Wednesday 8 August 2007

Are we all dumb?

I'm not ashamed to say I consider myself to be of reasonable intelligence. Sure, I'm no rocket scientist, but I completed TEE well, finished a uni degree and am now working in a job in which I really on my brains rather than my physical skills. Not that any of that is necessarily indicative of intelligence levels.
However in conversation with someone the other day, whom I consider to be, well, downright stupid, this person told me that they hate dumb people and give them shit whenever they can.
Which got me thinking, people really are deluded about their level of intelligence.
Does that mean I am? The answer, I hope, is no.
I think the real issue here is common sense. Anyone with finely tuned common sense I consider to be intelligent, regardless of their level of education or training.
Or am I just wrong and completely stoopid?

3 comments:

my name is kate said...

I thought we had that conversation in confidence, Johnsy...

Dave said...

hehe i was deliberately non-gender specific but for anyone who is slightly concerned the person i was talking about is someone who has no email address, internet access or any chance of EVER reading my blog.

shiny said...

I heard once that the concept of the "reasonable person" in defamation cases is a bit of a farce because in studies everyone considers themselves more liberal than the "reasonable "person" which therefore means all judgements using this test are inherently over-conservative.

To get back to the point I think that everyone assumes they're a little bit smarter than the average bear when in actual fact if you look up "average bear" in the dictionary there is a picture of all of us (well, most of us).

Phew. All that thinking was exhausting. Now back to watching reruns of Big Brother.