Intelligence of Americans...

In My Humble Opinion
21

American’s are not all, well, American’s. Don’t you wonder how many international folk were surveyed amongst the American sample?

By the way, I’m 22 and got 18 out of 20. Multiple choice is my expertise!

There are many reasons why this stupid survey turned out the way it did. If you were smart, you would have come up with the reasons yourself. And if you were even smarter, you would know not to mention such a puny survey about facts and not about problem solving, while questioning the intelligence of someone.

What a moron.

22

But not punctuation :smiley:

23

As did I. Looking at the results, I’ve come to the conclusion that, on average, if you’re not German or Swedish, you’re stupid.

24

“Most American’s” is meaningless. You need to take a look at this thread.

Make your mind up – do they usually believe you or do they always believe you?

You may not have intended to start a flame war, McDeath, but there’s a good chance this thread will turn into one if it gets moved to an appropriate forum. For some reason people don’t appreciate their whole population being called unintelligent because of a few items on a TV show or anecdotes from a tourist. I suggest you visit this thread and see how the OP there is getting on:

Some 20,000 Canadians are Fucktwats

25

Besides, the number of American kids who didn’t know where America was is pretty close to the number of French, German, Italian, British, and Swedish kids who didn’t know that the organization that endorses the euro as the common currency for its members is the European Union.

26

All that said, some of the American scores do seem embarrasingly low. Then again, there are at least a couple of questions that each nation was clueless about. The British didn’t know much about Japan, and Americans and Mexicans (and sometimes Canadians) tended to miss the same questions.
How did 71% of Mexicans surveyed not know which dot was furthest west? How did almost half the English not know where the Pacific Ocean was? Proximity seems to have a lot to do with it.
Representative or not, there are a lot of good jokes to be made from the results, that’s for sure. Such as: Americans did relatively poorly on the question about where the Taliban and Al Qaeda were based, disproving Mark Twain’s old joke that war was god’s way of teaching Americans geography. Only about 1/6 of us could find Afghanistan, which means bombing it was a real show of our determination. And best of all, we did splendidly on the question asking where most of the world’s oil comes from. Color me surprised. :wink: :wink: :wink: :wink: :wink:
I’m a Yank and also aced the thing.

27

Oh dear Lord, I just got to the page where they asked the kids where sweden was. It appears that one stumped nearly everybody.

28

McDeath - How could any moderately intelligent person think that a T.V show, and their own personal travels to a country could yield credible evidence to support even the most ludicrous of theories such as your own?

29

BTW, there was another thread about that National Geographic survey last November:

Where in the world are we? Americans don’t know.

30

Well, as an American who spent many years in Canada I have to say that I met lots of Canadians who were just as ignorant of the U.S. as any Americans are ignorant of Canada.

Ed

31

First of all, McDeath the Mad, seems you yourself have some geography problems:

On what fantasy planet is Toronto anywhere near as far south as California?. Look at a map sometime. Unless you’re telling me that the 44thd parallel has somehow magically gotten further south than the 42nd parallel, Toronto - which lies between the 43rd and 44th parallels lies further north than every single square inch of California, which lies entirely south of the 42nd parallel. Toronto, by my observation, is more than 150 km further NORTH than the northern border of California.

No offense, but if you don’t know where TORONTO is, my friend, you should not be criticizing people over their grasp of Canadian geography. Either than or you don’t know where California is.

You know, we can talk all day about why Americans do or don’t know this or that, but the OP needs to really understand a little something I like to call

FILM EDITING

If you want to make (insert group) look stupid on TV by asking them questions, all you have to do is put 100 people in front of a TV camera, ask them stupid questions, and then you do this thing called “editing” where you cut out all the people who are smart and just link together film “clips” of the six or seven people who answered the question stupidly. Then what you do - you might want to sit down for this stunning revelation - is you only broadcast the film you want people to see, long after you have filmed it, and it makes it look as if the 6-7 people who showed were the only people you talked to! Isn’t that amazing??

It also helps if you have a host like Rick Mercer who deliberately asks leading but stupid questions and goads the person into answering things in the affirmative, since he knows ordinary people are intimidated by being on camera and will tend to agree with anything the host says.

Honestly, if you think “Talking to Americans” proves anything, you need to take a film studies course or something, because it’s YOUR smarts that are highly questionable. Oh, and by the way, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was not a documentary.

As to the issue, I have known many Canadians and many Americans, and Canadians in my experience are just as ignorant as Americans. I have known college-educated Canadians who did not know how many provinces there are in Canada, who did not know who Adolf Hiter was, and who did not know that Edmonton is the capital of Alberta. I sincerely doubt that half of all Canadians known how many states there are in the USA (52 seems to be a popular guess for some reason) and I’m sure if you asked Canadians varied questions about, say, Europe, you would get a lot of really dumbass answers.

32

FTR, I scored 20 out of 20 as well.

Thanks for the response Rickjay. Like I mentioned in the OP I stated that I knew that “Talking to Americans” was purposly edited to show the not so smart answers. I guess I am mainly basing my question on my personal experiences and the NG survey.

I had no idea my personal experiences would not have enough basis to ask this question. And I never checked the other thread about the NG survey, so if that thread proves that the NG survey was a load o’crap then I’m in the wrong again.

Your point about Europe is weak. Canadians and Americans shouldn’t need to know everything about European countries. But they should have a fairly decent knowledge of their closest neighbours both geographically and historically.

Now about the Toronto point, I hope I’m not wrong there! I remember seeing that fact one night while playing NTN, and I’m sure I verified it with an atlas. I’m at work right now so I can’t check. If I am wrong (which is possible) I’ll feel like a real clown.

I actually have brought this up many times in various circles of friends. I have done the “States Challenge” with 3 different groups of friends. We try to name as many US states as possible within 15 minutes. The record was 48. My personal best was 42. The average was around 30. Now of course this is not an accurate representation of Canadians, but I think we did pretty good. How many Americans can name all provinces and territories in Canada?

MtM

33

Better break out the greasepaint; Rickjay’s latitude statistics were right on. :smiley:

34

Fuq, where are my big red shoes…

MtClown

35

I got one wrong - I didn’t think there were more Christians than any other religion. I would have gotten Sweden and Afghanistan wrong if they had made the questions harder by only using adjoining countries for the other choices.

I’ll make one other comment - this demonstrates the relative ignorance of Americans on the average, not lack of intelligence. I think that, on the average, we’re just as smart as anyone else on the planet, but we’re less well educated. That is definitely a problem, but further discussion really belongs in GD.

36

rowrrbazzle that’s what I meant, I just used the word intelligent instead of ignorance.

I guess I showed my lack of intelligence and my ignorance in the OP.

So would you say Americans are more ignorant than Canadians?

MtM

37

Actually, I kind of liked the clip where they had the Governor Missouri (I think) congratulate Canada on moving to a 24 hour day.

That was pretty good.

38

It seems you’re just fishing for some US-bashing. Is GQ really the place for that? You’ve got a small survey that indicates one age group of Americans is relatively poor at geography and you want to generalize that to denigrate an entire nation.

No, I can’t answer your question and probably shouldn’t bother to reply in GQ, but I don’t think anyone else can possibly answer your question either. Asking whether the entire population of a country, on average or by any other measure, is more ignorant than another group is pointlessly broad. You can compare specific test scores on specific subgroups and infer whatever answer you want, but as far as I know, you won’t find any data to back up what you want the answer to be.

39

Well micco I’ve already asked a mod to move this thread, I hate people trolling, and I don’t want to be accused of it.

I wish I would have re-thought the OP.

So let me say a couple of things:

1). I’m sorry I used the word intelligence in the OP, there is absolutley no evidence in my experience with Americans and the NG survey that would point to Americans being stupid.

2). I should have used the word ignorant or naive. And only ignroant or naive when it comes to anything non-American (particullary Canadian).

3). I won’t make any more outrageous statements like Toronto is on the same lat as Northern California (I did however invent the question mark) without checking the facts.

MtM

40

What you are probably remembering incorrectly is the fact that the southernmost point in Canada (not Toronto, but Pelee Island, Ontario, in Lake Erie) is further south than parts of Northern California. California’s northern border is at 42 degrees N, and Pelee I. is at about 41 degrees 45 minutes N – making it further south than parts of twenty-six US States.

Your mistake, of course, was not in getting the fact wrong, but in getting it wrong while mocking other people’s ignorance.

Your excuse is undoubtedly that it’s really hard to build good bookshelves in your igloo, so your atlas collection is somewhat lacking. The nearest library is probably three days away by dog-sled, which could make fact-checking hard.