Why Are People Dumb?

[haha]

Automatically voting against the incumbent is no worse than always voting a straight ticket.

In the right circumstances I think the absolute most rational voting pattern is to vote the machine that you are part of. If I or my son or daughter or father or mother were getting patronage jobs, I'd happily vote for Lucifer.

Ha

 

[growing_older]

My grandfather's generation were lucky to get a grade school education. My father's generation were doing well to graduate high school.

Maybe, but when I compare the level of work that they did to the current equivalents where to avoid hurting student's self esteem most things are graded very generously and math problem sets have been vastly dumbed down, I don't think the comparisons are as clear as they seem.

 

[kumquat]

If all the dumb people got smart and did LBYM, who would be left to help pay for all the social entitlements?

Who would need them?

Financial Advisers?

 

[jacob]

Maybe, but when I compare the level of work that they did to the current equivalents where to avoid hurting student's self esteem most things are graded very generously and math problem sets have been vastly dumbed down, I don't think the comparisons are as clear as they seem.

Agreed. Quantity is not quality.

Education is not getting better, it is merely getting longer.

When I talk to 20-21 year old college students today, I'm surprised to learn they're taking classes in "calculus" that covers things like integration by parts and integration by substitution. I'm surprised because this level of calculus was something I learned at age 16 in high school. I'm 35 now, so this is only 19 years ago. In addition, when I was in college back in the 1990s we would sometimes get question sets from the 1970s. These were materially more difficult than the contemporary ones.

As more people are let into college, the material is dumped down to maintain the passing percentages. Just putting a person in a classroom unfortunately does not make that person more intelligent. Our longer educations are simply a function of a richer society that can afford to keep more people from doing productive work. College is a good place to put unproductive workers, so there ...

 

[Danmar]

A lot of people think that things keep getting worse, or diluted. Eg my education was better than now, todays youth are lazy or whatever, politics is degenerating, inflation is destroying our society, ie we miss " the good old days" As far as i'm concerned the good ole days are right now. We have (generally) never had it so good at least from my albeit non representative experience.
As an aside, I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to be a genius (and by definition they have always existed) say a million years ago? I try to imagine how they would have felt or acted. How would they have used their intelligence?

 

[Amethyst]

I don't know about a million years ago - it doesn't look as if our ancestors were truly human, yet - but 100,000 years ago, the genius probably became the tribe's wise man/woman/shaman, and got the tribe to take care of all their needs for them...A.

As an aside, I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to be a genius (and by definition they have always existed) say a million years ago? I try to imagine how they would have felt or acted. How would they have used their intelligence?

 

[jayc]

I view life as a series of events with continous improvement for every action or experience. Learn from your mistakes and experiences. In finance this approach works great with LBYM, reduce spending and maximize saving and returns on those saving/investments. In other areas it reduces wasted motion and time on projects and every day tasks. I know what task/subject I am ignorant about through lack of experience and at least try to do a little research before and always after the fact when the results are not to my satisfaction.

In general I think most people do not use their previous experinces to their benefit.

 

[Danmar]

I don't know about a million years ago - it doesn't look as if our ancestors were truly human, yet - but 100,000 years ago, the genius probably became the tribe's wise man/woman/shaman, and got the tribe to take care of all their needs for them...A.

Agree about the time line said that just for effect. tribes would have been pretty small, mostly family probably. I wonder what the genius would have thought? How they would have gootten people to do their bidding without well developed language? is intelligent even relevant without language skills? How would intelligence be of use in such an environment?

 

[youbet]

In the right circumstances I think the absolute most rational voting pattern is to vote the machine that you are part of. If I or my son or daughter or father or mother were getting patronage jobs, I'd happily vote for Lucifer.

Ha

Couldn't agree more Ha. As a lad, I grew up in a family where my dad, his brother, his sister's DH and several cousins all worked for the city of Chicago. They all held blue collar jobs that paid at least double what they would have earned in the private sector, plus nice bennies. We had a pic of Richard J Daley on our living room wall and I spent many an hour working for the precinct captain running errands, delivering plain brown envelopes and passing out packs of cigs (with voting instructions) outside of polling places.

But I'm flexible. When dad retired I backed out of doing my "political hours." When my uncles retired shortly thereafter, I noted the pic of Daley was gone. When my cousins retired, and by then I was older, I felt the thrill of voting a split ticket for the first time!

Voting rules such as always voting against the incumbent or always voting a straight ticket (over a lifetime) need to be tempered with a little flexibility!

 

[jayc]

As an aside, I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to be a genius (and by definition they have always existed) say a million years ago? I try to imagine how they would have felt or acted. How would they have used their intelligence?

IMO life long ago was divided by people with good eye sight and people with bad eye sight. Think of all the tasks people would be poor at. i.e hunting, defending yourself, moving around, etc. Without glasses I would probably have not lived much past when my parents stopped looking out for me.

 

[growing_older]

but 100,000 years ago, the genius probably became the tribe's wise man/woman/shaman

Probably only if their intelligence was the right sort, or coupled with the social and emotional skills to make something like that happen. Even now, we waste most of the genius caliber intelligence that had potential but doesn't fully develop for many reasons. Not to mention that problems with eyesight, physical coordination, running speed, resistance to infection and good luck not to break any bones would have been required for just survival back then too.

No child left behind and most school metrics focus on reducing the gap between high performers and low performers or insuring that all low performers meet a minimal standard. Almost no schools seem to be measuring how high the high performers can go, or nurturing individual genius. This looks like a system designed to produce lots of interchangeable parts in a large population of willing workers, not a system to encourage brilliant innovation or breakthroughs. We do reward that to some extent but mostly as winner take all economics of scale not as a systemic part of developing talent, so a very few get outsize rewards, but very many get nothing or fail to develop to their true potential.

 

[Walt34]

Intelligence is always a tricky question.

I've written before here about "Ronnie and Carol" the couple whose financial house of cards continues to implode. (At the height of their folly they were $700k in debt.) Yet she is by all accounts an excellent math teacher, and he's a carpenter who is always in demand and backed up up six months or more. Customers will wait a year for him to build a deck or cabinetry and pay a premium price because he does such excellent work. So these people are not stupid and certainly have the education and math skills to realize they're going to lose all they have, but do nothing about it. The behavior is very puzzling.

 

[Bestwifeever]

Here's what happened to the genius during prehistoric times according to Saturday Night Live back in 1980: SNL Transcripts: Steve Martin: 05/17/80: The Hominids (no YouTube of this, but Steve Martin played "the strange one"--genius, Bill Murray played Oakna the caveman):

Oakna: You are smart. But I am swift. And I am..

Strange One: [ finishing his thought ] Strong.

Oakna: Yes. I am strong, and I am swift!

Strange One: Okay, you are swift and strong, and I am smart.. and, together, we can improve our lives. Perhaps, we can even stop wandering, and build permanent dwellings and domesticate animals. Why, we could then have leisure time to develop a system of symbols, and to record events and communicate ideas, creating a civilization beyond our wildest imagination.

Oakna: You are smart. But it is late, and we must sleep, so tomorrow we can begin on this work.

Good. We must sleep. Yes, let's hit the dirt. We did good.

Strange One: Yes.

[ everyone spreads out on the ground and falls asleep ]

Oakna: [ sits and watches the Strange One fall asleep behind a rock, then picks up a bigger rock and holds it over the Strange One ] I am strong! [ pounds the Strange One with rock, killing him ] And now, I am smart [ smiles happily, and dumbly steps into the fire once more, burning his foot ]

 

[youbet]

So these people are not stupid and certainly have the education and math skills to realize they're going to lose all they have, but do nothing about it. The behavior is very puzzling.

Hey, if you're smart you do things the "right way." And the "right way" is obviously my way.

 

[Danmar]

Here's what happened to the genius during prehistoric times according to Saturday Night Live back in 1980: SNL Transcripts: Steve Martin: 05/17/80: The Hominids (no YouTube of this, but Steve Martin played "the strange one"--genius, Bill Murray played Oakna the caveman):

thanks. never saw that before. i guess other people have wondered the same thing. Kind of points out that intelligence can only take you so far.

 

[Danmar]

IMO life long ago was divided by people with good eye sight and people with bad eye sight. Think of all the tasks people would be poor at. i.e hunting, defending yourself, moving around, etc. Without glasses I would probably have not lived much past when my parents stopped looking out for me.

When you hear old descriptions of very successful aboriginals (closest we have of prehistorics) you tend to hear "he was a great hunter" or "he was a great warrior" Tend not to hear "he was a great thinker" I guess that tells us something?

 

[Amethyst]

The greatest warriors show the other fighters ways to fool and intimidate the enemy.

The greatest hunters come up with new, improved ways to catch and kill the food animals.

The wise man or woman notices and remembers stuff that nobody else remembers as well (like the best places to find medicinal plants), and also thinks of new ways to keep the rain off, fix stuff, etc. Proto - doctors and proto - engineers.

What I do wonder about, is where the shamans first got the idea of convincing everybody that there are spirits, and only the shamans can talk to them. I still think that's the cleverest route of all - getting people to do stuff for you, in the hope that you can intercede with nonexistent beings!

Amethyst

When you hear old descriptions of very successful aboriginals (closest we have of prehistorics) you tend to hear "he was a great hunter" or "he was a great warrior" Tend not to hear "he was a great thinker" I guess that tells us something?

 

[Hamlet]

Agreed. It is generally worth examining each candidate specifically. But that takes time and effort. I don't get the impression that most people are doing that.

Automatically voting against the incumbent is no worse than always voting a straight ticket.

 

[Hamlet]

I would bet that there is more Calculus being taught in high school today than 20 years ago.

It certainly wasn't widely taught in my high school in 1990 when I graduated. There was a Calculus class, but it was pretty small. It also didn't allow for getting AP credits, which is pretty standard now.

Certainly there has been an issue with college students not being prepared for college level work, but that has more to do with the expansion of college to groups of students that never used to go.

When you try to send the top half of high school students to college instead of the top 20%, you are going to have some challenges. You are either going to have massive dropout rates or be forced to lower your standards. Or some combination of the two.

Average test scores have not been going down, we've just been trying to reach further down the bell curve.

When I talk to 20-21 year old college students today, I'm surprised to learn they're taking classes in "calculus" that covers things like integration by parts and integration by substitution. I'm surprised because this level of calculus was something I learned at age 16 in high school. I'm 35 now, so this is only 19 years ago. In addition, when I was in college back in the 1990s we would sometimes get question sets from the 1970s. These were materially more difficult than the contemporary ones.

 

[MichaelB]

Here's what happened to the genius during prehistoric times according to Saturday Night Live back in 1980: SNL Transcripts: Steve Martin: 05/17/80: The Hominids (no YouTube of this, but Steve Martin played "the strange one"--genius, Bill Murray played Oakna the caveman):

Hilarious. Thanks for posting this. Its like reading the transcript of a cable news show...

 

[growing_older]

I think the notion that genius could become prehistoric shaman or healer is our interpretation through a huge distortion of romanticized time distance from those people. The essential skills needed to be a successful shaman were ability to manipulate the people, not ability to heal or be wise. In fact, the profession of healing is largely ineffective throughout history until the advent of penicillin. Even though there are some effective herbal cures, there were also many ineffective or harmful ones mixed in, so on balance doing nothing might have been preferable to treatment by most healers. Even what we think of as modern surgeons and physicians were largely ineffective or even harmful before the early 1900's.

 

[cb7010]

There are dumb people...

but, I don't think most people are necessarily dumb. There are obviously biological differences in brain function and capability across the human population; but, I think the primary problem these days is that far too many people do not fully utilize their given capabilities.

Being inexperienced is not being dumb. I think intelligence should be measured by the capacity to learn, analyze, and solve...

Perhaps the author's use of the word ignorant somehow meshes with my assessment, that people are generally lazy. Our lives, particularly, in the US, are pretty darn easy and many people, acting instinctually, are simply content to get fat and happy and aren't driven or self-motivated enough to challenge themselves.

 

[Nords]

"A man's got to know his limitations." -- Dirty Harry

Agreed. Quantity is not quality.
Education is not getting better, it is merely getting longer.
When I talk to 20-21 year old college students today, I'm surprised to learn they're taking classes in "calculus" that covers things like integration by parts and integration by substitution. I'm surprised because this level of calculus was something I learned at age 16 in high school. I'm 35 now, so this is only 19 years ago. In addition, when I was in college back in the 1990s we would sometimes get question sets from the 1970s. These were materially more difficult than the contemporary ones.
As more people are let into college, the material is dumped down to maintain the passing percentages. Just putting a person in a classroom unfortunately does not make that person more intelligent. Our longer educations are simply a function of a richer society that can afford to keep more people from doing productive work. College is a good place to put unproductive workers, so there ...

I don't know whether the education is required to be longer than it used to be, as much as it's more common to see more people deciding to spend more time on it. Before just the cream of the crop was attending college, and now the denominator is a lot more common. People are still bailing without high school degrees and eventually finding good jobs and even making their fortunes. Yet most of us have been persuaded by various studies that we improve our odds by spending more time getting educated.

Elizabeth Warren's "Two-Income Trap" says that real estate values were driven up over the last generation by two-income couples who wanted good schools in good neighborhoods. Same with the cost of college-- they're just charging what they can get away with.

If it's any consolation, Hawaii is consistently graded as one of the nation's worst public-school systems. Yet our daughter was studying calculus in eighth grade (through Kumon tutoring), skipped an entire year of high-school math due to Kumon, too AP Calculus in 11th grade, took AP Probability & Statistics in 12th grade, and managed to cover Kumon topics like differential equations, vectors, and matrices before college.

Of course we had to explain practical applications of logarithms and matrices to her. That was a little more difficult to accomplish than the mechanics of solving the problems. However she immediately grasped the concept of investment returns having a skewed kurtosis...

 

[TromboneAl]

‪Idiocracy Intro (HR titlovi)‬‏ - YouTube

 

[Gumby]

Obviously people fall somewhere along a bell curve in terms of intelligence, and some people always will be incapable of learning and applying knowledge. No big mystery there. What is a mystery to me is why so many people who otherwise appear to have sufficient mental capacity seem to be not only willfully ignorant of even the most basic information but also actively opposed to engaging their brains in any meaningful manner to analyze and interpret the information they do know. There seems to be a very strong, and growing, anti-intellectual streak in modern American culture. I don't know why that is so, but it makes me fear for the future of the country.