Why are people stupid

[JimD]

The engineer who thought the toilet needed electricity (a few do but that is a very rare exception and why wouldn't you try it if you don't know for sure) reminds me of some engineering students many years ago when I was in college. I graduated from Kansas State and we had quite a few exchange students from the middle east. I don't remember the country at this point. Their government leased a group of them a house to live in. They called the landlord after a month or so complaining that the toilet didn't work. It seems they didn't know how to flush it.

Jim

[Alex Franke]

AND poor at math!

Okay, but I'll have to tweak the numbers a bit:

Half are stupid, three-fifths are insane, one third are just clueless, and the remaining five-eights are poor at math.

Thanks for the correction!

[cwithboat]

The other half has the IQ of a 4 year old and the manners of teenager. People amaze me. Anyone have similar experiences?

It is interesting that after 4 pages of comments I have noticed no one pointing out the fact that IQ remains basically the same whether the individual is 4 or 40. Manners, however, are a totally different story.

[Mr__Bill]

The engineer who thought the toilet needed electricity (a few do but that is a very rare exception and why wouldn't you try it if you don't know for sure) reminds me of some engineering students many years ago when I was in college. I graduated from Kansas State and we had quite a few exchange students from the middle east. I don't remember the country at this point. Their government leased a group of them a house to live in. They called the landlord after a month or so complaining that the toilet didn't work. It seems they didn't know how to flush it.

Jim

A lot of what we consider stupid is really ignorance, often coupled with knowledge of situations we may be unaware of. Now it's really easy to say that you don't need electricity to flush a toilet, unless you live in a house with a well and an electric pump. One flush and that's it for water. I have been in houses on the top of hills where city water just trickles into a cistern and then an electric pump provides the water pressure for the house. No electric = no water. And if you have never seen a flush toilet..... Now if you have never used a squat and a water bottle you might be complaining about no TP! Would you be stupid? Not at all, but stupid could certainly follow and many around you would think you were.

Not picking on you Jim, I understand where you are coming from.

To me, a lot of what we think of as stupid is arrogance, a don't give a darn attitude or as stated, the ME factor.

I think stupid is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Of knowing full well what the probable outcome will be but still surprised when it happens. Basically the failure to apply the knowledge and abilities you have to a situation and having less than desirable results follow. I don't think intelligence has a real bearing on stupid, although some would argue that the more intelligent one is the stupider they are.

Without spell check I would, to some, look really stupid in my posts. However not using spell check would be stupid, not being able to spell is not.


Bill
now climbing down off his soap box and putting it away for a while.

[Shep]

I'm actually surprised that so many people agree about how many ignorant people were out there. After I started this thread I thought more people might be against me. I guess we've all seen our share of stupid in society.

[BobSch]

Given that engineering is "applied science"...

Like the EE we hired who never could figure out how to solder?

[woodturner]

Like the EE we hired who never could figure out how to solder?

Why would an EE need to solder? In the workplace, we have technicians for that. In union shops, EEs are usually not allowed to solder.

A lot of us can solder, and I do agree it's a basic technician skill all EEs should have. Never know when you will be in a pinch or working late and need to touch up or fix something. Techs are usually on a 9-5 schedule, especially in union shops, so it's tough to find one for those late night repairs.

[smorris]

I always figured it was one of those "Not a why question, they just are".

Now I firmly believe that ignorance can be cured easily, as many here have helped cure mine when needed. Stupid on the other hand goes to the bone, darwin used to deal with those for us and occasionally when someone stands on his doorstep and screams "Me next" he still obliges them.

[leehljp]

. . . And if you have never seen a flush toilet..... Now if you have never used a squat and a water bottle you might be complaining about no TP!

For the un-informed out there, that does happen.

[leehljp]

The more educated a society becomes overall, the less it relies on personal observation skills and deductive reasoning skills. "Common sense" is a term that recognizes these two qualities as a part of survival, existence and moving up the food chain - to put it in the vernacular.

There are as many geniuses in illiterate countries per capita as there are in literate countries - But it is my contention that overall, in illiterate countries, the over all common sense, observation skill rate is higher than in literate countries. Death takes its toll on the lower end of the gene pool in those countries - while advanced societies protect the gene pool more adamantly . . allowing the lower end to become a higher percentage of society - more and more.

My middle daughter taught in a small private school geared to internationals here in Japan for 4 years . OF course because it was "English", a few Japanese parents wanted their children to attend for at least a couple of years for the "English" (International) experience and increase their language ability.

Invariably after about 3 to 4 months, the Japanese parents would complain about the math part that. My daughter taught deductive reasoning skills as part of the math. Word math problems caused all kinds of confusion. Japanese are geared strictly to memorization of formulas, not word problems that require a person to think of it in a varying and live situation. In this same line of thought, my wife's uncle was a design engineer working for NEC (in Tokyo) when MOSFET chips first came out. He said that he could take a "C" engineering student from the US and be far more productive in design than the "A" students in Japan.

LASTLY: We have to realize that this is a woodworking forum (originally focusing around a specific saw) and as such, MOST of this type of people have reasonable observation and deductive reasoning skills. Because of the nature of our hobby, we have - as a group - a much higher percentage of common sense, deductive reasoning and observation skills than society as a whole. Our fingers, hands, eyes and guts depend on it!

[LCHIEN]

Like the EE we hired who never could figure out how to solder?

c'mon, soldering is an important skill for those who work hands on on electronics. But there are many EE disciplines for which soldering not necessarily be a required skill.

Electrical Engineering includes electronics but also includes power distribution, robotics, antennas, MEMs, information theory and a host of other related fields which might not require soldering on a regular basis. The following is a list of the societies in the IEEE organization - those who can be considered electrical engineers.

http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/tab.../section4.html

In the line of the original topic, we seem to have confusion between spupidity, abject ignorance, and lack of knowledge in certain areas.

Finally, soldering 20 years ago is a lot different than soldering electronics today. A lot of people can't do elementary soldering of a couple of wires and a solder terminal, but high end electronics soldering is beyond the capability of many humans... I'm designing some boards which have literally hundreds of lead free solder ball connections hidden beneath a device measuring 13x13mm to 21x21 mm. Entire discrete resistors and transistors measure 1/16th inch by 1/32nd inch so the solder pads are about a third the size of the resistor.


Loring,
Senior Member, IEEE

[cabinetman]

In the line of the original topic, we seem to have confusion between spupidity, abject ignorance, and lack of knowledge in certain areas.

Loring,

Don't take it so personally. There are probably a lot of EE's that don't solder.
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[leehljp]

Soldering is logical and common sense.

First, you watch someone do it once. Then you touch the tip of your newly acquired soldering iron and learn that you don't do it anymore (but you still do it anyway to get the excess solder off ) Next, you start experimenting to see what else you can do with a hot point, besides getting screamed at by LOYL or the boss. Then you learn what it doesn't fix.
Finally you get down to the business of melting solder onto a connection.

[woodturner]

Soldering is logical and common sense.

That's the problem with watching a skilled person do a job - they make it look easy.

Soldering is more complicated than one might think, particularly for electronic assemblies. First is the size issue - how do you solder something you can't see without a microscope? Then there is the lead issue - most shops are moving to no-lead solder, which is more difficult. What about flux? What kind, how will you clean it off after you solder? What if the board is conformal coated? What if the solder mask is damaged?

FWIW, it takes a day or two of training to teach someone who "knows how to solder" to learn to solder correctly on contemporary electronic assemblies.

BTW, most of the soldering rework now is done on hot air reflow machines - soldering irons are too big for the work, and if the tip is made small enough to work, it can't retain enough heat to melt the solder.

[cabinetman]

Not that soldering is not worth talking about, but getting back to the original topic, when encountering conversational stupidity, it might be worthwhile to determine if the person is just mentally challenged, or is jerking your chain.

We may take them as being "stupid", and not as fluent as we may like. Some people have a high degree of intellect, but may be a poor communicator.
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