"There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid."

I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.

Although perhaps the terminology is a bit dichotomous - smart vs. stupid, which could be misleading also. I mean it's a bit ridiculous to condense ability and wisdom along many dimensions into this single dimension. And it further seems that in common parlance, stupid can mean a variety of things based on context...

Although I get the spirit of the article, I think it's just too much of a simplification to be useful.

"If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole." -Raylan Givens, Justified

I believe the same applies to stupid. Yes, you will occasionally run into stupid people (or as the OP states "people being stupid"). But if it happens more often than not, look in the mirror.

As I am sure many HN type people are familiar with, growing up and into my adulthood, people have often commented on me being "the smart one". It confused me, because I honestly have never felt particularly smart. I have always felt like I have been playing catch up.

I have been a member of a local makerspace for the past couple of years, and one thing that being a member has crystallized for me is that pretty much everyone is smart in their own way. It feels obvious to say, but being a member there really made that click for me. People just think I'm smart because I have interests often associated with smart people, not because my capacity for learning or the size of the set of things that I know are all that different from other people.

The other big thing that I think makes people think I'm smart is that I have absolutely no issue saying "I don't know", or just asking questions about something, like the article says. I think people don't really weigh statements or questions like that into their understanding of the knowledge you actually have nearly as much as if you do something like guess incorrectly. I have a habit of shutting up and letting people talk, and people just assume that I know more than I do :P

There is not really that much deviation in intelligence among most adults. People just have different experiences, and therefore different knowledge sets. The way those sets intersect, and the way that non-overlapping sections are treated during interactions seem far more influential for how "smart" someone is perceived, than the actual size of those sets, or even the rate at which one can change that set (how fast they can learn).

I’d rather be around a self-proclaimed stupid then a self-proclaimed smart

>Smart people don't think others are stupid

In my experience, this is true even when they _should_ believe that someone is stupid. It seems that the very intelligent make two errors: humility, and then the same theory of mind error that every makes.

The "humility problem" is well-intended but incorrect; they don't want to claim they're above anyone, at at least in the same of some very intelligent people this is not just a social signal. They seem to think that other people must be just as intelligent as they are, but there's some other explanation for why they don't understand things. This ties into the next problem:

I don't have a clever name for the next problem, but I would call it "the same theory of mind error that every makes." When we try to model other people, we use our own mind as a model. We do this even when we've been proven wrong over a lifetime. We do this when we know better. We slip back into this when we've previously corrected for this. How many extroverts do you know who can tell when an introvert has had "enough" social interaction. It's exceedingly rare. But the extroverts aren't bad people. They just have no real way to slip into the introvert's perspective. They're modeling the introvert as being more or less the same as them, but just with a few quirks. The model fails over and over.

The in case of intelligent people, they seem to have no understanding what a very unintelligent mind would look like, and instead seem to believe that apparently unintelligent people _could_ be brilliant if they just read more, or were not so closed minded. Or maybe they had a poor upbringing, or are dealing with trauma. They don't seem to understand that for stupid people, abstractions are often impossible, impulse control is fleeting, and emotions rule their mind more than thoughts. They cannot really place themselves in the stupid person's mind, so they try to ask "how much would need to go wrong for _me_ to come to such an incorrect conclusion." And so they come up with a false hypothesis, such as "their school teachers must have failed them."

My first-year philsophy professor gave a similar warning. He offered words to the effect that if we (the students) started thinking that the philosophy we were reading made no sense, was idiocy, or just nonsense, pause for a moment and imagine whether we thought it was likely that Plato was an idiot and everyone hasd missed it for millenia, or that we might be misinterpeting something. There’s always the chance that we’ll have an insight that others might not have had, but there’s a reasonable chance the the philosophers we were to study might not be exclusively stupid.

I think smart people either don’t say it out loud or just don’t care. The hard part about this topic is, the moment you say anything you’re kind of saying that you’re one of the smart ones lol

Theory falls flat quickly when discovering there's actualy people who will never think 1 step futher.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered as one of the important phillosophers of 20th century, did it all the times! he even compared simple people to animals. When he was a teacher in small village(s) in Austria, he was higly disrespecting to the simple village-people and their kids he was teaching. Using force on dumb pupils to put knowledge into them with his bare hand!!!

i think its lack of understanding and empathy in smart people causing them to think others are stupid - when I studied, the only thing i really learned is to ask "why in this stupid way, and not in some other more smarter way" when there's one answer one can use to explain why, then its enough to counter that "stupid"/"smart" arguments. Smart people often live in a higher state where their knowledge allows them to find better approaches/answers/methods - so the result is they alwys question approaches/answers/methods and if there's a simple better approaches/answers/methods, they say "thats stupid" - but never consider the why was it made this way and not the other way around.

Thats my experience. Until I learned to question first, then think&suggest, I was, i thought, "the smartest guy in the world, because all other were plain dumb!". Now i differentiate more and only if something is not explainable, erratic, uncalculated, i call DUMB with an emphasis on the forced, spitting, pronounciation without opening the mouth for vowels! :)

The primary argument of this article can be simplified and rephrased as “Only stupid people call other people stupid” which really points the finger back at them.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrounded_by_Idiots for the case that people generally aren't stupid, they're just different - personality, upbringing, culture, etc. Being smart is knowing how to spot those fundamental differences, interpreting them for what they are and adapting your behaviour.

But there are also proper idiots.

I'd argue that this is a matter of wisdom, not intelligence per se. Lots of smart people think others are stupid, especially when they're young. Most smart people grow out of this over time, as they gain experience. Some don't, but that's not because they get stupider. Sometimes it's due to lack of real-world experience. Other times it's inappropriate devotion to certain fictional tropes that people always seem to forget are usually villain-coded: the heroic smart guy sometimes gets frustrated but rarely complains about the intelligence of their comrades, but the villainous smart guy complains about it all the time.

I read and love all from Derek. I like that he always makes you think through, even when starting from simple and stupid ideas.

Personally I tend to dismiss myself as stupid, because many times I detect I'm being misguided by lazyness and not wanting to think things through, which obviously makes me feel so smart that I could spend all day trapped in this stupid paradox.

> There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid.

Only problem is that there are people that are actually stupid in the actual medical sense of the word. And a side effect is that they’re not great at thinking things through.

idk this sort of thinking just feels very “everyone gets a participation trophy” when much of the world doesn’t work that way

I don't think this is a good marker for intelligence, but I think if you avoid dismissing issues because other people are dumb you will generally think harder and in the end will have a better understanding of the issue.

I have a personal rule that goes along the lines of "If I can't explain why a smart and kind person thinks the opposite of me it means I don't really understand the issue". It doesn't mean that I have to agree with them, but I always try to understand where they came from.

The line of thinking progresses like this - it starts at ignorance, then it comes to the showcased "there are no stupid people" partially because of the still remaining ignorance in the "unimportant" humanities areas usually "STEM and economics is all that's needed to be smart!". And partially because of the combination of self-censoring and social virtue signalling "Look, I'm super duper extremely tolerant and avoid even a slight mention of the "bad words", please praise me!". And then, rarely, a person understands that a) there are no "bad words" and opinion of others is more or less worthless with the exception of friends and family, and b) a lot of people are actually stupid in a clear biological or medical sense. Like for example, the oft incorrectly remembered IQ score. It is quite openly in the definition of that score, that score 100 is around the median. And word median implies that there are not only higher scores than 100. but also lower too. It's really obvious, and after virtue signalling is no longer in the picture, it is very easy to explain.

My experience is rather:

Smart people typically turn out to be disrespectful towards stupid people if in their life such stupid people made their life more difficult. And smart people often have a good memory.

If they never had any problems with stupid people in life, smart people are in most cases much more respecting.

I see this style of framing a lot and it always seems like turtles all the way down to me:

- Smart people recognize that some people are stupid

- No, real smart people recognize that behaviors are stupid, not people

- No, real smart people don't label others, including calling themselves smart, based on a small sample of observed behaviors. They leave the dichotomy behind.

- Wait, you still called yourself smart...?

- You are all wrong, all labels are generally meaningless and unhelpful in describing dynamic people in a dynamic world, though let's not be dogmatic about it, sometimes a dolt is a dolt and a genius is a genius

Smart people do not default to thinking that others are stupid.

They go through the answer space, exhausting the other options and then settle on "that guy must be an idiot" with a confidence level somewhere in the high 90%.

It has to be this way, because stupid people do in fact exist. So there must be a process of which the outcome is thinking that someone might be stupid.

There are many ways one can be smart. Having an intuition for solving complex problems is not the same trait as having a good memory or controlling your emotions or being environment and self aware.

Many are overlapping traits sure, but someone that has them all, can easily be the worse at each one, when compared with others that excel in that area. This is why you see so often brilliant people doing idiotic stuff.

So, "everyone's stupid" is a matter of alignment, in the areas you're best, where you can judge best, few around are better. Which can be true while still not making you the smartest person around in all ways.

I don't agree that this iuis an indicator of any kind of intelligence other than social intelligence (e.g. don't say stupid things that affect your life, in other words socially intelligent people keep it to themselves)

some people are being stupid all the time though. stupid is a shorter way to say it

I wonder if people who call people stupid for calling other people stupid might also be stupid. But I’m not jumping to conclusions. Just a thought

Smart, and not so smart, people realise you can't categorise people in such binary ways

i forget where i heard it first, but people may still forgive you after burning down their house, killing their parents, kidnapping their daughters, but will never for calling them stupid.

This has the smell of enterprise corporate positivity. In a corporate setting, you have to keep the peace.

But no, there are absolutely maliciously intentionally stupid people out there.

The other fallacy is the author who says "smart people don't think others are stupid", makes an assumption that this Derek Severs is a " smart person".

there are plenty of places in the world in which most people are assholes about some particular thing.

For example if you are a young black man or a gay person living in Utah you might encounter pretty much assholes all day, depending on what you are trying to do that day and depending on if you are unlucky. If you are a good Mormon person in Utah you will probably meet nothing but good people when you go out, even if you meet people who are not good Mormons.

If you are living in Denmark and taking care of a severely autistic child of about 6 years old with learning disabilities, if you meet nothing but unknown Danes during the day you are probably meeting nothing but assholes.

This really clever quote, like most really clever quotes, is somewhat insulting when it reaches its limitations.

This is a strong anti-signal for me. When you work for someone who thinks every other team / counterparty we interact with is stupid / we could do their jobs / blah blah blah.. hugely demotivating behavior.

This line of thinking is common but it’s only a self serving implicit bias.

Yes, everyone around you could very well be more stupid or the bigger asshole. This is a perception issue void of evidence either way. The people most prone to poor perception analysis are those least capable of perceiving, which is the foundation of Dunning-Kruger.

For everyone else there are things like measures and accomplishments.

I like Nassim Taleb's take - the Intellectual Yet Idiot.

While not wrong, this quote assumes a healthy self-regulating society that isn't being actively driven off a cliff by algorithms optimizing everything for short-term benefits.

Meaning that it might actually be that the assholes one runs into all day are in fact assholes.

Even more so when we consider that one during a normal day does not run into a representative sample of society, but tiny tiny bubbles. We made sure to atomize everyone into that and separate the social classes from each other.

__

We can of course not expect our quotes like that to serialize all the assumed preconditions into their writing, but we should remember that those exist when replicating them.

Important doesn't mean "smart." I would actually argue Wittgenstein wasn't very smart (and in my opinion, often wrong). There were just the right enough people around him that thought he was a gifted student (though he didn't always excel academically, weirdly enough). At what, that is a mystery and is contentious. During his early years when people thought that, he was already harassing and beating children (he published Tractatus in his early 30s).

1. He rejected infinite mathematical extensions, unbounded quantification, misunderstood Godel’s incompleteness theorem and quite a bit more that the math community dismissed. So he wasn't a math genius (he originally studied engineering and became interested in math through that)

2. Most people were skeptical of his picture theory, and rightfully so. It grew out of the same environment that gave rise to, at that time and in their initial form, logical positivism, empiricism, and at its most horrific, behaviourism, which led to infant pain denial. Picture theory explains something surface-level, which in itself people understood was just incomplete, and I'm sure you know, even Wittgenstein rejected his theory later

3. But the problem with his last work, Investigations, was that it was again surface-level musings, and written in a weird cryptic way sprinkled with made up words. His language-games, to me, sounds like what teens nowadays would talk about in high school with less fancy language. And it describes, to me, this kind of juvenile high school behaviour. Which, fair enough, I'm sure rings true to some people. But his philosophy is general enough to not really contribute much as a whole. It just hides behind this high-brow language. Yet he was very adamant and defensive about it

Wittgenstein had severe anger issues that people recognized but hardly anyone wanted to do much about. He had a superiority complex (lots of childhood stuff in his life probably) and he just didn't like a lot of people and thought very little of them

I guess the one good thing about him I can say is when he wanted to accomplish something he really set his mind to it. If only that same fervour was used to be not just a better person but to work well with others, he might've contributed something most experts would still rely on and be influenced by