It's incredible how easy it is to remain in a bubble. Family, friends, neighbors, college, work colleagues - all are going to be closer to you than the average person.

Anyone who has worked retail, customer service, or otherwise general public-facing jobs will have this put in perspective pretty quickly.

I didn't meet anyone that would fit on the left half of the bell curve (less than 100 iq).

I promise you that you have. I don't care what industry you worked in. You were vastly overestimating a lot of people.

I can't get away from the idiot. I have to see him in the mirror every morning.

As far as a funny story: My friends brother isn't very bright sometimes. My friends computer chair broke, one of the 5 metal supports that lead out to the plastic wheels snapped. My friends brother was learning how to weld so he tried to fix the support and in trying to test the strength of the weld he started bashing the seat against the floor and broke every plastic wheel... lol

I spent 20 minutes (I timed it) on the phone diagnosing a tech support issue and instructing the user on how to fix it. It took about 10 seconds for me to realise that number lock was turned off.

The rest of the 20 minutes was trying to get the user to find and press "Num lock" on the keyboard.

About 10 minutes in, they actually found and pressed it. Apon noticing that nothing had appeared on the screen, they tried pressing it again, then announced it didn't work.

Somehow, just getting them to press the button one more time was not simple, as they now had to begin their logical left-to-right scan of the keyboard again to find this mysterious new "Num lock" button they'd never heard of before.

This person (on another call) would say the name of each key as they pressed it. They would say "Caps lock, A, Caps lock, Enter" when typing a single "A" on a line, but didn't know what "Caps lock" was and couldn't find it on the keyboard when asked to press it immediately after having said and pressed it.

I don't think we've met yet.

Yes bro. I work a customer facing job and drive in traffic. I encounter morons every day.

If you haven't met a dumb person, you are the dumb person.

TIL that dumb is defined as having scored less than 100 IQ.

Anyway, I've worked enough customer service to say with some confidence that I've met at least a few people who truly just exist and let the world happen to them with zero curiosity.

Yes, I knew someone when I worked in retail who was quite dumb, she was a super sweet person though.

I realized how dumb she was when we encountered a mouse in the back stocking area. It crawled under the door and out to the back of the building. She turned to me and said “I heard the reason mice can crawl under doors like that is because they don’t have any bones”

Me being a biology major with a big interest in all things animals and insects that loves to educate people tried to correct her. I told her about how all mammals have bones and that mice were just very flexible to be able to fit under the gap in the door. I told her about how we used to dissect owl pellets when I was in 3rd grade and put the little skeletons back together. She did not believe me and still thought mice just don’t have bones.

I do sometimes wonder if she ever finished nursing school.

Ive known several MAGA people.

One in particular stands out, she was in charge of processing bills for our company, and she basically got all her propaganda from fox news. The company is/was a civil engineering firm (I no longer work there), we specialized partly in large municipal water projects, dams, water infrastructure, injection wells, large scale stormwater percolation, reservoirs etc.

During the big California wildfires (when firefighters kept not getting water out of the hydrants), the head engineer and the lead technical engineer held one of their once-a-month training lunches, and they decided to go over the California wildfires and the effects on the water infrastructure.

This lady stands up, and interrupts the lead technical engineer (who was going over flow/pressure/friction equations to show why hydrants ran dry when there was so much demand), to insist that the reason California is running out of water is that "Newsom drained the reservoir to protect some stupid fish" and other fox news idiocy. Spent a solid 5 minutes trying to tell a bunch of civil engineers a bunch of "information" about water systems that was so hilariously wrong that it was actually impressive.

That was a very awkward few minutes while HR tried to tell this lady that she needs to let the engineers actually learn how to do the job.

A ton of pre-millennials really huffed the leaded gas fumes / ate the paint chips and it shows. :/

But of course! One I know well. He's a very friendly and likable person, and never judges anyone. He has a large social circle, a steady job doing manual tasks. He has a delightful longtime girlfriend. But he can't grasp abstract concepts, or any but the simplest logical concepts. He hides any lack of understanding with a quick joke, but is highly susceptible to propaganda.

I got some for you.

I used to work in the computer lab of a public library. I've met so many people carrying such a profound lack of basic understanding or reasoning skills, that the most terrifying thought was realizing "They drove here."

I put up with that job way too long... It was... So deeply soul sucking I'm still recovering years later. I wish I were joking.

A lot of people who simply didn't read anything presented to them on a screen, couldn't handle the concept of email, and had no idea how to open Microsoft Word, much less type a resume. That was kinda the bread and butter there, unfortunately, but we did our best.

It was a whole lot of "That sounds hard. Do it for me?" And they found all sorts of weasle ways to need constant babysitting without crossing the line of my job description.

Few wanted to actually learn anything. (If they did, I went above and beyond.) They mostly wanted a free butler to do their homework assigned by the government or a lawyer or their job or whatever.

These people are dumb by choice, because they are intellectually lazy.

"Monke, stop being mean to the 85 year olds!" You might be thinking. No. These were like 40 and 50 year olds who would tell me "I'm old school, I don't do computers." Computers were around since way before me! Where the heck were you!?!? (I'm now convinced whenever people say "old school" they mean "no school.")

Some examples:

We used to put big obvious "Out of Order" signs over the screens if a machine wasn't working correctly. I watched a young lady in like her 20s, sit down at that machine, make eye contact with me, see the sign, flip it over, attempt to sign in, then walk up to me to say (yes, in fluent English) it wasn't working.

I had a regular patron always looking for pastry chef jobs. We had to keep her resume, email address, and password on our work machine because she'd show up every week having forgotten all of it. She ended up with one pastry job only to get fired for eating one from a tray on shift.

So she applied to a grocery chain I think (with significant hand holding by a number of staff), and they had one of those basic competency tests like giving correct change and "Click the picture that shows how many apples are left if we had 5 and take 2 away."

I explained the nature of the question but that I couldn't do the thinking for her, and I shit you not this woman in like her early 50's broke down upset that it was all too much to handle. Like, first grade math. She was one who drove there, by the way. In a car.

I had a dude get grouchy with me because I told him he couldn't edit videos with PowerPoint (there was no video editing software on those machines.)

I had people more than once try to get me to help them use Paint or GIMP to alter a scan of a pay stub. (FAT CHANCE!)

They would often try to call customer service reps and hand us the phone. Another huge no.

And these people all showed up to blame their struggles...On me.

...Yeah, I've met people that have made me weep for the species. They have zero curiosity, zero intrinsic understanding or critical thinking or pattern recognition, and they are seemingly content only knowing how to just complain and buy things.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. And I have seen quite a few wasted minds. It really does break my heart.

Edit: Still work for the library, but in a MUCH better position now. I'm still sad the the weirdest most unhinged people I meet usually want the computer lab though, and I hurt for my colleagues over there...

I once worked with a guy who did not know the sun was a star and didn't know what planets were. This was when I was in the military. I had a an unlabeled world map in my office and whenever someone new(to Germany) came in to be introduced I'd point to the map and say, "I'll buy you a beer if you can point out our location on the map". It was just an icebreaker so pointing at Europe was good enough. It was shocking how many people couldn't locate Germany on a world map and quite a few couldn't locate their home state on that world map.

I worked with another guy(a computer programmer) who thought the earth was 6000 years old. He also once told me that vertigo is when you feel like you're standing still and the earth is spinning and indigo is when it feels like you're spinning and the earth is still.

I work with and interact with professionals and am often reminded of something Richard Feynman said, "Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot."

Well I'm surrounded by religious magas so, yes.

"Earth is 2000 years old. Gay is wrong and unnatural. Dinosaurs didnt exist. Democrats want to turn the US into Russia. Trump should take over Canada"

All actual things said by real life people to me.

Its baffling how stupid most Americans are.

Yeah, about a decade back. A friend of my roommate was not very bright. She said stuff like "why would anyone do a PhD, didn't we already research all there is?”.

I had a friend in elementary school that was a little slow sometimes. One day we were walking home from school, and out of nowhere, he asks, "Why don't they just make the Playstation 9?"

It took me a minute to figure out what he even meant by that. The Playstation 2 had just came out. Did he think that companies already have the schematics for all of their products decades into the future, but they're just rolling them out one at a time anyway? Does he think that they already know what the PS 3 through 8 are going to be, and they can just...decide to skip those?

It was only about a year ago, right here in a fedi thread, that someone shared this PS2 commercial and I had a giant AH-HAH! moment that was decades in the making.

This has to be bait

Wait haven’t you ever had to go to like, the DMV or a Walmart, or a CVS at 11pm? I’m not saying the professions are filled with dummies but the cross section of public you encounter there is sure to have a few dummies.

I literally met someone who called 911 for a broken artificial fingernail.

Spend sometime in the emergency Department and you'll meet plenty.

I'm not sure I understand the question.

I was in a conscription army. Everyone fit for duty gets called up. I think we can assume that the very extremes wouldn't be fit. But anyone 80+ from the lower side of that bell curve would be there. It's a good mix of the whole country.

I think in most cases you wouldn't realise that someone was on the side of the bell curve unless they had serious problems with social cues.

This one guy didn't know how to shower. He'd strip down, cover himself in soap and then shower it off. I knew this guy from school, and he was bullied a lot. He'd rage out about any little thing, so bullies got a kick out of it. I guess it was a chicken and egg problem.

One guy was nervous about getting drafted, so he showed up shitfaced on the bus that rolled in. As the rest went to stand in line to get signed in and get their gear, he ran and hid in a bush until the MP:s came to get him. Nice enough guy. He hung himself in the forest a few years after conscription.

Another guy really tried to get out of serving by complaining about his knees, hoping to get deemed unfit for service. He got assigned lighter duties, which were to service the fleet of bicycles the army has. When time came around to use them, they all had issues.

Another had been driving trucks before conscription. He claimed he hit 110km/h due to having the sun in his back. He was quite the mythomaniac in general. He didn't make any friends, didn't pick up on social queues and could not clean up his dialect enough to be understood by half of the people there. He came by my bunks asking about a helmet and shovel his friend had borrowed from him, and was supposed to leave with us when friend was discharged. Turns out his "friend" broke into his locker to "borrow" the gear to return for his discharging. I got called in as a witness in that incident, but I hadn't heard anything about it until dumb guy came along for his stuff.

Edit: i just remembered movie night with that last guy. We had a classroom with a TV up front and a microwave on the windowsill for heating snacks. He was sitting by the microwave and his sergeant passed a pack of microwave popcorn down the row to be microwaved. Dumb guy asks for instructions - "just toss it in and set it for three minutes". Three minutes in it starts smelling burnt in the whole room. Turns out dumb guy left the plastic wrapping on.

Education and employment level do not preclude stupidity. I too work in stem. I have had antivax colleagues.

I've met plenty of 'dumb' people that function just fine in a familiar environment. You would never know in normal circumstances. The problem comes when something out of the ordinary happens. For instance, we had a shop worker with a learning disability. She dealt with all the common problems just fine, but if someone asked for something out of the ordinary, or for directions (this was pre-smartphone) it quickly becomes apparent.

i had someone assigned under me at work. this person was old enough to have a teenager, yet she could not function. we were painting the halls, she kept setting the paint tray into puddles of paint that she spilled, then kept setting it down on the bare floor. she could not understand how to scrape tape off the tabletops. she could not tell me what her job duties were after 4 months of doing the same shit every day (take trash out, clean bathrooms, sweep, wipe down tables. she could not list that off to me. any time i was giving her direction, she would stare bankly at me slackjawed, like there was no intelligence in her eyes, then 5 minutes later  i would find her on her phone because she couldnt remember what she was supposed to do and didnt even think of asking me to remind her.

she lived a couple houses away from where we work and her mother (who she lives with) would walk over to check on her sometimes. weird.

the last straw came when after 2 hours of work, i came out of the bathroom and all the lights were off and alarm code set, and she was gone. i texted her and asked where she went and she said she thought we were done for the day bc she finished her task and couldnt find me (I WAS IN THE BATHROOM.)

when i got management involved, i was told i didnt try hard enough with her. lol

I wait tables and deal with the public every day. So, yes.

I work in mental health and I’ve definitely met patients who have low IQ scores. However, even without getting into clinically significant low IQ ranges, I can virtually guarantee you that you’ve met people who have sub-100 IQs. 100 is the average human IQ score. You haven’t gone through life this far without meeting people who fall a few points below it, just as you haven’t failed to meet people who score above it. A person with a 95 IQ is not going to be able to be distinguished from a person with a score of 105 by someone who doesn’t have substantial training in assessing IQ (and even then, most experts would have to formally test people to detect subtle differences like that).

My old roommate. He would make like 20 chicken drumsticks in the night/evening, eat one or two of them, and then leave them to sit out all night only to throw them away in the morning. It did not just happen once, he did it like at least 4 times. Huge waste of food.
He also once cooked [my!] ground beef with 0 seasoning, literally just in a pan. And while he has that plain ground beef sitting in a container in the fridge, he started defrosting another pound of MY beef. What are you going to use it for?? You already have plain ground beef that you cooked literally yesterday!?!?
He also had this ancient and suffering blind & deaf chihuahua who wore diapers, and he would leave the dirty diapers in the most random places including on top of the electricity utility box in front of the house where everybody can see it.

I did not even believe in idiots/stupid people until I met this guy. He was also a big fan of Charlie Kirk, by the way.

A particular fellow student comes to mind who was slow to understand things, made a comparative lot of programming mistakes and so he took more time, but he also worked hard, stuck to a problem until it was solved, coordinated tasks well, and additionally brought positive spirits to any project group. I assume he'd score under 100 but I'd love to have him on my team if he applied with us today.

It's hard to know for sure though, since 100 is the average by definition and most people will be relatively close to it. Not like 97 or 103 makes a big difference. It's half the people you meet in public, like, (by and large) we all go to the same primary schools and supermarkets etc. Outside of those (so tertiary education, workplaces, online bubbles perhaps, etc.), there's still a substantial fraction who learned a lot and/or have a good work attitude and go very far in life amidst people who didn't have to work hard to get anywhere

It frankly seems strange to assume you basically never met anyone who is slightly below the average. From a statistics point of view, one might wonder if that's a dumb thing to say ;) (jk)

I was in this friend group (many many years ago) were one girl who always amazed me with her conclusions sometimes joined up. She was very kind so you can not dislike her but she didn't understand very simple concepts and were often lost in conversations that were a bit deeper than small talk. Everyone who met her for the first time always had at least one silent movement where they were thinking "why did she ask/say that?" and were unsure how to proceed (to not hurt her).

At my old workplace did I work with one woman that I think is "dumb" but I am very unsure in what way. I always had this weird feeling when talking to her, it felt like she didn't really get it but she didn't say much that would indicate it. Even tho she is older than I did it feel like talking to a child. It was a very weird experience. I didn't really talk much with her so I heard most things second hand but she could come to some weird conclusions about how to do her job. For example I often came earlier so I could leave earlier, so she did the same except I was actually working she did not, she were just sitting there for 1 hour doing nothing and assumed that was ok, as if we got payed to be there not actually work. When her boss told her off did she get stressful like a child and you saw she felt ashamed. She did this for many things and how she reacted made it seem like a child. I am unsure if she just tested us or if she actually thought it would be ok.

Otherwise do I not really meet "dumb" ppl. It is more about not having the knowledge or experience to know how to proceed or understand something. And some ppl are often in flight or fight mode when stressful problems arrive, so they do not think and come up with a solution that may be called "dumb".

Yeah, me neither but someone once told me that If you never met a dumb person, you're the dumb person. And then I was like "oh".