism first-hand at a first-class graduate school. You would think the caliber of talent for such a prestigious university would weed out disingenuous individuals, but the truth is that plagiarism is a cultural phenomenon. Just type in "plagiarism china" into Google to find out how students are being raised to copy work and rewarded for their efforts. Then they come to learn over in America in a culture where its frowned upon, and you see them with the same confused expressions when they correct their work. Not to say that what China is doing as a country is right, but you can't simply state that people are stupid.
  • protomyth 16y ago
    It really isn't held as a major sin by the general public in the US. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/2607505/Joe-Biden-plagiarised-Neil-Kinnock-speech.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/b... http://www.slate.com/id/2198597/ http://www.slate.com/id/2198597/
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  • S_A_P 16y ago
    Totally agree. What is the point of this article? To have a laugh at the "airhead" that didn't understand what plagiarism was? This article reads like a chain email for "darwin awards" to me.
  • jonpaul 16y ago
    Agreed. Clearly the author isn't that intelligent - as he/she doesn't understand what irony means.
• klochner 16y ago
  Funny, cute, or sad, but http://notironic.com/ http://notironic.com/
• konad 16y ago
  I don't think she was being devious, I think she thought she had done the right thing.
  • rbanffy 16y ago
    For some interpretations of "thought" and "right" only.
• kenjackson 16y ago
  To me going to university isn't the surprise. But that Sarah was apparently picked as the subject matter area expert for this topic. This leads me to think that maybe there was some confusion going on. Is it possible that Sarah actually wrote the source article and thought that her seminal work in the field would be good background information?
  • jerf 16y ago
    And then failed to use that as a (rather good) defense? That strikes me as a stretch.
    • kenjackson 16y ago
      Without the author of the post being Sarah or Michelle, and given the problems I have with it... it's hard for me to tell what really happened.
• ShabbyDoo 16y ago
  I often have a terrible time figuring out whether someone is being dishonest or is just stupid. Take buying a car at a dealership, refinancing your house, or anything else involving a lower-level salesman. They make absurd statements which benefit their cause if I believe them. Last week, I was talking to a mortgage salesman affiliated with my financial advisor (who I think is pretty smart). The mortgages rates offered are about 0.25% lower with a "point" (percentage of loan amount) paid up-front. One can compute the approximate () length of time the loan must be held for this to be a good deal. This guy, without any knowledge of how long I expected to stay in my home, said, "I never put people into points....you gotta pay all that money up front, you know?" Was he being dishonest? I don't think his commission varied much depending on which product he sold me, and he seemed legitimately interested in forming a longer-term relationship rather than making a sale that day. When I mentioned that the point of indifference was probably around two and a half years and that I planned to stay in the house, he backed off of his claim. I suspect he was just not .too sharp but perhaps realized that, when confronted with too many confusing mortgage choices, many people would just choose irrationally not to refinance. If someone chooses to buy nothing, he gets no commission. Maybe he was smart enough to want to reduce the number of choices for me to consider. And, when confronted with the need to cough up a percent of their homes' values, many people might back out of deals, so he decided to eliminate choices which might not pan out in his favor. I have taken the adage "Never presume malevolence for what can be explained by stupidity." to heart and try to react in such situations with the presumption of stupidity. It's really hard though when I can't figure out how someone could actually believe the things he's saying. After all, shouldn't someone who spends his days selling mortgages understand the trade-off of paying a point down up-front for a lower rate? () I don't know how the average person figures out which mortgage product is best. I have to put together a complicated NPV spreadsheet when deciding such things. And, even then, I'm not properly accounting for the interest rate options implicit in the products.
  • sbierwagen 16y ago
    HN uses the asterisk to style text. Ideally, the parser would be smart enough to know you wouldn't be trying to italicize three paragraphs at a time, but as you can see, it isn't. Hopefully you will check back within the edit window, in time to correct the mistake.
• chegra 16y ago
  What comes to mind is Occam Razor. Thinking that Sarah is stupid is not the simplest explanation. Couple of reasons: 1) Sarah got into university 2) Sarah finished university 3) Sarah pass approximately 32 course at university 4) Sarah maintained a high enough average to be select to work in the corporation she is in now. 5) Sarah was chosen as the expert in her field There is only two things that point to Sarah being stupid: 1) Copying others' work and thinking that a simple change of font is sufficient enough to mask it. 2) What your mother said. As you would have noted, evidence for Sarah being smart can't simply be explained away. It would require a few professors and classmate helping her out. It would require someone botching the interview and the selection of an expert. This isn't the simplest explanation. If we assume Sarah is smart, why did she make such a glaring mistake and why does your mom said what she said? A possible reason why Sarah did what she did was because she didn't want to do it again. I assume the effort that Sarah placed into copying and the conversation with Michelle was not more than 30mins. People who do a good job are normally rewarded with more of the same work. So, instead of 30mins of work, Sarah might have ended up putting 300hours of work into something that will most certainly not yield a high payoff for her. So, in this case it might be best if she pretended that she is stupid, which would basically fast track her career by months if she was to working on stuff with high payoff instead. But, you could tell Sarah's boss about her incompetence. No you wouldn't; the easiest thing is to ask for another expert. Even if you did, she can simply say she was going to write legal a letter that it might be in the best interest of the company to purchase the copyrights of these paper, instead of having a highly qualified person wasting time and money on something that might essentially be fruitless. Sometimes it might not be in your best interest to appearing competent all the time. Appearing competent all the time is akin to a greedy algorithm which might not be the optimal solution to achieving your end goal. In terms of the author's mom, maybe she is right but it doesn't apply here. In summary, the simplest explanation is that Sarah is smart, but for whatever reason she chose to appear incompetent in this scenario; I have outline such a scenario above. If Sarah is stupid it would require, more than likely, over a dozen people willfully assisting Sarah's incompetence, but if she is smart it just requires her to play dumb for 30mins. This is not to prove comprehensively that Sarah is smart but really to show that other simpler explanations exist. If I was Michelle, a lot of alarms will be going off in my mind, and I would not simply dismiss it as she is stupid.
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• richieb 16y ago
  Keep in mind that everyone is a Dilbert at something....