

You are Probably Mis-Diagnosing People as Stupid - healsdata
http://jasoncrawford.org/2010/04/how-to-work-with-stupid-people/

======
jxcole
I had a one hour disagreement with someone at my college who was a
creationist. Not only did he believe the world was only a few thousand years
old, but he also believed that at some point there were floating layers of ice
in orbit around the earth.

I completely disagreed with him on all fronts. However, I'm not sure that he
was stupid. The impression I got was that he was working with a completely
different set of axioms than I was.

At some level, you can't ask why any more. There has to be some sort of core
base to your beliefs. My core belief is in things like science and math. His
core belief was in the concrete word for word truth in the bible. Intelligence
didn't really play into it.

When you think something is stupid, a lot of times it has to be with the core
assumptions that underly their beliefs. Unearthing and understanding these
beliefs and agreeing to disagree is very important.

~~~
btilly
One of my best friends in grad school was a creationist. We discussed the
subject exactly once. He realized that I knew rather more about the debate
than he did, I knew there was no percentage in pushing it, and we both knew
that neither person was going to change their opinions soon. So we found other
things to talk about.

I got him through his topology qual so he could get a masters. (He went on to
get a PhD in math.) He introduced me to Linux. On the whole I think I got the
better long-term bargain.

~~~
eru
Seems reasonable.

One interesting question you can ask each other is "What would it take to
change your mind?". In a certain sense--which may remind you of Karl Popper,
the weaker the conditions you can offer on which you'd change your mind, the
stronger your standpoint is.

Of course asking this question can be quite uncomfortable for yourself. For
example, I like to think of atheism as the reasonable person's natural point
of view. But I could not offer good conditions that would make me change my
mind. Because I suspect I'd rather doubt my sanity than accept sensations that
would be incompatible with no-gods.

------
jrockway
Remember when that article about Facebook had 100 comments along the lines of
"what have you done with the old Facebook login page? I hate this one!"?

We are probably not misdiagnosing them as stupid.

~~~
pavs
They are computer illiterate (or internet illiterate to be more precise), but
not stupid.

~~~
jrockway
Or just plain illiterate.

~~~
pavs
How did you come to that conclusion?

There are a lot of things I don't know and some things I am very new to. If I
were to sit down with Brian cox and argue about the nuances of quantum physics
I will come off as someone who is Quantum Physics illiterate, not stupid.

To some people the internet is new, mysterious and complicated like quantum
physics, simply because they are not very familiar with it or interested in
the technical aspects of the internet doesn't make them stupid.

~~~
jrockway
How can you confuse a newspaper article with a login form if you have any
ability to read and understand what you read? Yeah, the word facebook is used,
and the facebook logo is on the page. But if you RTFA...

Anyway, acting stupid is as bad as being stupid. Worse, even.

~~~
ezy
I don't understand this. Why is it so hard to give someone the benefit of the
doubt?

The whole piece boils down to that. And it's very useful advice for arrogant
computer dweebs. You can't just write people off like that successfully.

And you certainly can't do it because 100 out of N misdirected users of one of
the most _popular sites on the internet_ don't have the correct mental model
for what's going on or complete confidence in that model.

~~~
mistermann
"100 out of N misdirected users" Good point....I agree with the idea that
whoever got confused by that article is stupid (I mean, if you can't figure
out you are reading an article, then is the state of stupid even possible),
but it was a fairly small sample of people, considering how many people log in
to facebook per minute.

But then, I guess we're back to the question of why they navigate to facebook
via google....sigh.

------
spuz
All of these points assume that someone who is "stupid" is someone who
disagrees with your point of view. I find that is very rarely an issue in my
day to day job. The real question I'd like to know the answer to is how do you
deal with people who require more help and guidance than others? How do you
help others to think for themselves and come up with great solutions to
problems by themselves?

~~~
jasoncrawford
Great question, and something I'm still learning. I touched on some points I
know in the article. E.g., if you have data or lessons-learned that they
don't, share that information.

Probably a whole separate post in helping others see your point of view via
questions rather than statements, so they learn your method and not just your
conclusions.

------
DanielBMarkham
Easy rule-of-thumb: if you think somebody is stupid, ask "Help me to
understand"

I've found that once you understand, very, very rarely do you think they are
stupid any more.

~~~
mootothemax
I couldn't agree with you more.

On a personal note, I must admit that the level of arrogance seen in IT is
sometimes quite overwhelming. Just because someone can use a computer does not
automatically make them smart; _other_ people have _other_ skills, amazing! ;)

~~~
LiveTheDream
"She's not troubled, she's a dancer" \- Sir. Ken Robinson on a child whose
parents feared she might be learning-disabled, thus demonstrating that
different types of intelligence exist. Look up the speech on TED Talks; it is
incredible.

~~~
adammichaelc
I know the video you're referring to. It is really cool, and opens up the idea
that intellectual intelligence is only 1 type of intelligence.

From my personal life, my wife couldn't care less about computers and probably
would never watch a TED video, but her "people intelligence" is very high --
she can relate to many different kinds of people and wherever she goes she
makes good friends and people around her hold her in high esteem.

Her dad is something of a bookworm who knows a little bit about everything and
quite a bit about a couple of things. If he were younger (he's in his 70's)
he'd probably get his news from HN. I've often wondered if his "intellectual
intelligence" was transferred to her but in a different form... like she used
it in a different way, in interacting with and reading people, instead of
books.

~~~
Retric
I suspect at the biological level there are vary few differences in "types of
intelligence" but people can get vary good at solving the types of problems
they have already solved. I think the real trick is not to measure people
based on what you are good at but what they are good at.

Coders can often walk though large logic problems instantly, but IMO that's
the same basic thing as an artist knowing which 12 lines capture the basic
idea of a picture. Think of it like the brain missing the correct API's, you
can fake it but it's slow and buggy. But, if you start to spend 10,000+ hours
solving the same types of problems and you are going to create that
foundation.

EX: Cab drivers develop much better spatial reasoning skills over time.
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm>

~~~
phaedrus
@Coders can often walk through large logic problems instantly: I work in an IT
shop where we write in house systems to support the business processes of
nontechnical people. When we try to hammer out business requirements for
systems we'll often have discussions with customer where we carefully question
"OK, so it is ALWAYS the case that P and Q implies R", and "It's NEVER the
case that P or R implies S" and so forth. The customer will say yes, yes, yes,
throughout this, then she'll mention some other case can happen that logically
invalidates the rest of everything she said. Only, she doesn't realize this
because she doesn't have a coder's hard-edged sense of logic. But when this
happens I, my boss, and my boss's boss (the CIO) will all three exchange a
quick incredulous look with each other at the same time because we all ran
through the logic and found the contradiction nearly instantly. Or, that is to
say, as she was talking we were all three building up the same structure in
our minds, and the last thing she says brings it crashing down in all three of
our heads at the same time.

Trying to explain that to a non-coder is not easy to do without appearing
arrogant, and I think that is why people in IT can appear rude. How do you
politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm
having trouble categorizing what you need?"

~~~
michael_dorfman
_How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and
imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?"_

You say: "OK, now that we've covered the standard flow, let's talk about the
strange cases. What are the weird situations that come up once in a while?"

For many users, "ALWAYS" translates to "always, except for the oddball case",
and "NEVER" translates to "not usually, but you never know."

That's why Requirements Analysis is as much about psychology and anthropology
as it is about logic.

------
boredguy8
Thanks for sharing: this is a pretty succinct summary of a much better way of
approaching the world than the "everybody sucks, only I see the light." It's
almost NEVER true, and the people who I know that are right often enough to
say that, never would.

"To know that you do not know is the beginning of wisdom."

------
shalmanese
I've often found that people who "don't have the patience for stupid people"
are really masking a deep seated insecurity. They figure out the one or two
areas they regard as their strengths and arbitrarily define that as
"intelligence" (and, sometimes, they really aren't even great at those cf:
Dunning-Kreuger: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dun...>). That way, they can
look at the world and see that the majority of people are "stupider" than
them.

In reality, we all have areas of strengths and areas of weakness. Some people
are great conceptual thinkers, some are great communicators, some are
brilliant at being detail oriented etc. When I meet somebody for the first
time, I really try and find where they are strong & I am weak so that I can
learn something from them. Over so many dimensions of human endeavor, there's
usually at least one or two major areas in which I feel like I gained
something from that encounter.

Once in a while, you genuinely will meet someone who has nothing to teach you
and nothing you want to associate with them. In those cases, I just put up a
wall, be pleasant and engineer to be away from that person as soon as
possible.

But I pretty much approach everybody with an open mind and a humble heart and
it's worked wonders for me.

------
bena
The interesting thing about this article is that it's assumed that the problem
is on the other end.

    
    
        Are they afraid of the conclusion?  
        Are environmental stresses degrading their judgment?  
        Are they intimidated by you?  
        consider these potential cognitive and psychological problems  
        They may have good judgment but poor communication skills.  
        They may have raw intelligence, but poor thinking habits—patterns of absorbing, processing, and filing information.  
        They may have general insecurities that make them afraid of looking stupid or give them a psychological need to win arguments.  
        They may have a problem with you personally.
    

What if it's not them, but you, with the problem? What if (gasp) you're wrong?

This article isn't about how to work with "stupid" people, it's about how to
pander like an asshole.

~~~
jacobolus
Trying to overcome communication barriers and understand where other people
are coming from is not “[pandering] like an asshole.”

~~~
mistermann
Yes, but what if they are __actually __wrong, then what?

------
jgg
Part of the problem, particularly with Western culture, is the desire to
assign _everything_ a rank, without much clue as to whether or not the metric
used is credible at all. Your GPA, SAT/ACT/GRE scores, IQ, credit rating,
college major, average income and choice of university all form an impression
on people who want a nice box to put you in, whether you like it or not. Sure,
some intelligence is probably required to achieve high rankings in some of
those areas, but it isn't indicative by itself of who you are or what you're
capable of. To the perceptive crowd on Hacker News, this probably seems
obvious, but to most of society, these facts and figures define who you are
and what you should do with your life.

The best hope for humanity, in this regard, is to judge people on what they
contribute or accomplish. This will probably never become a viable paradigm
for most people, because it isn't inherently concrete; it's much harder to
look at someone's entire life and judge their merit relative to someone else,
rather than noting that a 3.5 GPA is higher than a 3.2 GPA. In fact, once you
look at the big picture, it starts to become rather noticeable that judging
people at all is, most of the time, a fruitless task.

~~~
mnemonicsloth
People like linear status orderings. They exist in every culture and get
reinvented when there's no culture present at all.

That's why we're prepared to believe things about IQ that we'd never believe
about processor or compiler benchmarks.

~~~
Tycho
Could you elaborate on the IQ remark? I'm just curious as to what your
thoughts are (I have no particular opinion on the matter)

~~~
jacobolus
Try reading this, by Cosma Shalizi:
<http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html>

~~~
jerf
I would suggest submitting that to HN as its own thing. It's quite a nice
read.

------
tobtoh
Good article. I wish more of those smug arrogant idiots who think everyone
else is an idiot would read this :P

------
tensor
We all have vastly inflated images of ourselves. Every single person.

~~~
jdietrich
That is massively, dangerously wrong. Dunning, Kruger and an array of later
researchers have shown that while the inept do strongly overestimate their own
abilities, the highly able strongly underestimate them. The very able assume
that if a task was easy for them it must be easy for everyone, while the
completely inept assume that a task seems difficult because it is objectively
difficult, and that they must be very able to have made the progress that they
did. The lower you estimate your own ability to be, the more likely it is that
you are in fact highly able. CF Downing demonstrated that people with high
intelligence tend to overestimate the intelligence of people who are similarly
intelligent to themselves and underestimate their own. If you think that the
people around you are more intelligent than you, you're statistically likely
to be the most intelligent person you know.

Personally, I think this is a highly pertinent cognitive bias, so pervasive as
to affect nearly every aspect of modern life. I think that our most able
thinkers keep quiet for fear of being wrong, whilst the stupidest and least
informed in our society shout from the rooftops in blissful ignorance. I think
that between the natural effect of "the more you know, the more you realise
you don't know" and the pervasive anti-intellectualism in our society, we are
becoming dominated by the loud and inept.

In my work as a gambler, I rejoice in this bias, as it is what pays my bills -
bad gamblers can't even conceive the idea that there might be skill involved.
Unfortunately, I think it is fucking up society - while professional
scientists are careful to speak precisely, avoid hyperbole and only make
statements that are backed by strong evidence, their opponents feel free to
rant and rave, to extrapolate one anecdote into compelling evidence, even to
deny the possibility of objectivity.

~~~
tokenadult
_the highly able strongly underestimate them._

I think that's a lot less generalizable than you suppose. For details, see

[http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...](http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300123852)

Both behavioral economics and cognitive psychology show that most people
overestimate their abilities most of the time.

------
latortuga
This seems to be sort of a primer on rhetoric - how to effectively address an
argument instead of dismissing it as merely stupid. He touches on a number of
rhetorical techniques somewhat informally and I like his treatment of the
subject. If you found this interesting, I'm in the middle of a book on the
subject of argument and rhetoric that is actually quite engaging, called Thank
You For Arguing by Jay Heinrichs.

------
ramidarigaz
I think it's partially the environment. When I'm in an environment with people
who are interested in the things that I am, I am constantly amazed at how
bright people can be.

E.g. at university programming classes, some of the students are... crazy
smart...

However, when I'm around people who don't share my interests, it can get
tedious trying to explain things.

------
microcentury
Obvious as all this seems, I've found in managing people that it's generally
something they have to learn for themselves from scratch. And it was something
I had to learn for myself. It's so much easier to wrap yourself in the
comfortable delusion that you're right and everyone else is a moron - those
idiots in Department X have no idea how anything works and have no sense of
the strategy etc etc. Engaging with the full complexity of a situation and
still finding a path forward is something that comes with maturity.

------
hassenben
"stupid refers to lack of ability while ignorant refers to lack of knowledge"
-- Therasus

You can educate ignorance, you can't rewire stupidity.

------
yason
Isn't there a saying that all people are logical and rational, but everybody
just starts from unique assumptions.

------
chaostheory
stupidity isn't very common... but laziness and indifference are a different
story.

~~~
kscaldef
I don't know why you wouldn't assume that stupidity is roughly as common as
intelligence. By definition, 50% of the population is below the median.

~~~
eru
That says nothing about the distribution, or the absolute levels.

Most people are pretty competent in breathing, they don't suffocate. Still
half of them are below median in their breathing abilities.

