this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
468 points (85.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35937 readers
905 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

To clarify here, I don't feel like I'm significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying "facts."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] _danny@lemmy.world 37 points 11 months ago

I think it's important to consider why you think this. Try and explain what makes someone stupid.

I do tend to agree with the general statement that most people are pretty fucking stupid. If IQ were a meaningful number of intelligence, I'd wager that it's heavily skewed left. Meaning that the common saying of "think of how stupid the average person and realize half of all people are below that" is even worse when you use the median.

For me, what makes someone stupid is lack of curiosity, lack of drive to learn, and lack of critical thinking. I think stupidity is a learned trait, and our modern society is doing its damnedest to make sure children learn it as soon as possible. Never question authority, you only need to memorize so you can pass the test, and you will be spoon fed the information.

Then soon as you get out of school, you have to get a job and occupy most of your time with work or sleep, you'll likely get only two-three hours of time to yourself each day, meaning you'll lack the time to break out of the cycle. And the system compounds at most jobs. Your manager is likely stupid, meaning they want you to never question authority, just do what they tell you, and ask them very little questions.

I also think the trillions of dollars that are spent on advertising strongly influences this. And being constantly bombarded with psychological manipulation encourages stupidity.

I also think stupidity is compounding in and of itself. The less you know, the more you can just make hasty assumptions, then use those assumptions as fact for your next set of assumptions.

It's also contagious. Being around people who are less stupid than yourself makes you feel bad, so you aren't around them much or encourage them to join you in being stupid.

There is a massive difference between not knowing something, and choosing to not know something. Just about every person in the world has access to the greatest source of information that has ever been created. There are free courses on just about every topic you could ever desire to learn, fingertips away.

There is also a massive difference between knowing something and rote memorization. Being able to follow the logical chain of facts is very important, so is being able to critically think about a topic. I think being "bored" is great at combatting stupidity in this way. Spending time with no stimulation is great for engaging your brain in actual thoughts. Consider dedicating time to just thinking: no audiobooks, music, podcasts, video games, movies, TV shows, social media, books etc. Just sit and be bored for a while. Meditation is a great entry into this.