Outside of just judging someone as being more or less intelligent, what assumptions do you folk tend to make about those you believe to be either smart or dumb? i.e. "that person is such a know-it-all" or "that person's going to work at McD's for the rest of their life"?
my mother worked at a McDonald's for almost 35 years, she only quit a few days ago.
I realize this isn't your original invention, but, "oh they work in fast food so they must be a blithering idiot" is one of the worst stereotypes about anyone.
... Are you all going to be alright?
she got a new job at a company called ServiceMasters where she's being paid proportionally for her work as opposed to making not much above minimum wage.
Outside of just judging someone as being more or less intelligent, what assumptions do you folk tend to make about those you believe to be either smart or dumb? i.e. "that person is such a know-it-all" or "that person's going to work at McD's for the rest of their life"?
my mother worked at a McDonald's for almost 35 years, she only quit a few days ago.
I realize this isn't your original invention, but, "oh they work in fast food so they must be a blithering idiot" is one of the worst stereotypes about anyone.
... Are you all going to be alright?
she got a new job at a company called ServiceMasters where she's being paid proportionally for her work as opposed to making not much above minimum wage.
Yay!
Good to see things are finally looking up for y'all somewhat.
I'm kind of proud of it, but I also know that means nothing if I don't do anything useful with it, and bragging about it is just stupid and asinine. Plus, to be completely honest, it's alienating to know that literally only one in over a thousand people is like you, or that when you start talking about something that really interests you half of the people in the room are lost in five minutes and it's not because they don't care - it's you, the freak.
To be perfectly honest, I think that sounds pretty arrogant out of context, haha. But I think I sort of understand what you are saying in context and I feel like it makes some sense. It seems to me that a lot of people feel like that when discussing a niche interest of theirs that a lot of people do not share.
To me, "smartness" is mainly an innate thing. If someone is particularly smart, they can often understand things like complicated math problems with much less effort than your average person. My experience in school was that some people could just easily pick up on stuff and not have to put much effort into their classes to do well. I would consider those people smart.
I feel like "wisdom" and "education" are more related to experiential/practical knowledge and textbook knowledge respectively. I tend to consider somebody wise if they have life experience and/or a great deal of maturity and tact. It seems to me like people can educate themselves both in school and out of school (e.g., Heapers here reading about math, science, philosophy, history, and politics for fun), so it is not necessarily all that easy to determine how educated somebody is.
Personally, I really dislike talking about people in terms of their intelligence or smarts.
First off, I think it can encourage elitism and ranking people based off of something that is sort of arbitrary. People are not worth more as people just because they happen to have more IQ points than the average person. Second, complimenting someone by saying they are smart or criticizing someone by saying they are dumb does not make much sense to me since it is not like the person in question is responsible for any innate smarts they may have.
I can't say that I disagree with any of that.
Potential accusations of arrogance included, honestly.
Outside of just judging someone as being more or less intelligent, what assumptions do you folk tend to make about those you believe to be either smart or dumb? i.e. "that person is such a know-it-all" or "that person's going to work at McD's for the rest of their life"?
my mother worked at a McDonald's for almost 35 years, she only quit a few days ago.
I realize this isn't your original invention, but, "oh they work in fast food so they must be a blithering idiot" is one of the worst stereotypes about anyone.
Most of my employment history to date has been in food service and one of the people I connected to most during the time was an elderly woman who had apparently worked at McD's for years, I'm not talking shit about your mom.
Intelligence is a really strange thing to put into perspective.
I was actually just thinking about this; I just got back from studying for an upcoming geography exam with a few of my classmates, and on the way back to my dorm with one of the girls in the group, the conversation topic moved into how smart I was and how desirable it was for people to be like me in terms of my knowledge about technology and the class itself while the majority of the students in there only have a cursory understanding of the material.
I know she meant it complimentarily, but at the same time, it made me wonder whether or not the amount of random knowledge I've amassed over the years can really count as being 'smart', especially considering my disorder and the way it makes my brain work and everything. I didn't want it to seem like I was dismissing the thought though, so I just settled on saying that I was 'weird' without really addressing the concept of being 'smart' or 'not smart'.
Which, really, is about as well as I can put it. I know that I don't work like most people do (gotta love that #neurodiversity), but I can't definitively say that I'm smarter than most people as a whole because I feel like doing so would be extremely arrogant. I'll admit that there are a few things that I definitely have more knowledge about than most of my peers, but everyone has their little obsessions; mine are just really prevalent because of my nature, which is distinct from that of the majority of the people surrounding me.
"Intelligence" has no universal definition - it simply refers to a set of traits that the predominant culture values more than others, and those traits are as varied as the cultures that assign them.
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I can't say that I disagree with any of that.
Potential accusations of arrogance included, honestly.
Heh, I was not necessarily trying to accuse you of something; I was just making an observation.
i would like to be smarter, and i hope that this is something you can train yourself into being, although it might not be
if i call someone smart it's definitely meant as a compliment