Where are all these "stupid people" that supposedly exist?

[Spearmaster]

Yes yes, obvious subject line designed to draw attention. Here's the real thing:

People complain about stupid people all the time. But I almost never meet someone that functionally retarded. I go to work in an office, do my job, come home, watch TV/play games/whatever. If there's a party or meetup going on that I'm interested in, I'll go. Simple as that.

The thing is, I never meet people that I really hate. I see so much complaining online about stupid facebook status updates and stupid conversations with friends, but I never find myself engaging with that type of person. I know that the recent election made a lot of people very confrontational, but not one facebook friend I had posted that kind of reaction. Nobody gloating, nobody complaining.

So why is it that I have some kind of anti-stupid field around me? Yeah, I've met stupid people, especially when I was working retail, but despite how common they are, they're practically a legend to me.

It depends on your tolerable threshold of when someone becomes stupid and where your base line is at, stupid people usually consider other stupid people normal or smart(not meant as an insult). Personally I don't think people are stupid, I think their actions are, plus stupid people are just people we notice doing stupid things deemed stupid by our own bias anyway.

 

[Snotnarok]

Have a glance around Deviantart, artists claiming that there's originality in their "Original Sonic/Naruto/My Little Pony character"

Or people that believe that dinosaur bones were placed in the ground to test faith that the earth is 10,000 years old despite having mountains of evidence otherwise.

People who believe funding NASA and missions is a gigantic mistake when we should be 'helping people down here'. Nevermind NASA is 100% US based and doesn't outsource so that money stays in the US, but the number of technological advances because of NASA goes beyond just space travel and you probably have a few things in your home because of it.

 

[Scrythe]

I currently work at a full-service gas station situation in a particularly uppity part of town, filled with a ton of older and/or richer white people, and I'm routinely find examples of people who prove that one does not get smarter or wiser with age. If you're an idiot throughout life, you stay that way.

Now having said that, I don't believe that my entire country is filled to the brim with mouth-breathing aspies, but as with any demographic the less intelligent ones tend to also be the loudest.

I mean, look at clan Palin.

 

[Treaos Serrare]

Retail attracts idiots to it like mosquitoes to a bug zapper

 

[Ethan Bewley]

On the subject of stupid, there are a few girls that I know of who are, to quote a great man; "Pants-on-head retarded." These people have no general knowledge what-so-ever.

The first one asked the question; "Is England in Great Britain?"
The same one also thought that the Red Baron was Canadian.
The other ones are sexually retarded, in the sense that they said, and i quote; "If a hot guy I didn't know asked me to f*** him, i totally would. I love sex."


These are only a few but if anybody wants me to keep them updated, ill be glad to. There isn't any shortage of it.

 

[afroebob]

I don't know about you guys but there are a lot of stupid people were I live. Well, you could consider them to be ignorant but for someone to be as clueless as they are yet believe they are the most informed person on every matter that have to be pretty fucking stupid. Then again, I live in St. Louis which, while not the WORST place in America, is a pretty shitty city in a lot of parts.

 

[OuroborosChoked]

If they don't exist, who the hell is buying millions the latest spunkgargleweewees by the MILLIONS? Or voting on American Idol? Or watching Glee? Or voting Republican?

Somebody has to be doing these things...

 

[6_Qubed]

Have we so quickly forgotten G W Bush?

Trying to, yeah.

OT: I work at Pizza Hut, and I could very well be confusing "petty" for "stupid", but you wouldn't believe the lengths some people will go to get free pizza.

Or the number of times we've been yelled at for not including sauce in their order.

Which you have to specify that you want.

And it was an Internet order.

(We don't record Internet orders personally, that's why they're internet orders.)

And they wanted delivery but put it in as carry-out because the driver "carries the pizza out of the store."

 

[Cid Silverwing]

You're far more likely to encounter them on the Internet.

No shortage of them anywhere. Just look in the right places, although you really should prefer not to.

 

[TKretts3]

There's this one friend of a friend that I see on a regular basis, and he is just the typical 'Libtard' when it comes to art. He has the audacity (Stupidity) to claim that art is, "Anything that makes you feel something." You don't have to have a degree in an arts course to realize how stupid that is. Another one is similar, but instead of the whole art thing, he would always reply to anyone who didn't agree with him, "Well that's just ignorant," or, "[Sigh] You are so ignorant." and then just walk away.

Other than that, not too many stupid people.

 

[A_Parked_Car]

My view is that there are certainly legitimately stupid people out there, but they are less common than one would think. A lot of people that you hear about being "stupid" are simply making statements and the like on things that they don't understand.

For example, I'm a military history major and musician, so when I talk about military history or music I come off quite smart and informed. However, if I try to talk about things like science or cars, I come off like an idiot.

 

[madkill]

When you hold out an individuals idiocy then their retarded behaviour becomes very black and white but if you can't pinpoint stupid you won't notice it at all.

I could go through any one of your friends on facebook and find at least five idiots. Someone being stupid is all about perspective, when someone points out one comment and holds it up on a pedestal marked 'stupid' then you are seeing from that persons perspective of what is stupid, you could hold up something more stupid or say that person is stupid for seeing something else as stupid.

In the end, its just a big pissing contest. Which is one way to see the internet.

That's just my perspective on the matter and everyone else's perspective on this subject is melon.

 

[Naeo]

People aren't stupid. We just pick a few people who express ignorance/stupidity on a few topics and turn them into the mascots for a "plague of stupidity that has befallen us". We also tend to only remember/notice/care about the slip-ups and stupid things. Then we don't try to put those things in context, we ignore that the people in question are certainly very knowledgeable about a wide range of (other) topics, and then we start hurling scorn and insults. Or, most of the time, we hear someone say or do something incredibly stupid, then just grumble about "that dumbass" and get on with our lives--and a lot more people do that than I think a lot of people recognize. People are a hell of a lot smarter than you think when you ask about topics that don't automatically bring up high emotions (i.e. politics, religion, and big social issues--the absolute worst possible criteria for judging someone's intelligence upon). The dumb stuff people do gets attributed to them being a dumb person, and we amplify that sentiment in our media and our minds. There are perfectly real stupid people, but they're rarer than you may think.

 

[tsb247]

I see stupid every day at work. About two weeks ago, I had someone accuse me of turning their, "Black and white," film into color film and ruining all of their photos. For the record, that is impossible. The actual film itself is either black and white or color; Period. However, this person swore up and down that I did it, despite being shown that her film clearly said, "Color." on the strip.

I also had to listen to some idiot rant and rave about how proud she was of her 15 year old daughter for getting knocked up and having a baby. Of course they didn't know who the father was.

As a photo lab technician, I have seen and heard just about everything, and if there is anyone you could consult as to the limits of human stupidity, it's a photo lab technician because when we say we've seen it all, we've seen it all.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

On the subject of stupid, there are a few girls that I know of who are, to quote a great man; "Pants-on-head retarded." These people have no general knowledge what-so-ever.

The first one asked the question; "Is England in Great Britain?"
The same one also thought that the Red Baron was Canadian.
The other ones are sexually retarded, in the sense that they said, and i quote; "If a hot guy I didn't know asked me to f*** him, i totally would. I love sex."


These are only a few but if anybody wants me to keep them updated, ill be glad to. There isn't any shortage of it.

There was a point where I didn't know either of those, and everyone is going to be missing at least something that is considered common knowledge at any point in their life. At best I'd call the first two ignorant.

You're calling them sexually retarded for having different criteria for who they have sex with than you? God forbid, also for saying that they enjoy sex?! The heresy!

 

[EclipseoftheDarkSun]

That's the thing, many people called stupid are no such thing, at least no more than the ones calling them stupid. We're all limited animals, capable of unusual things for animals, but still limited in perspective, capabilities and intellectual understanding of a whole range of things that surround us. Calling someone stupid is usually a label used to abuse others and treat them in a subhuman manner, with no basis in fact, just a basis in dislike. Experiments have demonstrated that labelling people as stupid has concrete deleterious impacts on how they perform in various scholastic tests, while praising them actually improves their performance.