No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Keep in mind that you, along with everyone else, know very little all in all.
The things you do know will be important to you, naturally. Their understanding and their importance will also feel obvious, also naturally.
So anyone not knowing these obvious important things will instinctively feel like an absolute idiot to you.
This is a mental trap. Try to avoid it. The less respect you have for others, the less able you will be to really listen to other standpoints and learn from them, leading to a vicious cycle of alienation.
Wine is wine, bread is bread. Let us not conflate lack of reasoning (stupidity) with lack of knowledge (ignorance).
Reasoning is based on knowledge. There have to be things you accept as truths first before you can start reasoning, and those truths are not universally shared, nor do they have the same weight for everyone. That includes you and me.
There are things we don't "know", and things we don't know that we don't know, but we nevertheless think of ourselves as informed and capable of reasoning. To someone who knows more than us, they'd consider us stupid. It's not about objectivity, it's about looking down on those that don't know things you know and declaring them less-than.
The basic point is there are countless factors big and small that influence any individual's thoughts and ideas at any given moment. Our minds are very complex things, and our lives are messy, absorbing all kinds of information and stimuli that affect it in ways we don't properly understand or even realize.
When we talk about people being stupid or smart, we're just reducing that complexity so we can make simplistic insults that make us feel better about ourselves, but ultimately aren't saying anything meaningful about the human condition.
And there's a lot of dark history behind this, too. The history of psychology is riffe with falsehoods about quantifying intelligence, and often it was simply about prejudice.
You want to call people stupid for doing stupid things, sure, I get that. I do that. We all do. But the more you try to create these general arguments about human stupidity, the more it unravels, and the more it reveals about you.
I won't address everything because it's a lot of text, OK? (I did read it though.)
I think that it's more accurate to say that reasoning is a "tool" that you use to handle knowledge. And sure, without knowledge you aren't able to use reasoning, but sometimes even with knowledge you aren't able to do it either - we brainfart, fall for fallacies, etc.
Another detail is that ignorance is far more specific - a person isn't just "ignorant", but "ignorant on a certain matter". For example it's perfectly possible to be ignorant on quantum mechanics while being informed on knitting, or vice versa. In the meantime intelligence - and thus stupidity - is split into only a handful of categories (verbal, abstract, social, etc.).
They'd consider us ignorant. At least if following the distinction that I'm emphasising.
Not necessarily reducing it but I get your point, given that I think that it's simply easier to talk about ignorance and stupidity as behaviour than as something inside our "minds" (whatever "mind" means). And in both cases it's behaviour that we all engage; some more than others, but we all do.
Right, but when these important things are also very basic things everybody needs to know, like how to boil an egg, how to vote, how to dry wet clothes, how to treat people and items carefully and with respect, etc, I don't have much sympathy for adults who come across as an idiot in these ways, you know?
There's things that other people don't know because they're not as interested in them of course, but that's not what bothers me, it's all the stuff they should all know that they're ignorant of... :-(
I couldn't boil an egg. I don't like them, I don't eat them, and I have no particular need to prepare them for anyone else.
By your standards, I guess I'm an idiot?
So, sure, you may not currently know the procedure. But you could easily boil an egg if you had 60s to google it first.
Some people wouldn’t be able to figure it out. Stupidity isn’t really accurate though in my experience, I think it’s more being overwhelmed and sometimes just having an aversion in general to change and learning. People can often have really bad experiences early in life (ironically, at the hands of people like OP who categorize them as morons for their honest ignorance) that set them up to want to never leave their comfort zone, which is itself again seen as “stupid” by the same people, thus perpetuating the cycle forever.
It even goes beyond this.
Everyone thinks they're smarter than everyone else. Smarter than doctors, scientists, and engineers. Definitely smarter than whatever the political or ideological "other side" is.
It's ruining our society. When George Carlin did his bit about "how stupid the average person is", he forgot to mention how 99% of us assume we skew into the "smarter than average" side.
I can't have conversations with people I used to respect, relatives, old friends, or even casual acquaintances without everyone blathering on about how stupid these people are or that group is. I hate it.