alt Hacker News"If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole." -Raylan Givens, Justified
I believe the same applies to stupid. Yes, you will occasionally run into stupid people (or as the OP states "people being stupid"). But if it happens more often than not, look in the mirror.
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This is a strong anti-signal for me. When you work for someone who thinks every other team / counterparty we interact with is stupid / we could do their jobs / blah blah blah.. hugely demotivating behavior.
This line of thinking is common but it’s only a self serving implicit bias.
Yes, everyone around you could very well be more stupid or the bigger asshole. This is a perception issue void of evidence either way. The people most prone to poor perception analysis are those least capable of perceiving, which is the foundation of Dunning-Kruger.
For everyone else there are things like measures and accomplishments.
I like Nassim Taleb's take - the Intellectual Yet Idiot.
While not wrong, this quote assumes a healthy self-regulating society that isn't being actively driven off a cliff by algorithms optimizing everything for short-term benefits.
Meaning that it might actually be that the assholes one runs into all day are in fact assholes.
Even more so when we consider that one during a normal day does not run into a representative sample of society, but tiny tiny bubbles. We made sure to atomize everyone into that and separate the social classes from each other.
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We can of course not expect our quotes like that to serialize all the assumed preconditions into their writing, but we should remember that those exist when replicating them.
there are plenty of places in the world in which most people are assholes about some particular thing.
For example if you are a young black man or a gay person living in Utah you might encounter pretty much assholes all day, depending on what you are trying to do that day and depending on if you are unlucky. If you are a good Mormon person in Utah you will probably meet nothing but good people when you go out, even if you meet people who are not good Mormons.
If you are living in Denmark and taking care of a severely autistic child of about 6 years old with learning disabilities, if you meet nothing but unknown Danes during the day you are probably meeting nothing but assholes.
This really clever quote, like most really clever quotes, is somewhat insulting when it reaches its limitations.