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Smart people don't think others are stupid

sivers.org

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Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#61

Post by fusiongyro »

scarmig wrote: post #51
reitzensteinm wrote: post #40

Interesting choice including Republican and Democrat, there. I don't think they're stupid, but if someone identifies themselves as "a Republican" or "a Democrat", as opposed to "the Republican party best fits my views", or "I'm a registered Democrat", I pretty much write off any chance of having a decent political discussion with them. A large segment of the population follows politics the way they follow football, e…

Well, one argument is that politics is essentially a football game. The stakes are far, far higher, but fundamentally it comes down to all the institutions of a society self-organizing themselves into coalitions for the assumption or protection of power. "Reason" amounts to a way to mask rhetorical flourishes to convince dupes that they're morally better or smarter than the other side. And if you're turning to the Wa…

I agree with your first two paragraphs. The position you advocate in the third would make sense if political affiliation conferred a tangible benefit or our participation in the process affected the outcomes. But neither of those is true, and it undermines your case.

Affiliation is rife with intangible benefits of a vaguely religious character: believing that you're right, believing that you're benefiting the righteous and confounding evil, etc. But there is no 10% discount for Democrats at the Toyota dealership, and Republicans don't get a $1500 tax deduction simply for being Republicans. The only tangible benefit to affiliation is the ability to vote in the primary—a benefit so dubious we all personally know people who affiliated opposite their beliefs just to muck up the process.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#62

Post by bitops »

coffeemug wrote: post #14

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…

> As a consistent picture emerges

I've found that the length of time most people take to form a "consistent picture" of someone else is very short. Generally, it is whatever is the shortest length of time required to determine "are they acting in accordance with my desires or not?".

If the person is generally helping to make things happen which you want to have happen, you form a favorable impression of them quickly.

If they are unhelpful, you tend to think negatively of them. There is rarely a deep consideration of who the person actually is, or what might motivate them to behave the way they do.

Of course, if they are not only helpful, but are creating new opportunities, we call them "visionary" or "leaders". Great people.

If their actions are opposed (directly or indirectly) but very obviously to what we think our needs and desires are, we label them "enemy" and push them into that definition.

I'm having a hard time articulating what I want to get across, but it boils down to this: after a while, we stop acting on information that might change our perception of who someone is. We just think of them as "being a certain way" and observe all behavior from there on out as solidifying that definition in our minds.

I think a truly "smart person" is someone who is always staying open to the possibility of people changing radically, however unlikely that may seem.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#63

Post by fusiongyro »

ktizo wrote: post #4
adviceonly wrote: post #2

A total opinion piece with nothing backing it up. You can just type some things in bold letters and make it true. Show us the data.

Is an opinion piece based on a rational argument. You can argue against his assertion if you like, but to merely complain about typefaces and lack of hard data would seem to miss the point. For one thing, I strongly doubt that the author thought that using bold text made the opinion true, but rather that it added emphasis to what he thought were the important points. Also, why not go and check the assertion yourself…

I see a lot of programming debates start with assertions that look like this:

> Language A is dynamically typed, so it's more expressive, so you'll have working code sooner, so you'll be more productive!

or this:

> Language B is statically typed, so you can't fool the compiler, so your code is more likely to work on the first try, so you'll spend less time debugging and therefore be more productive!

Neither of these statements should carry any weight without actual hard data, no matter how compelling the argument sounds. And the fact that we can't come to an agreement about how to quantify things like productivity and "expressiveness" is itself evidence that these are subjective statements.

The whole point of science is that rational thinking alone is not enough. There must be empirical data. A rationally argued falsehood is as useless as an irrationally argued falsehood or an irrationally argued truth. A beautiful logical argument based on false premises is still wrong. Only empirical data can sort out which it is you have in hand.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#65

Post by rizzom5000 »

I disagree. Labels are sometimes derived of prejudice and bigotry. But if someone is obese, and I call them fat - it's not a label that I invented because I'm "not thinking" and "I don't realize the possibilities". I am thinking, and I do realize the possibilities, and the person is still fat and the person might be me looking at the mirror. And if I don't know I'm fat because I'm afraid that by admitting it; I've jumped to a conclusion, which would in turn mean that I've avoided thinking and have jumped to a conclusion - wait, I mean stupid -- then how am I ever going to know that I can do something about it? Bleh. Fallacious logic is not logic at all.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#66

Post by crash013 »

jseliger wrote: post #43
lotharbot wrote: post #15

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…

Even when they hold essentially the same views as I do, it's often for bad reasons 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 si…

Thanks this is something that always bothered me as well.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#67

Post by enobrev »

I can't imagine anything more apt than a conversation about this subject on a forum made up of people who hold their own intelligence in a high regard.

I assure you that your definition of "stupid" is short-sighted. I've pre-judged a good many of people in my life as such and have been proven wrong almost every time, provided I'd spent enough time to try to understand what makes that person think the way they do.

We all have our methods. You might call them madness - or stupidity - but the moment you do, your ignorance becomes your bold weakness.

tl;dr: Get over yourself.

Downvotes... Let's continue the point...

"Sometimes, so far as I can tell, they're stupid. Sorry." [1]

"people do Stupid Things. And I call them stupid when they do them." [2]

"Smart people also triage their time so as to not waste it going down likely unproductive avenues." [3]

"Maybe politically correct people don't think others are stupid, but smart or not, there are definitely some morons out there." [4]

"Define usually. More often than not when I hear "I don't know" it is offered as an excuse/explanation for laziness and shirking responsibility" [5]

"Odds are that the all of the people from the article, and the author, are relatively stupid." [6]

"Smart people don't think others are stupid as the truely smart know that others are stupid." [7]

"at LEAST 15% of the world is stupid. That's just getting started." [8]

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3985594

2: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3985040

3: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3985265

4: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3985575

5: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3985050

6: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3985118

7: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3984894

8: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3985224

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#68

Post by pradocchia »

Sivers has it right, and I'm disappointed by the reaction here. People are smart. This should be your baseline. From there, people may do or say stupid things. It may become pathological. But the person has not lost his capacity to be smart (barring some physiological damage). It may have atrophied, like an unused muscle, but the capacity is still there.

But even this is getting ahead of yourself--how would you know they are stupid? Acting stupid is at least multi-dimensional: the act+stupid. It's a limited claim. To be stupid, though, now that's a very broad claim, to reduce things to a position on a single axis. And that is pure hubris, an intellectually indefensible position, an argument from apathy: "well I don't care about all those things, to me the guy's just dumb". Ah well thanks for clearing that up!

And there's the inverse: you casually judge others as stupid, and you have shown yourself to have poor judgment. You are being stupid with judgment.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#69

Post by lani »

>So when someone says “They are so stupid!” - it means they’ve stopped thinking.

Don't listen to this !!

If you don't stop thinking , pretty soon you'll be deconstructing socio-economic behaviour of wage employees, thrashing between cultural/societal programming and why that is so, then you will move on to swarms surviving and problem-solving in groups and why programming is necessary for this, then you will proceed on to variety in nature, and degrees of freedom and 'coincidental' interlocking of such degrees of freedom of various entities leading to formation of stable ecosystems of assemblies of moving parts . By this time your soup would've gone cold and the opportunity to tell the establishment that this is not what you ordered would be far gone.

Re: Smart people don't think others are stupid

#70

Post by codeonfire »

aoiao wrote: post #36

Nearly 15 percent of people worldwide believe the world will end during their lifetime and 10 percent think the Mayan calendar could signify it will happen in 2012, according to a new poll. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/01/us-mayancalendar-p... ^at LEAST 15% of the world is stupid. That's just getting started. That's one poll, about one thing.

All evidence suggests that the universe/world will end upon my death in any sense that matters to me. Once my brain has stopped functioning it will be impossible to ever receive stimulus from pysical phenomenon again for all eternity. So, if you can agree with that then you could agree that the world will end sometime during most people's lifetimes assuming I don't outlive them. So from my point of. View they are right, but for the wrong reasons.
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