For me, it’s a matter of how little they know the world around them and how things affect other things. Case and point, when voters thought that voting Trump in, that he would magically make egg prices go down. They’re going down now, from what I saw shopping earlier today, but they weren’t because of him.
Another example is how when shop lifters, when they shoplift, always think that they’re harming who they call ‘The Man’ aka corporate operating the stores, directly. That’s not entirely true and I know this having worked retail several times and currently.
Who you’re hurting, really, is the store itself and those that work in it. The store pulls its own profits in by how many people shop there and part of that profit, is distributing to those who work there. When you’re stealing from that store, you are actively harming that store’s profits and in turn, harming those that work there.
The CEOs and executives are still raking in millions and they aren’t above having to shut down stores over dipshit thieves which in turn, costs a lot of jobs in that store to absorb the profits to make up whatever costs.
Usually when they start ranking IQ, especially across broad groups
Well, going after low hanging fruit, people that think shoplifting is a major expense for most retail stores that would cause locations to shut down. Obviously self checkout and how it makes abuses and shoplifting easier shows that that is a much smaller cost than just the labor of paying a cashier. It is always advantageous for PR reasons to blame crime and shoplifting rather than a lack of profitability or demand for shutting down locations.
But on a more serious note, it is a lack of curiosity or unwillingness to challenge really simplified narratives about common facets of daily living. A more original answer might be the lack of ability to pick up on jokes or sarcasm. I was always shocked about some people’s inability to pick up on sarcasm, even when the statements would make no sense or be obviously wrong, if they were done sincerely. There is an awareness of context and meta-awareness that is what I usually identify with intelligence, as opposed to expertise in a specific domain.
Autistic people are famously known for not getting sarcasm. Usually they assume you’re not intelligent when you sincerely make statements that are nonsensical or obviously wrong. Who is “low intelligence” there?
I heard that in some Asian countries sarcasm is a foreign concept. I kid you not. Hilarious if you ask me
I’ve actually heard this in a more egregious form. I once heard someone claim that sarcasm is an anglosphere phenomenon and someone that isn’t a native English speaker would never be able to understand sarcasm.
Would be interesting if it were though, or if we could pin point the geographical or cultural origin or sarcasm. As a european, I can only say sarcasm is very very present here. And I’m not being sarcastic here
Anyone older than me without class consciousness
Black white thinking without self reflection.
One’s willingness to say, “I don’t know” and a general ability to think critically.
Just today, a friend was yammering on about a situation he clearly had limited information on (Canada Post strike). We’ve aptly described him as confidentially incorrect. Don’t be this person.
confidentially incorrect
Exactly the term I use for ChatGPT and co.
I have several flags:
- when people is not able to focus a discussion in the specific thema and tend to divage
- when somebody is reassuring that two things are same/not same but they can explain why they are the same or not
- when they are not able to identify a contradiction in their own arguments, and once you point on that still negates the contradiction
- when don’t know how to explain difficult / advance concepts they should master in easy terms / vocabulary
And a few more, but not so strong like these ones
That’s not something I go out of my way to do. Some people are undereducated, and some if those are harder to educate than others, but there’s rarely a reason to write someone off. Most people are willing to learn if you approach them with patience and empathy.
They believe the bosses lies. Lies about the nature of profit for example.
Kindness and empathy
Whenever I see or hear someone disregard or debase another person they don’t know or understand without even trying to get to know anyone … I immediately just think they are dumb
Whenever I see or hear someone treat someone else kindly without ever more knowing the other person … then that person is smart in my books … all that can change if the receiver of kindness starts acting like an ass though.
It’s the first impression … if all I see is kindness and empathy at the beginning, I know I’m dealing with a bright person.
Sure “in your book,” but then you’re alienating yourself from other people by having an entirely different set of definitions for intelligence.
Or perhaps you’re inadvertently conflating ethical values with cognitive ability
Empathy tends to be a byproduct of considering another person’s point of view and not immediately assuming the worst. There is definitely intelligence there, if you are considering all angles
Yes I do agree with that. Although the converse not. I.e. acting non-empathetic → non-intelligent, which the person I was responding to meant
I mean, that’s emotional intelligence. You’re dead right to value empathy highly, imo.
There’s many types of intelligence. Many of them are useless to society if you don’t also posess one or more of the others.
I was talking to my wife about how is ethical yet moral steal clothes that have the brand logo printed on them, since you are walking wearing them, you are a walking ad, even if you paid for the clothes, you still are a walking ad. You actually paid for being an ad. Then, she asked me if in the process will somebody be affected, like, the manager of a store. That is when we both got to the conclussion that the best is not buying that kind of clothes and go and buy to little business or flea markets for cheap but good clothes (with no brand logos prints over).
¿Y por qué no las dos?
It’s ‘case in point’, by the way.
This post hits several of my indicators for the question they’re asking.
For me, a general lack of curiosity how things work, from human behavior, to technology, to economy, and everything else. And how you inform yourself.
Of course you can’t always be interested in everything and can’t know how everything works in detail, no one has time for that. Also you might be wrongly informed in certain instances. But if you’re so uninterested that you don’t know how almost anything works even in basic ways, or you for example only get your information from “my parents told me” or “I only believe what I have seen” or similar, I’m seriously questioning your general intelligence.
Otherwise, their reaction when their beliefs are challenged. I don’t necessarily mean when they’re told they’re wrong, but when they do something and reality gives them an unfavourable result, idk, like a magnet not sticking to a surface, if they keep trying to stick it on instead of maybe evaluating that the surface (or “magnet”) is not magnetic.
Intelligence is a difficult thing to measure, especially merely by interacting with a person for a little while.
Many of the answers in this thread amount to privileged assumptions that fail to account for the fact that what they describe as signs of lacking intelligence could also be symptoms of exhaustion and alienation inherent to conditions such as living under a capitalist system and/or neurodiversity and/or disability and/or sickness and/or…
For example, when someone works 16 hours a day for 5/6 days a week, they are far less likely to have the energy for using their little free time away from work to ponder deep questions at the same level as someone privileged enough to have a less demanding existence. This is not correlated with their intelligence in any way.
