41–50 of 130 posts
He's right - smart people know others are stupid. Seriously though, people do Stupid Things. And I call them stupid when they do them. Change lanes without signaling, without looking - maybe you're not an idiot all the time, but at that moment you're acting like an idiot and endangering other people.
Labeling people is nearly always a substitute for thinking and empathy (both hard things).
Smart people don't think others are stupid merely because of the beliefs they hold . That is, being a [Southerner, Northerner, Republican, Democrat, Indian, American, Christian, Muslim, Atheist, Tauist, Piist, vi user, emacs user, ...] does not mean a person is stupid. There are smart people who really have thought things through and ended up at each of those positions for good reasons. But smart people might conclud…
I noticed this too, and for a long time it bothered me. But I recently read Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind, and in it he points out that a lot of people appear to hold believes about a wide array of issues (politics, religion, consumer products, and so forth) that they don't really hold based on logic and evidence, but to signal group identification and affiliation.
In addition, he points out that, on a wide array of issues, people tend to have gut, intuition-based reactions first, then look for evidence to support their intuition, while a lot of us assume or want to assume that it works the other way around.
I probably learned something from The Righteous Mind on every page, and I say this about very few books; I also wrote at more length about it here: http://jseliger.com/2012/03/25/jonathan-haidts-the-righteous... .
(BTW, I agree with your basic point and think it's well put.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fundamental attribution error from social psychology - you tend to attribute errors by others to their intrinsic flaws (stupidity, poor judgment, clumsiness) but your own errors to circumstances (I was tired, they tricked me, it was slippery).
The world would be a much better place, IMO, if everyone ever knew about this cognitive bias and was reminded of it periodically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
They are closely related but people always forget the second one.
Smart people don't think others are stupid merely because of the beliefs they hold . That is, being a [Southerner, Northerner, Republican, Democrat, Indian, American, Christian, Muslim, Atheist, Tauist, Piist, vi user, emacs user, ...] does not mean a person is stupid. There are smart people who really have thought things through and ended up at each of those positions for good reasons. But smart people might conclud…
Can we find better things to write about than this? It is getting really boring reading about how other people think we should all behave.
Then again, religion is a great way to cope with the paradoxical and absolutely absurd reality we live in so maybe they aren't that stupid...
There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid. The same could be said about almost all behaviors, such as courage, promiscuity, or whathaveyou. However, over time people tend to display consistent patterns of behavior. As a consistent picture emerges, we tend to switch from thinking of people as acting a certain way, to thinking of people as being a certain way. Whether you want…
This is absolute BS. Odds are that the all of the people from the article, and the author, are relatively stupid. Maybe one or more of them isn't, but the odds are against them - that is just how it works.
Most people are average, I get a lot of attention for things I do that people don't understand. But I'm not really a smart person, I just like puzzles and I do them quite often. There plenty of situations where I appear like a bumbling idiot.
Heres how I see it. People who have an interest in something invest lots of energy into understanding it. Judging someone by there ability not to understand something that they have invested a lot of time into doesn't make you smart, it makes that person a jerk.
And heres the reason. Calling someone stupid is an insult, a way of asserting a dominant position i.e. "I am better than you because my understanding is more advanced." Guess what, thats one hell of arrogant position to have.
As someone who usually runs teams I'd probably ask to someone who used statements like that to be transferred. If said person held an attitude like that, its not helpful to the team, potentially damaging to someone trying to get up to speed, undermining confidence. And lastly it wrecks of someone who would hold a something over someone else to look better rather than cooperate, build needlessly complicated code that half the team couldn't work on at a decent speed.
Anyway theres a quote attributed to Einstein I'm sure you've heard which sums it up nicely for me "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."