I have an office job that entails a lot of interaction with people who in the construction industry, small business owners, developers, bankers, etc. I'm too androgynous for my employers to feel comfortable with letting me meet people in person (thank god) so most of it is through email or phone calls. They all vary in education and income; some have PhDs, some never finished high school, some are rich as fuck, some are struggling to get by. Most of them are local but I work with quite a few people from different parts of the country.
There's something that is common between a lot of these people, maybe even the vast majority, is that they cannot do extremely simple tasks or understand simple concepts, even when I try to explain them visually (like I'll share a spreadsheet with them and go through each individual thing I'm doing to show them what I mean). Very few of them get it. I'm not particularly smart or amazing at math or anything, but I'd like to think I can understand simple instructions. Sign this, add these numbers, make this match this. I can't imagine what it's like working in retail if the average person is this dumb.
And if buildings in the US had better ventilation. CO2, even at concentrations barely higher than normal, makes you dumber!
Having completely sealed buildings is good for insulation but bad for breathing.
I am very firm that I get 8-9 hours of sleep every night and I refuse to feel lazy about that. I also think most people are chronically dehydrated. If I don't drink at minimum a liter of straight water a day, I know my focus and cognition start to go to shit.
I'd say it's a bias of your job. To you doing the spreadsheets is dead simple because you do it all day. There are things that are second nature to you that other people struggle with. You're judging them by their ability to understand your work. There are things they do that you would also struggle with but you are never in that position so you don't realize it.
Everyone is stupid at most things.
Construction is a very friendly field to people who struggled at school because you don't have to be book-smart to do well. It's also full of men, which means a lot of arrogant assholes. A significant amount of the people who don't understand spreadsheets are just prideful middle aged men who think "book learning" is beneath them and get all pissy because they refuse to learn from someone they see as beneath them (some of them literally cannot read and are too embarrassed to admit it as well).
literally argue over something online that actually both agree on
You're completely wrong.
Ahhhh, reminds me of the classic bodybuilding.com days in a week thread (cw: ableist slurs)
While I have to admit language stuff is something I have had a knack for forever, this is still true. I'm pathetic at math though, so I sorta get it.
Yeah idk my old job was literally teaching people things. Maybe it's different cus most were there and happy to learn but everyone picked it up at some point if they put effort in.
I don't think the average person is as "dumb" as disinterested for whatever reason.
Most people don't give a shit about their job and are only giving 20% on any given day, and don't really want to be talking to you or listening to you in the first place. If you were talking to them about stuff that actually mattered to them, they might seem a little smarter. You are also probably overestimating your own intelligence relative to them, which is human nature. I assure you the vast majority of people you interact with professionally or as a customer are not, if they spare you a thought at all, leaving thinking "what an unusually clever individual", they probably also think you are a dumbass.
Yeah, this. American's are not especially stupid. Ignorant, narcissistic, intellectually lazy, sure, but OP's having a reddit moment here thinking they're mentally lapping people who just don't give a fuck.
Most people don’t give a shit about their job and are only giving 20% on any given day
:07: :gigachad-hd:
Most people don’t give a shit about their job and are only giving 20% on any given day
:is-this: Is this the Pareto principle?
Honestly as someone who works with some really-domain specific knowledge, it's easy to get up your own ass and not consider the knowledge level/what the other person needs to know.
That said people just kinda check out mentally when they're working and that's probably the appropriate response in like 90% of cases.
Are Americans genuinely dumb or am I just an arrogant asshole?
both tbh, no offense.
Personally I like to blame the ubiquity of the service economy for turning everyone into helpless babies.
Then again people all over the world are like this, soooo
Half of US adults can't read a book at the 8th grade level. (Animal Farm, Huckleberry Finn, Frankenstein.)
I was Lisa Simpson about my reading level but partially cause when I took my first reading level test in the 3rd grade I was at college reading level (which means the test standards are really really low, I wasn't a boy genius) I was stoked to totally own Lisa and not be a nerd. It inspired me to not put effort into things from then on.
It inspired me to not put effort into things from then on
Lmao relatable
test in the 3rd grade I was at college reading level (which means the test standards are really really low, I wasn’t a boy genius)
Yeah same I was like "Wow I'm so smart" but actually they're just absurd
I didn't have to know what the words meant either. I just guessed at how to pronounce them.
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading
This was a cool article about how we're just teaching kids to read wrong now.
Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.
The text said: "My little dog likes to eat with me."
But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone." Rodney breezed right through it, unaware that he hadn't read the sentence on the page.
Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"
"Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."
When I asked [the scientist whose work underlies the current approach] what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn't believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.
"Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said. "I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that."
He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept. [They are not.]
Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist — despite lots of evidence that it does. And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.
"My science is different," Goodman said.
Huh. That explains a lot. I knew about the "reading wars" debate and similar various math reform controversies and at one point participated in some workshops about how to teach reading (for non-professional reasons), but had no idea this was the context behind all the wacky shit I've seen over the years. Worst part is how obvious it was that a lot of petty politics and snake oil peddling was affecting everything behind the scenes.
As another person who was reading way beyond "grade level" as a kid, I probably got lucky in that my immigrant parents insisted that I learn phonics. I'm not sure they understood the context of all the debates either, but it was probably a no-brainer to them. Both other languages I learned as a kid were definitely introduced with the equivalent of phonics. (To be fair, both were nonalphabetic languages.)
Jesus, that's wack. I knew how to read just fine, I just pieced pronunciation together from how English works and other words I knew with similar syllables. I was even told that being able to piece it together that way is also good but not what they were testing for.
Edit: I also did everything but English class in French which was a second language so that probably helped. English comprehension was easy mode
Now keep in mind that the average newspaper is written at a 10th to 12th grade level. Those shitty NYTimes pieces that get posted in the dunk tank are too complicated for the majority of adults to fully comprehend. Education in this country is a joke.
You put animal farm in front of me and I'm not reading that garbage :soviet-huff:
21% of US adults (over 43 million people) are illiterate/functionally illiterate.
Holy shit, the Department of Education claims 54% of Americans read below a sixth grade level. How is that even fucking possible
wait this isn't an archive, how is this account not deleted in embarrassment?
it's wild, they kept going and even contradicted themselves a few tweets later by saying that the educated bolsheviks brainwashed the "illiterate masses"
I thought you were trolling at first, then I looked it up. Holy shit, our education system
Yeah it's worse in some parts, but it's true. I used to have a job where I'd help people write their own name on legal documents because they couldn't read. A guy from my hometown graduated college with a business degree and owns a tire shop. Cannot read. He can sign his name and knows how to add and subtract, but cannot read a page of text and meaningfully gather information from it.
I also used to work at a grocery store and part of that job involved reading labels or shopping lists for illiterate folks.
For a few years I pretended to be dumber than I was because of burnout, depression, and lethargy to really commit to anything.
After a while of pretending it becomes the same thing as possessing a genuine dull mind. (I had to start reading again just to resharpen it when I got better.)
Not dumb so much as dumbed-down and beat-down by our shitty society. Who's got time to be curious and learn shit?
Idk, I'm pretty stupid and I don't usually understand what people mean when they show me stuff on a spreadsheet, so maybe 🤷🏻♀️
Americans are the dumbest, most propagandized people in human history. An illiterate medieval peasant who thinks God put the king on Earth has a more accurate understanding of how the world works than the average American. Even the Americans who managed to receive an education beyond what's needed to operate a cash register almost always know nothing outside of their field. It's partially a deliberate policy and partially a result of the way hyper-Capitalist and individualist wage-slave factories we call schools have optimized for a multi-tier system of wage slaves, labor aristocracy, and managers/owners. Imparting any knowledge that isn't used to enrich the ruling class is unnecessary.
