Ignorance is a lack of information.
Stupidity is a condition where one can not learn new information.
::: general :::
YMMV
I agree that people are lazy, but the statement “people are sheep” is usually stated with the intent of mislocating the sources of similarity between people.
First of all, people mostly do the same thing not because of herding tendencies but because people are mostly the same. One of the wonders of modernity is that we have this thing called Evolutionary Psychology, which, despite the ire it has drawn from Social Constructionists, is at least as valid as any other area of psychology. People have fundamentally similar drives deep down, and these are rooted in evolutionary processes. Why is it that men are far more often willing to have sex than women are? Why is it that people tend to enjoy sweet and fatty foods? Why do people love their family members, rather than random strangers? The answers are not to be found in ideas of sheepishness, submissiveness, or group-think. The answer is “we evolved that way”.
Second of all, even if a very common behavior or belief is not directly traceable to some evolutionary force, that behavior/belief may be more common than others because it just makes sense, full stop. Why do people tend to use Windows, rather than Mac or Linux? Because for the large majority of people, choosing Mac or Linux is a bad idea. Why don’t more people see that 9/11 was a government conspiracy? Because the just-stated position makes no sense.
Third, when lots of people believe things that are really stupid, they don’t generally do so because they’ll never rebel against anything. A school board member might believe that boosting students’ self-esteem will reduce violent behavior and increase their grades. The belief in question is false, but those who hold this belief probably suffer from some combination of uninformedness, emotional bias, and stupidity. I wouldn’t assume that the school board member holds this common, false belief because he/she will never go against popular opinion.
Yes, we’re stupid; we possess pretty much the lowest intelligence you can have and still build a civilization. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been the first hominid species to pull it off; it isn’t surprising that we aren’t all that good at it. Our brains are built according to the “good enough to muddle though” standards of evolution, not according to any capability for objective judgment or consistent rational thinking.
Bell curve.
I’m getting there, dude. It’s starting to get - exhausting - sometimes, to even think about correcting people. 
Well, Stupid people serve a purpose. There have aways been and always will be ignorant people or low IQ types. I don’t have a problem with stupid people. It’s the people with the brilliant minds that want to take over the planet or create some special race that scare me.
Two of the smartest men I dated were both depraved. One was the bi sexual cheater who is one of the best programmers in the North East. Still he leads this double life which he finds so amusing and not caring about the people he uses. He doesn’t care about anything except how smart he is and how he can keep his high profile job and play with peoples minds. Isn’t that sad…
The other was a retired colonel in special forces. He had a million dollar mansion and could cook like no tomorrow but he decides to tell me he is a Neo Nazi on an island? WTF man? I had to have the police move me to a different hotel and get me off the Island safely. Turns out he was into some really kinky stuff and had a room in his house full of torture devices. That was a close call. Too close.
At least with an average person they are a pretty easy read most of the time. I’m kind of glad for my slightly above average IQ and gifts and the humility to know I’m dust in the wind and I better make this day count. I am never bored and love the way some dopes on here make me laugh. I hope I make a few people laugh too. I’m just another bozo on the bus with dog crap on my heels and a sign duct taped to my back that says, "kick me hard. "
I just feel like I am so blessed to be born in this century, in this country and all the blessings in my life. We live in a beautiful world. Yes we do, yes we do…
[quote=“Cat_Whisperer, post:11, topic:551743”]
Now this is something both stupid and often repeated because people think it sounds clever, just like “we only use 10% of our brains.” :rolleyes: 50% of people don’t have an IQ below average. The range of IQs is a bell curve, and the highest % of people have IQs clustered right around the average, the numbers being that aproximately 50% of people have an average IQ, 25% have an IQ that is to varying degrees below average, and 25% have an IQ that is to varying degrees above average.
Anyway, the problem with people is that they’re self-absorbed rather than stupid.
What sort of mental abilities are you concerned with?
Logic and abstract thinking: human intelligence wasn’t evolved (directly) to do this stuff. It’s a by-product, probably, of being able to do things like draw conclusions about animal behavior (for hunting), tracking seasons (for gathering, and later agriculture). I’m sure others could come up with better examples.
Consciousness: Kind of hard to define exactly. But I’m confident machines can’t do it at all. I suspect animals do, but not to the same degree. We’re f-ing geniuses! I mock, therefore I am.
Language: Feel free to ridicule the poor state of speech and writing in the general public. Obviously there are people who are much better at this than average. OTOH, spoken language predates smarty grammar persons and best-selling novelists by, at a guess, several tens of millennia. For most of human history being able to shout “Watch out for that cave bear behind you!” counted for more than being able to correctly conjugate verbs.
Math: Unless you are a practicing engineer, physicist, or similar you aren’t hot stuff. But knowing if someone is short-changing you certainly counts for something.
Reading facial expressions and intuiting the emotional state of others: Tricky across cultural divides. Women tend to do better than men generally. It’s amazing this works at all. Nothing to compare to, really. People are f-ing geniuses. (Doesn’t work at all on sociopaths though).
I guess what I’m saying is smart/stupid is very specific and even people who appear “dumb” are the descendants of a long, long line of people who were at least smart enough to reproduce and keep their offspring alive long enough to do so again.
Personally, I think that our long, long tribal past is just below the surface, and explains a lot of human behavior.
Walt
Compared to our capacity and potential.
Well, the 33% of Americans who like to be told what to think certainly are. Everyone else is merely dumb.
[quote=“elfkin477, post:27, topic:551743”]
That was me, not j66, and I don’t see your explanation making what I said invalid. If you split a bell curve like what you’ve described in half, you still get 50% above average and 50% below average, don’t you? Unless, I guess, the 50% in the middle all have an IQ of 100 exactly. Then you need to take it to a few more decimal places. 
Yep, it’s a rule even. Wizard’s First Rule; people are stupid.
Mobs are incredibly stupid. People stampede just like cattle. Just ask the survivors of the Who concert The Who's concert tragedy | EW.com
Lynch mobs are stupid too.
Tea Party rallies are the epitome of stupidity.
I’m still trying to understand how more than 50% of people can have below average intelligence.
I must be stupid.
If 10 people take a test, and 9 of them score a zero and one of them scores a 100, how many of them scored below average?
Actually, I think IQ has a symmetrical distribution, so this doesn’t hold, but in general the median isn’t equal to the average.
And if one person takes the test how many are below the average? Small samples are worthless.
I don’t know - the actual wolves in the human population don’t seem to have much trouble fleecing the majority of people. And even sheep can stampede.
I think you’ll find it doesn’t have anything to do with sample size. There are, what, 7 billion people in the world. What percentage of them have a below-average income?
We all exist in a profound state of functional ignorance. There is vastly more knowledge to be had than a humans capacity to learn it. Its not surprising that people seem stupid. They have different priorities, different skill sets, different interests.
Grandma can barely click a link on the internet without help. Many would consider that stupid, and it is. But she know dozens, if not hundreds, of recipes by heart, can cook entire meals from scratch, grows an outstanding garden, and makes beautiful quilts.
There is also the issue that many areas of knowledge or expertise are looked down on, as something someone of a lower class or low education takes interest in.
Someone who enjoys and quotes shakespere is seen as smart, or at least well educated. Someone who enjoys and can quote some pulp sci fi or from the 60s is not.
The guy who fixes the mathematicians car may not be able to solve some advanced proof, but he can tell the clueless mathematician that noise is his transfer case going out and fix it for him.
Someone may know nothing of politics, but they can quote chapter and verse of the dungeon masters guide and monster manual, etc, and can plan and run a complex and exciting campaign, and importantly, know when to ignore or alter the rules in the rulebook to make the game exciting and fun.
People value their own limited subset of knowledge far too much, and ignore the talents of others.
How many facts you know is a function of learning, not innate intelligence. A smart person, on learning a new fact, will go out of his/her way to figure out how that fact ties in to other things they know, putting it into context of their entire world view. An unintelligent person will just learn the new fact by rote, but will have a difficult time, even when led step by step, seeing how this new fact fits into the rest of their world view. If there are sufficiently few mental “hooks” on which to hang a new bit of information a stupid person will probably just shrug and consign the information to their mental dumpster of “things that are not important,” whereas a smart person is more likely to think, “Hmmm, I don’t know how this information fits in with what I already know, but it seems like an important bit of information, perhaps I should go learn more about it in order to see how it relates to my world.” Stupid people are incurious, even when presented with information they are explicitly told is important to them–if they don’t have some immediate payoff or consequence, they will not bother to integrate that knowledge absent a carrot or a stick. Smart people are curious and even without any clear information regarding the relative importance of new information they are likely to fill in any knowledge gaps to fit their new information into their overall world view. So a smart person’s world is constantly getting larger and more complex, whereas a stupid person’s world remains static–often due to concerted effort to resist learning new things because of the effort required to make sense of them.
Any time you see overly simple concepts, simple and non-nuanced positions, a lack of complexity regarding the perception of relationships of people and systems to the observer and a resistance to learning new things, you have a stupid person. Make of that what you will.