alt Hacker News> ...but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
This is a reasonable assumption if you've spent your life in places where the average person is well-educated, but, if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated. Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
I do think there's a distinction to be made between "stupid" and "uneducated" but in terms of how you experience interactions, it's a distinction without a difference.
Replies
>if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated.
poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education.
these attributes are not the divider between smart and stupid.
> it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated
But being poor or uneducated is not an innate property of a person. Everyone can become poor or rich, educated or uneducated at any time.
> Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
That's exactly something where I think "Smart people don't think others are stupid" applies. Just because people don't vote in ways that would follow your logic means they are dumb. They maybe have different priorities, incentives or moral than you.
I actually was thinking on the following example, from my personal life: I have two masters, however I was doing summer jobs in my local town, as handyman, and was humbled very quickly.
The others colleagues all stopped school very early, got the same irrational political views that the ones you mentioned, etc.
However, they were beating us totally, students coming from fancy universities, for everything else related to machinery, gardening, repair, etc... Even on new problems, they were able to quickly make these logical connections, that we would miss.