[QUOTE=the raindog]
I’m being whooshed, right?
Just because we keep telling each other we’re special doesn’t mean we’re actually special.
It’s long overdue that we deep six the myth that this place is somehow a reservoir of unbridled intellect.
[/QUOTE]
Dude, you can spell “reservoir” “unbridled” *and *“intellect” and use a metaphor in a coherent sentence. I know you don’t want to believe this, but that makes you one of the smarter ones. It’s really okay, we’re good people too!
People become “ignorant” because once they “know” something, they tend to latch on to things that reinforce that knowledge and reject anything that disagrees with it as wrong or an aberation.
For example, not to pick on the OP, but say you got it into your head that Walmart was some evil corporation that destroys jobs and ruins communities. Your views are likely reinforced by your friends who are your friends because they share a similar view to you anyway.
[QUOTE=the raindog]
I’m being whooshed, right?
[/QUOTE]
You know, I think he actually disagrees with you.
[QUOTE=Renob]
Considering your views that Wal Mart “costs people jobs” and that removing subsidies will cost jobs, I’d be careful about thinking you are smarter than those “ignorant” masses you deride.
The fact is, all of us are smart about some things and ignorant about others. All of us pretty much grope blindly at life, perhaps developing something that resembles an expertise in one or two areas.
Furthermore, your assumption that people are making ignorant choices about their lives may or may not be true. You don’t know as much about their lives as they do. To presume you have more information than they do about their own lives is, well, ignorant.
[/QUOTE]
Well I for one am not going to get all coy about this,the fact is that there are a hell of a lot of stupid people in this world and there are a hell of a lot of unintelligent people in this world.
People for whom no matter how much education you throw at them they will never learn from it.
I always remember some years ago two grown adults raising families commenting on a rise in Value Added TAX brought in by Thatcher.
“Oh yes she’s a shopkeepers daughter so she’s done that to make more money for them”
People are not all equal in intelligence,never have been and never will be.
There seems to be a trend in political correctness that if person A is obviously defficient in one field,say literacy,then they must compensate for this by excelling in another field.
For some this may well be true but for many it is not.
I am not confusing received knowledge with intelligence,if you have spent your entire life working as a mechanic it does not make you more intelligent then someone who has no knowledge of mechanics if they have never been exposed to learning about things mechanical.
People who are ignorant about those things that apply to and affect everyone in everyday life are just that,ignorantand ignorance is often,but not always,accompanied by stupidity.
I will never have the understanding of physics and mathamatics that S. Hawkings possesses and unfortunately I dont make up for it by being an artistic genius but rather then being in denial about the fact I have learned to live with it no matter how gutted about it I am on a personal level.
And to save any Anoraks wasting their time I’ve no doubt whatsoever that this post contains many errors ref. commas and word usage etc. but I’m trying to write the post while holding an intermittent conversation with an annoyingly
persistant colleague.
If you ARE reasonably intelligent don’t let the "Marching Morons "bully you by numbers into being ashamed of it,YOU’Ve done nothing wrong,by being intelligent you have’nt robbed others of their intellectual capacity,you have’nt harmed them in any way and if they are just a little bit slower then others then its down to nobody but themselves.
I for one am hearily sick of this enforced egalitariasim and the dumbing down of everyday institutions we are forced to put up with.
[QUOTE=the raindog]
I’m being whooshed, right?
Just because we keep telling each other we’re special doesn’t mean we’re actually special.
It’s long overdue that we deep six the myth that this place is somehow a reservoir of unbridled intellect.
[/QUOTE]
Hardly that, but I did a study for a Pit thread on intelligence which showed Dopers have been on Jeopardy in numbers several orders of magnitude greater than expected if our level of intelligence was similar to that of the country as a whole. I suspect the level of advanced degrees is similar, but I haven’t done that study. That obviously doesn’t mean everyone is a genius.
I used Jeopardy because there is a list of Jeopardy contestants.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
Hardly that, but I did a study for a Pit thread on intelligence which showed Dopers have been on Jeopardy in numbers several orders of magnitude greater than expected if our level of intelligence was similar to that of the country as a whole. I suspect the level of advanced degrees is similar, but I haven’t done that study. That obviously doesn’t mean everyone is a genius.
I used Jeopardy because there is a list of Jeopardy contestants.
[/QUOTE]
Methinks you are correlating the wrong variables.
[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
Supply and Demand IS whatever the market will bear. That’s the whole point.
However, there’s a more direct answer. The money you pay for a gallon of gas has nothing to do with the amount they paid for it. That money’s done gone. Instead, the price you pay for gas reflects the cost of the oil company’s NEXT purchase of gasoline.
[/quote]
If that were true, wouldn’t you expect the price at the pump to go back down the day the price of crude goes down? You know that doesn’t happen. Either the instant price rise makes sense, or the delayed price drop makes sense. You can’t have it both ways. It’s a supply and demand thing, except when it isn’t.
What you suggest would mean the most profitable companies in the history of the world don’t know exactly where every penny and every gallon is, every step of the way. The fact is, they do. They know where every tanker is, and how much they paid for the oil inside. They know how much it is worth, every day until it reaches port.
They know exactly when each boatload of crude became heating oil, diesel fuel, gasoline, motor oil, and candle wax. They pay herds of accountants to crunch all the numbers, so they’ll know. They also know they can get away with jacking up gasoline prices the same day the price of crude goes up. They know that guys like you will say it’s all justified. :dubious:
I’ve come to the conclusion ignorance isn’t really everything someone doesn’t know, it’s everything someone doesn’t want to know. It’s easy to not care about things you haven’t yet been able to understand.
[QUOTE=bump]
I’m routinely amazed at the ignorance that surrounds me, both in my actual, face-to-face life and on the internet.
I mean, I hear people in one breath talk about how Wal-Mart is great because they “provide low prices; what people really want”, and then say in the next breath that they’re against govt. subsidies because “they cost people jobs”. (truth is, Wal-Mart isn’t necessarily the lowest price, and they cost people jobs, and subsidies may or may not cost people jobs, but removing them sure as hell will)
Another category is people on internet message boards (not SDMB in particular) who claim that the high price of gasoline is a plot by oil companies to raise prices, not market forces. :rolleyes:
Or people who got hoodwinked into variable-rate loans, or rent-to-own schemes.
How do they get this way? Is it intellectual laziness, or some kind of stupidity, or misinformation?
[/QUOTE]
Note the thread on page one about ggas prices and it’s cause. You can still learn.
[QUOTE=Sitnam]
I’ve come to the conclusion ignorance isn’t really everything someone doesn’t know, it’s everything someone doesn’t want to know.
[/QUOTE]
Ooh, I like that!
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
Note the thread on page one about ggas prices and it’s cause. You can still learn.
[/QUOTE]
Gaudere’s Law is a bitch.
[QUOTE=Maeglin]
The costs to remediating ignorance are perceived to be higher than the benefits. People use heuristics in their daily lives because for the most part, it’s just not worth it to abandon them.
What heuristics we abandon in favor of a more granular, fact-based kind of thinking depends on our expected return for our efforts and at what point we are indifferent between the costs and the benefits.
[/QUOTE]
I had to go look this word up. It means Common Sense. Now I don’t understand this post.
When I see the disasters wrought upon American public education by the education industry, you have to think that the Ted Kennedy’s and Jimmy Carters of the USA wanted this. Everything has been devoted to “dumbing down” the course material, removing any evaluation of achievement (grades are “discriminatory”); standards are constantly lowered, and more and more money is demanded. Now we have “pre-kindergarden” and “afer school” programs-and yet the educational level constantly sinks.
My conclusion:the elite want the masses to be ignorant and incapable of judgement. Having the people poorly educated assists the ruling class in maintaining control.
It’s perhaps a tragic conclusion, but this is what I think is going on.