More Really Dumb People
But I have a sneaking suspicion that the intelligence curve is not a normal Bell Curve, that it has a big hump toward the Dumb End
I recently read the results of a study that indicates why Dumb People
are doubly damned. It seems that there is a kind of a Catch-22 which
prevents them from perceiving their own dumbness and enables them to
think that, Hey! I'm OK! The gist of the study was that people who are
performing around the 12% level estimate that they are performing at
the 62% level for the basic reasons that a) they are too dumb to be
able to accurately evaluate their own performance, and b) they want to
think that they are better than average.
I took a course at Portland State in Proutland, Orygun, about Abnorman Psychology. The per-fessor stated that when we think about abnorman psych and look at the Bell Curve, we normally think that all the abnormans are at the left-end of the curve. So, he's like asserting that the other tail at the right-end is also abnorman. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the intelligence curve is not a normal Bell Curve, that it has a big hump toward the Dumb End, and a long, thin tail toward the top-end. I mean, people can only get so dumb, and they like forget to breathe and tie their shoes, but there aren't any big disadvantages to being Too Smart other than getting occasional headaches from trying to talk to rilly dumb people.
The study further states that with some effort, rilly dumb people can be convinced that they aren't doing better than average, and can be
coaxed along to great heights of intellectual achievement in the Arts, Music, Science, Medicine, and generally got a shot at becoming Nobel Prize winners or being able to maintain a regular job at a fast food joint, learn how to vote democratically in a, like, totally non-elitist way, without either choking on a chad or eating the ballot because it smells good.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:
Unskilled and Unaware of It:
How Difficulties in Recognizing One's
Own Incompetence Lead to
Inflated Self-Assessments
http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html
I took a course at Portland State in Proutland, Orygun, about Abnorman Psychology. The per-fessor stated that when we think about abnorman psych and look at the Bell Curve, we normally think that all the abnormans are at the left-end of the curve. So, he's like asserting that the other tail at the right-end is also abnorman. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the intelligence curve is not a normal Bell Curve, that it has a big hump toward the Dumb End, and a long, thin tail toward the top-end. I mean, people can only get so dumb, and they like forget to breathe and tie their shoes, but there aren't any big disadvantages to being Too Smart other than getting occasional headaches from trying to talk to rilly dumb people.
The study further states that with some effort, rilly dumb people can be convinced that they aren't doing better than average, and can be
coaxed along to great heights of intellectual achievement in the Arts, Music, Science, Medicine, and generally got a shot at becoming Nobel Prize winners or being able to maintain a regular job at a fast food joint, learn how to vote democratically in a, like, totally non-elitist way, without either choking on a chad or eating the ballot because it smells good.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:
Unskilled and Unaware of It:
How Difficulties in Recognizing One's
Own Incompetence Lead to
Inflated Self-Assessments
http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html