Yes, when I was doing community college theatre there were two guys - best friends - who were the dumbest fucking idiots I’ve ever encountered in the wild. It was years before Dumb and Dumber came out or I would have called them that. Really good natured, happy-go-lucky guys. but they didn’t have six brain cells between them. Over the few months I knew them their friendship fell apart when Moron A beat up Moron B for getting him fired from Taco Bell where they both worked. I can no longer remember any specific stories about dumb things they did, cuz it was decades ago, only that it was always hard to explain anything to them, and I wasn’t the only person who had this problem. They seemed normal in social situations, not like they were mentally impaired or high or anything, just not much going on under the hood.

Yes.

Ran into a person in a random discussion about hand sanitizer. This was well before covid. They completely believed that having clean looking hands was better than having dirty hands. IOW if you’re a mechanic and can’t quite get all the crud out from under your nails but had scrubbed you hands with cleaners and soap as best you could that this was far worse than not washing your hands all day.

No amount of reason would penetrate this stance.

I mean, it’s not like they carry a sign. Some actual mental handicaps can sort of get through the day with some supports. So, maybe you’re just not looking hard enough. If you’re going IQ you should use <85 or something, too, since <100 is literally half of the population.

On top of that, it’s really hard to tell between weird behavior because they’re dumb, they’re not really paying attention or they’re neuroatypical/mentally ill. I have better stories about supposedly intelligent people missing obvious things. (I star in many)

Anyone here thinking that they’ve never met a dumb person probably IS the dumb person lol

Wait haven’t you ever had to go to like, the DMV or a Walmart, or a CVS at 11pm? I’m not saying the professions are filled with dummies but the cross section of public you encounter there is sure to have a few dummies.

Plenty

So, I am normally very skeptical about people yelling about bubbles…but I went from working in IT like you to working blue collar, and thus essentially went from being mildly smarter than most of my coworkers to being very obviously the smartest in the room barring infrequent encounters with others like me.

There are folks around me in blue collar work that are very experienced at what they do and wise in that specific niche due to their experience, but in general my overall mental capacity seems quicker and more flexible than most individuals I meet now, which wasn’t showcased nearly as much when I was with other nerds in IT.

So yes, you’re in a bubble. I had also been in a bubble for many years and had forgotten WHY I had fled to IT and nerd shit, and got a pretty pointed reminder.

Yes, I have visited the United States of America, thank you for asking

I work in mental health and I’ve definitely met patients who have low IQ scores. However, even without getting into clinically significant low IQ ranges, I can virtually guarantee you that you’ve met people who have sub-100 IQs. 100 is the average human IQ score. You haven’t gone through life this far without meeting people who fall a few points below it, just as you haven’t failed to meet people who score above it. A person with a 95 IQ is not going to be able to be distinguished from a person with a score of 105 by someone who doesn’t have substantial training in assessing IQ (and even then, most experts would have to formally test people to detect subtle differences like that).

In my experience I have come across people who presented as “stupid.” I have worked with rotating casts of temps at a couple of jobs - the “stupid” people are just as common in management as in the temps.

Usually I think it is because they are not present in their moment/don’t care about what is happening, so they aren’t really stupid but are just… vacant. Once you get them talking about a project they are actually passionate about, you can see the light of their intellect. Some folks however really do have a hard time understanding the world through logic, even when they are really trying.

I’m not sure I understand the question.

The definition of dumb is very elastic.

There is one summer student who came to work at my software company. He was in a very specialized and elite program at a top-flight Canadian university. Both his parents were professors at this university.

One day he came to our boss, and said that his family always went to Europe for 2 weeks in the summer, and he needed time off. My boss explained that he had been hired because we wanted to do a special project during the summer, and it would be very difficult to not have him on the team for a significant part of it.

My boss asked the student when the vacation was going to start. The student replied, “tomorrow”.

At first, my boss was angry, but then realized that the student actually had no understanding that this was an unusual and onerous request. That’s about the time I started learning about autism (and later realized that I was somewhere on the spectrum as well, just not as far along it).

If you haven’t met a dumb person, you are the dumb person.

Yes, but I’m of the general opinion that people are usually willfully dumb. If you have passion and drive, I think you’ll more likely than not have some level of strong intelligence.