Also, as Gump’s Mama said “stupid is as stupid does” – “stupid” DOES NOT EQUAL “not an intellectual” or unbookish, nor in any way “learning disabled”… and certainly not “less trained for the new job market”.
Yeah really, that’s a strange point to have made. A comedy about nerds is making everyone else feel inadequate? What a path of destruction must Mr. Spock have carved for 50 years…
So what do people here mean when they say “stupid”. Could you give me an example of what “stupid” is?
And the solution to this is to deliberately create inefficiencies just so we can hand someone a job that doesn’t need doing, just out of a sense of pity? That’s just about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.
And I would agree that we seem to be suffering the opposite problem. In a world with anti-vaxxers and climate change denialists, stupidity and anti-intellectualism remain a huge problem.
Let’s not forget all that Cold War military spending (financed by a 90% tax rate). Lots of good jobs coming out of that.
Why should we? Those people are just stupid.
Except no one paid 90%. That was the tax rate for the most wealthy but was offset with lots of shelters and deductions. It was also an era with 10k homes and 20¢ gas.
Remind me again how many people actually paid that 90% tax rate?
The fact was taxes were significantly higher in order to support government spending. I doubt many of the people who wax nostalgic for the fifties would want to go back to that kind of economic policy.
I thought it was the Greeks. :rolleyes:
No. The Greeks were the ones who built Rome in one day.
Until there was a famine and you and your family died, that is. Hobbes had a reason for calling life nasty, brutish and short. I suspect there were smart farmers who paid attention to what worked and what didn’t, and stupid farmers who did things the old way and were the first to go in a famine.
Yes, but the world only needs so many skilled tradespeople. They are not now, nor will they ever be a majority of the workforce and competition for some of those positions can be stiff. It is not easy to get an IBEW( electrician) apprenticeship, just as an example. While it is all well and good to suggest the trades as an alternative to college, that still leaves another large segment that won’t be able to get those jobs either.
In the 1950’s-1970’s in particular manufacturing was the answer and it still is for some. But the service jobs that are replacing manufacturing just don’t pull the same weight.
What I meant was that your post contained no stupidity. Your comment was well considered and well communicated, the personal epistemological approach you describe is rational and the fact that you face your mental challenges in a way that allows you to formulate and act upon this rational and pragmatic method tends to repudiate a charge of stupidity.
So if that term can be commonly used for the person described in your post(s), maybe we (as a society) need to work on tightening the usage a bit. Unfortunately, I don’t think that person we’ve described is quite typical of poor problem solvers, judging purely by our fellow members of society who are literate enough to post comments on You Tube and reddit.
Really? I thought it was the Vikings. 
Resist automation so stupid people aren’t irrelevant? That author is a fool. I guess it’s a plan for self-preservation.
Let’s say overpopulation is ever an issue. How’d that be addressed?
You know why college students aren’t ready for college work? Schools promote them immorally.
My IQ is through the roof, and I could say the same about me. Except perhaps for “doing ok socially”.
I’m so smart I’m stupid. 
You’re correct that ending social promotion would largely end the problem of unprepared students in colleges, but it wouldn’t solve the larger problem of what to do with people who aren’t capable of learning the complex skills that lead to professional jobs in the current economy. Failing a grade isn’t going to magically make someone smarter. People who have a hard time mastering reading, math, and abstract thinking would still exist and would still have problems finding employment that pays well enough to support themselves; they’d just be high school dropouts rather than college dropouts.
The Big Bang Theory is a stupid example. Its humor derives from mocking the excessively brilliant, not from promoting intelligence.
Similarly, the article ignores the strong element of anti-intellectualism that has long run through the U.S. culture. The 1950s? That was when there were as many attacks on Stevenson for being an “egghead” as promotion of Eisenhower for being a war hero.
There have been some rather (may I say it) stupid attacks on people who lack college degrees for certain occupations. Cleveland had a major industial company gutted in the 1970s when a new college-focused CEO began eliminating anyone without a degree among executives who had years of on-job experience and I worked at a company where various excellent managers were locked below an education ceiling because they did not have the required degrees. However, in both cases, the problem was a focus on education, not intelligence.
Do we face a potential problem with people being shunted to the side for a lack of paperwork indicating their levels of education? Quite possibly. Do we have the potential to create an environment where technical expertise renders too many people unemployable? Again, possibly. However, the point of the linked article looks at those situations through the wrong end of the lens, suggesting that they were not sufficiently smart to understand the actual problems we face.