this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
468 points (85.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35825 readers
1037 users here now

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!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

To clarify here, I don't feel like I'm significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying "facts."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

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.).

To someone who knows more than us, they’d consider us stupid.

They'd consider us ignorant. At least if following the distinction that I'm emphasising.

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.

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.