

The Ironic Truth About Stupid People - annajohnson
http://www.kikabink.com/news/the-ironic-truth-about-stupid-people/

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chegra
What comes to mind is Occam Razor.

Thinking that Sarah is stupid is not the simplest explanation.

Couple of reasons:

1) Sarah got into university

2) Sarah finished university

3) Sarah pass approximately 32 course at university

4) Sarah maintained a high enough average to be select to work in the
corporation she is in now.

5) Sarah was chosen as the expert in her field

There is only two things that point to Sarah being stupid:

1) Copying others' work and thinking that a simple change of font is
sufficient enough to mask it.

2) What your mother said.

As you would have noted, evidence for Sarah being smart can't simply be
explained away. It would require a few professors and classmate helping her
out. It would require someone botching the interview and the selection of an
expert. This isn't the simplest explanation.

If we assume Sarah is smart, why did she make such a glaring mistake and why
does your mom said what she said? A possible reason why Sarah did what she did
was because she didn't want to do it again. I assume the effort that Sarah
placed into copying and the conversation with Michelle was not more than
30mins.

People who do a good job are normally rewarded with more of the same work. So,
instead of 30mins of work, Sarah might have ended up putting 300hours of work
into something that will most certainly not yield a high payoff for her. So,
in this case it might be best if she pretended that she is stupid, which would
basically fast track her career by months if she was to working on stuff with
high payoff instead.

But, you could tell Sarah's boss about her incompetence. No you wouldn't; the
easiest thing is to ask for another expert. Even if you did, she can simply
say she was going to write legal a letter that it might be in the best
interest of the company to purchase the copyrights of these paper, instead of
having a highly qualified person wasting time and money on something that
might essentially be fruitless.

Sometimes it might not be in your best interest to appearing competent all the
time. Appearing competent all the time is akin to a greedy algorithm which
might not be the optimal solution to achieving your end goal.

In terms of the author's mom, maybe she is right but it doesn't apply here.

In summary, the simplest explanation is that Sarah is smart, but for whatever
reason she chose to appear incompetent in this scenario; I have outline such a
scenario above. If Sarah is stupid it would require, more than likely, over a
dozen people willfully assisting Sarah's incompetence, but if she is smart it
just requires her to play dumb for 30mins.

This is not to prove comprehensively that Sarah is smart but really to show
that other simpler explanations exist. If I was Michelle, a lot of alarms will
be going off in my mind, and I would not simply dismiss it as she is stupid.

~~~
CWIZO
In my experience labelling someone as smart, just because he/she finished
college and got a job, is a mistake or a bad assumption. I have plenty of ex-
classmates who ware A students trough high school and college, but they fail
miserably at anything that requires thinking, common sense, or coming to
conclusions on your own. They ware just good at learning things from books,
remembering them word by word but not understanding a thing they just
"learned".

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DeusExMachina
Same experience here. I know a lot of people that are not even good at
learning word by word but somehow manage to go through university

I can add my experience for jobs too: most of the times people get jobs
because employers do not bother to verify if they are good or not. This has
sadly happened in half the companies I've been. Where I'm working now there
are a couple of persons working as developers that don't know how to program
and don't even have a background in programming or computer science just
because the two non technical founders did not bother to have some technical
guy at the interviews to verify the candidates.

~~~
Tamerlin
Same here. I knew people who memorized their way through their mid-term and
final exams, but couldn't explain any of what they'd memorized.

That applied to some of the professors also -- one even put a question on a
mid-term for biochemistry asking for the rate of a reaction at equilibrium (no
joke). When questioned about this, the TA proctoring the test simply didn't
understand what was wrong with the question.

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bpodgursky
My chemistry is extremely rusty, but I thought that even if the reaction was
at equilibrium, there is still a rate of reaction--it's just that the forward
and backward reaction rates are the same, so there's no net change.

(anyone with a better knowledge of chemistry please correct me if I'm wrong)

~~~
Tamerlin
The rate of the reaction would be the net, which is by definition 0 at
equilibrium, as you described. So the answer SHOULD have been 0, but to be a
question worth putting on a mid-term for biochemistry, the question should
have specified starting concentrations of the various components (reagents and
products) in the solution.

More to the point though, the person who wrote the exam didn't understand why
the equilibrium part mattered...

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maushu
The reverse is also true, some (not all) people think others are intelligent
like them (or close to).

This is optimistic thinking. It never ends well.

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klochner
Funny, cute, or sad, but <http://notironic.com/>

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ShabbyDoo
I often have a terrible time figuring out whether someone is being dishonest
or is just stupid. Take buying a car at a dealership, refinancing your house,
or anything else involving a lower-level salesman. They make absurd statements
which benefit their cause if I believe them.

Last week, I was talking to a mortgage salesman affiliated with my financial
advisor (who I think is pretty smart). The mortgages rates offered are about
0.25% lower with a "point" (percentage of loan amount) paid up-front. One can
compute the approximate ( _) length of time the loan must be held for this to
be a good deal. This guy, without any knowledge of how long I expected to stay
in my home, said, "I never put people into points....you gotta pay all that
money up front, you know?"

Was he being dishonest? I don't think his commission varied much depending on
which product he sold me, and he seemed legitimately interested in forming a
longer-term relationship rather than making a sale that day. When I mentioned
that the point of indifference was probably around two and a half years and
that I planned to stay in the house, he backed off of his claim.

I suspect he was just not .too sharp but perhaps realized that, when
confronted with too many confusing mortgage choices, many people would just
choose irrationally not to refinance. If someone chooses to buy nothing, he
gets no commission. Maybe he was smart enough to want to reduce the number of
choices for me to consider. And, when confronted with the need to cough up a
percent of their homes' values, many people might back out of deals, so he
decided to eliminate choices which might not pan out in his favor.

I have taken the adage "Never presume malevolence for what can be explained by
stupidity." to heart and try to react in such situations with the presumption
of stupidity. It's really hard though when I can't figure out how someone
could actually believe the things he's saying. After all, shouldn't someone
who spends his days selling mortgages understand the trade-off of paying a
point down up-front for a lower rate?

(_) I don't know how the average person figures out which mortgage product is
best. I have to put together a complicated NPV spreadsheet when deciding such
things. And, even then, I'm not properly accounting for the interest rate
options implicit in the products.

~~~
sbierwagen
HN uses the asterisk to style text. Ideally, the parser would be smart enough
to know you wouldn't be trying to italicize three paragraphs at a time, but as
you can see, it isn't.

Hopefully you will check back within the edit window, in time to correct the
mistake.

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acconrad
This is incredibly condescending and to be honest, you're not that intelligent
if you have to resort to the faceless ridiculing of someone in a public forum.

I had to work with plagiarism first-hand at a first-class graduate school. You
would think the caliber of talent for such a prestigious university would weed
out disingenuous individuals, but the truth is that plagiarism is a cultural
phenomenon. Just type in "plagiarism china" into Google to find out how
students are being raised to copy work and rewarded for their efforts. Then
they come to learn over in America in a culture where its frowned upon, and
you see them with the same confused expressions when they correct their work.
Not to say that what China is doing as a country is right, but you can't
simply state that people are stupid.

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protomyth
It really isn't held as a major sin by the general public in the US.
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/b...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/2607505/Joe-
Biden-plagiarised-Neil-Kinnock-speech.html) <http://www.slate.com/id/2198597/>

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kenjackson
To me going to university isn't the surprise. But that Sarah was apparently
picked as the subject matter area expert for this topic.

This leads me to think that maybe there was some confusion going on. Is it
possible that Sarah actually wrote the source article and thought that her
seminal work in the field would be good background information?

~~~
jerf
And then failed to use that as a (rather good) defense? That strikes me as a
stretch.

~~~
kenjackson
Without the author of the post being Sarah or Michelle, and given the problems
I have with it... it's hard for me to tell what really happened.

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shin_lao
Unfortunately abusing someone is not always a question of "intelligence".

A lot of con-men are not especially intelligent, they just know how to exploit
one's weakness. And we all have our weaknesses, and no amount of intelligence
can shield them enough.

Funny story nonetheless.

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bherms
I think this is more related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, where incompetent
people are very confident in their competence (inversely, competent people are
not confident).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect>

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SamAtt
This is a little off topic but I was a little taken aback at the elitist
attitude regarding University graduates. Look at these quotes:

"Rather shocked that someone who had, in fact, gone to university and was
working for a major corporation, considered it okay to blatantly copy someone
else’s article"

"I don’t know which I found more appalling: that someone had made it through
university and into a major corporation believing it was acceptable to
plagiarize"

What about "going to University" imbues someone with automatic moral virtue?
Does this person believe the unwashed masses think it's absolutely acceptable
to plagiarize? While the elite University students are somehow above that?

Maybe I'm just over sensitive as someone who didn't go to college but it
really bugged me.

~~~
kd0amg
The idea is not that those who haven't gone to university don't know better,
but that going through university (which is assumed to have and take seriously
an academic integrity policy) would teach them (even though many would already
know better). To say that something is typically true of members of a group
does not mean that it is typically not true of non-members.

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NumberFiveAlive
Yes, this. There isn't really a single avenue of study at University you can
choose where you shouldn't encounter this. Unless you can make it through a
degree without writing a single paper. The idea that you can plagiarize
anything in any context at all is basically anathema in almost all academic
circles. Not that it doesn't happen, but most people that even attempt it are
smart enough to do more than change the font size to hide it.

~~~
mike-cardwell
I did a BSC in Computer Science at University. About half my class failed our
first ever programming assignment because of plagiarism. Loads of people had
just shared the code between them, character for character. There were a few
cases where they even left the original authors name in the comments at the
top of the code.

Instances of plagiarism dropped after that. At least they learned how to
change variables, function names, comments and whitespace enough to get around
the automated plagiarism detection tool.

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richieb
Keep in mind that everyone is a Dilbert at something....

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ergo98
Not irony (not even the pseudo-irony that has become the norm).

This reads like one of those "feel smart by setting up a strawman" things
that, _ironically_ (yuk yuk), "stupid" people resort to.

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Tycho
I disagree. Basically it's saying that it's the stupid ones who underestimate
the intelligence of people they try to cheat. The sort of incongruity that
irony is made of. If, say, only the worst martial artists picked fights with
strangers, that would also be ironic.

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konad
I don't think she was being devious, I think she thought she had done the
right thing.

~~~
rbanffy
For some interpretations of "thought" and "right" only.

