That image is just so cool. I love it!
But to tweak it just a little bit: Stupid shouldn’t use arrows. Arrows have too much finesse. He needs something more… blunt. I think a club would be much more appropriate.
Minor quibble - I would not consider the average person’s CSQ to be adequate, considering the incredibly stupid things the average person does. Maybe some kind of system where the one person in 10 (WAG here) that actually uses their common sense is responsible for 9 others?
I know what you’re saying, and I admit that parental discipline might be slipping overall, but people in general can’t be getting stupider on average. Actually, people have much more ability to encounter ideas, words, and concepts now than they did even in my dad’s childhood in the 40s and 50s.
The clincher to this is that it only stands to reason that high schoolers aren’t entirely able to understand these publications I mentioned. The L.A. Times is written by very educated and practiced adults, many of whom have been working at this world-class publication for longer than these kids have been alive.
There’s a reason that they call it an 11th-grade reading level. It’s not an adult one. The adults writing the Times are writing essentially for other college-educated adults. They hope to impress award committees. They want to feel that they are using their skills to the best of their abilities. So, while the grammar may suffer in the puff pieces of Newsweek (really, don’t get me started on the sentences that somehow lack verbs), the vocabulary and number of Shakespeare references remain high.
I quote from the current N: “(He) has established himself as Europe’s most idiosyncratic author.” “(This musical has) more camping than at a Boy Scout jamboree.”
I absolutely guarantee that the VAST majority of high schoolers could not adequately explain either of these phrases. I just last week had to explain “idiosyncrasy”, and no one in the room had even a guess as to its meaning.
You may now return to the un-hijacked portion of your thread.
Everyone will do something incredibly stupid at least once in their life. But some people will live their whole life without ever once doing something incredibly intelligent.
Stupidity is the building block of the universe.
[Harvey Danger] Been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding…[/Harvey Danger]
Stupid creates its own fields, like magnetism.
Case in point 1)
Even people of above average intelligence, when confronted with a “wet paint” sign, will have an irresistible urge to confirm what the sign tells them.
“Gee, that sign says the paint’s wet… poke hey, it is too.”
Case in point 2)
Every entry point in the universe, no matter how clearly marked, will inevitably cause people to attempt to open it the wrong way. Just sit somewhere with a clear view of a door with PULL written on it in big bold black letters and watch how many people try to PUSH it open. (like that old Far Side comic… hehe.)
There ought to be a law against stupidity. Call it the Stupid Law. If you do something stupid in front of a witness, you have to give him ten bucks. That would smarten a lot of people up. Imagine waking up in the morning and saying,
"Man, what the hell was I thinking? The elevator button was lit, the elevator was coming down, and I go and press the freaking button. Thank God there were only four of them. But still, fourty bucks down the drain,
Good thing that law was enacted after I called those bikers at the end of the bar a bunch of sissies. That would have cost a fortune. Wait, it did cost a fortune. Well, I’ve got medical coverage now. I’m learning."
The difference between genius and stupidity is that there is an upper limit to genius.
OTOH, no matter how many people fail to understand an instruction, there will always be resistance to revising the instruction. Someone will dig in his/her heels and say, “It’s perfectly clear. They ought to understand it.”
One reason why problems don’t get solved is that stupid people are convinced that shouldn’t exist is the same as doesn’t exist – and if the problem doesn’t exist, it doesn’t have to be solved.
To whatever extent this is true, it’s because a child raised by stupid parents tends to turn out stupid. Stupidity perpetuates itself. This can go on for generations. But pick individuals from, say, 100 different stupid families, secretly clone them at birth, place the clones with intelligent adoptive parents, and watch the results. I predict that the adoped children will will grow up with wildly various intelligence levels. Some will be just as smart as their adoptive parents – potential that had been lying fallow for generations will have finally been realized. But absent such an experiment, it is very difficult to determine which stupid people have fulfilled a low potential, and which have failed to fulfull a higher one.
I hear this at a party last night, thought it was applicable:
God must really love stupid people, he made so many of them!
So you’re saying that stupidity perpetuates itself. I like that.
Or in other words: Knowledge may be fleeting, but stupidity lingers.