Stupid people

Hi Jake.

It's been a week or 2 since my last post. Time flies when you so busy you cant think straight :)

I have been giving some thought as to where to start. There are so many topics I want to cover off with you.

Politics, Religion, Society, Love, Australia, how to deal with stupid people, Optimism etc etc.

In fact looking back over this list, you will need to know "how to deal with stupid people" to have a head start on at least the first 3 of these. Probably the first 4 when you consider that you will likely be the stupid one when it comes to love at least once in your life. So "Stupid People" it is.

To start with, "Stupid" in this sense is not necessarily just based on IQ. I have met quite a few people who have high IQ's but still fall fair-and-square in the "stupid" camp when it comes to everyday life and common sense.

For example, I was working onsite in a client's building a few years back. I had never been in the building before but I was hired to work there for a about a week. The second day I got in the lift heading up to the 17th floor and as it stops on level 5 and one of the GMs gets in. Now although this was not the first time I met her. I had had meetings with her at our own offices and had a few conference calls. This was (on paper) a very smart person. She was in charge of a multi-million dollar revenue arm of the business and she had an MBA. But once the lift doors closed and the lift continued on, she looked up at the numbers with an annoyed look and said "Oh damn! I wanted to go down". I suspect she must have got a few "duh" looks from a few people in the lift, because then she said as if explaining her mistake "I was reading and didn't look up at the arrows". I was just trying to be helpful and so I said "If it helps you in future the bell rings twice for up and once for down when the lift arrives" - I figured maybe this is her first time in this building so I was kindly sharing the knowledge that I had picked up in my last couple of days.

Now everyone has a bad day and makes mistakes from time to time and getting on the wrong lift is not what makes her stupid. Her response to me was what landed her in the "stupid people" category. She said "Wow! You know I've worked in this building for 5 years and I never noticed that". Now I had ridden the lift maybe 5 times in the 48 hours since coming to the building for the first time and I had spotted it. In 5 years she must have taken a lift maybe 5 thousand times and never noticed that it goes "ding" when it's going down and "ding ding" when it's going up.

Another example that I see all the time is people waiting for the traffic light to turn green who obviously want to take off in a hurry. You can clearly see that the light going the other way is still green and yet they edge forward as if their light is going to go green any second.

Do they think that this is a special traffic light that can magically let cars go from all directions at once without causing traffic accidents? Now some of these people may have high IQs and some may have low IQs but they have their drivers license so they obviously have the mental capacity to understand how traffic lights work i.e. traffic going opposing ways take it in turns.....

Both of these examples come down to the same thing: people take no notice of their surroundings and give no thought to how basic machines and systems work in their day to day lives.

Your IQ is what you are dealt and there is little you can do to change it (short of studying harder or working harder and this doesn’t increase you IQ it just lets you do the same amount/quality of work as someone with a higher IQ who isn’t trying as hard).

At age 3 you are currently giving me mixed signals as to how bright you are going to be. You seem to have a higher than average vocab compared to the other kids in your daycare group which is good but you also keep squeezing balloons until they pop and then being surprised/scared :)

I am sure you'll turn out fine in the IQ department, but the “take away thought” from this entry is that no matter how smart you are on paper, you also need to question how things work and take notice of your surroundings if you are going to make it in life without being stuck in stupid camp.

Now the bad news. The vast majority of people you will meet and interact with in your life will be stupid. We are - as a species - getting dumber.

Dawrinian selection for our branch of the tree of life used to be survival of the “fittest” which in early man meant “strongest”. Then we started developing bigger brains and had to be born earlier in our development cycle so we didn't kill our mothers during childbirth with our enormous heads and therefore needed to evolve social groups like family and clan and village to look after us until we had developed to a point where we could look after ourselves.

Gradually “fittest” shifted meaning to become survival of the smartest. This is because it was no longer brute strength that increased our chance of survival to an age where we could pass on our genes, it depended on who could make the best spear, who could determine where game would gather based on logic and who had developed enough smarts to not shit where they get their food.

However, now days being smart may increase your chance of living longer but it wont increase the number of babies you are likely to sire. The smartest are having fewer and fewer kids later in life and the most likely to pass on their genes are the low income "welfare state". Now, whilst I am certain there are smart folks in this group, when we are talking averages, it's not looking like this is the best group to be populating the future from a brains point of view.

To illustrate get the latest copy of the Darwin Awards and see what the stupid folks in your time are up to. Here's an example from my time:

Police were called to an Austrian apartment, which appeared to have the legs of a corpse sticking out of the window; on entering the apartment they found the dead man's head soaking in a sink full of hot water. The deceased man, after a night of drinking, decided to slip back into his apartment by sneaking through the kitchen window. Being a fixed window it would only open so far so he got stuck with his head at the sink. While thrashing about trying to get free he turned on the tap and drowned in the sink. Police were puzzled why he simply didn't turn off the tap, pull the plug to the sink or even just enter his apartment through the front door as he had the key in his pocket. A man that stupid should not be drinking, or left unsupervised...ever! 

Great example of stupid combined with no idea how everyday things work.

Finally, what to do about it? You can beat 'em - there’s just too many. Please don't join them that would break my heart (or make me turn in my grave) depending on my current status at your time of reading this. There's no point getting angry with them because you will spend tour whole life angry.

You just have to make allowance in your day (because they are going to waste a lot of your time) and try to work around them. But being aware of the Stupid People will save you a lot of anger and disappointment in the human race.

Try to remember for every 100 stupid people you see there is someone like Albert Einstein or Marie Curie or the person who invented Bluetooth headsets or what ever wonder gadget has just come out for you (probably thought activated restaurant bookings or the iPhone 25 or personal jetpacks or something cool like that).

So armed with a basic understanding of Stupid people, we should be able to take a stab at politics or religion for my next post. 

Take care. Love you son.