alt Hacker News>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.
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> poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education.
What does this mean? That they're able to scratch through existence on a minimum wage salary (or whatever) may be "quite smart" or it may be "meager survival". I don't think there's any inherent connection to anything, here, and it feels hand-wavy.
They're not the divider, but they are unsurprisingly correlates.
A vlogger I sometimes follow has generated many fascinating stories for me. They were getting by driving for instacart for a period, and they would do stuff like get home at the end of the day and... order instacart. They then proceed to say how they tip their driver well because they know how much it sucks to not be tipped. I honestly was confused about how these ecosystems even have a large enough market of rich people to be viable until I saw this; it did not cross my mind that poor people used it.
Or they got a small inheritance and went out and bought 2 brand new cars on finance. Basically never drove one of them. A year later and one of them has been repossessed, and they're complaining that their landlord is taking too long to change a smoke alarm battery, and that they can't afford to go buy a stool to change it themselves.
As far as I can tell, most of the luxury fashion industry exists to sell to people who can't afford to buy it. Like no rich person is spending $5k on an ostentatious bag covered in LV logos. But poor people do, thinking it will make them look rich (they have no idea that rich people know this, but I suppose if other poor people don't, maybe it works).
If you don't think stupid people exist, you are in a fortunate bubble. It can feel like you're an alien studying humanity watching some of the things they do. It's often baffling, and they have no idea when they do something stupid, so they don't try to hide it. Some people will instantly squander any way out of their situation, and then complain about it. It's like the parable of the drowning man.
> poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education
Care to elaborate?