how to not be stupid

stupidity is not (just) an IQ issue

I once saw a tweet that said “Stupid people can’t tell the difference between people trying to sound smart and people who are actually smart.”

I’ve noticed that people who find it hard to learn new things and are humble about it do get a fair bit of patience and understanding. What’s really annoying is when someone is confidently, stubbornly stupid.

I know more than one high IQ person who is habitually stupid in this way. They’re good at learning new things (that is effectively what fluid intelligence is) but they’re very bad at knowing when they’ve learned a new thing. They’ll speak about a topic with an enormous authority that impresses laypeople while putting off any real experts that are listening in.

Stupidity is a shortcoming that rarely gets any sympathy. In today’s world, intelligence is the foremost currency of human worth. You can find people encouraging positivity around every variety of bad luck, from physical beauty to mental health, but society seems content to denigrate stupidity as inherently, irredeemably shitty.

The thing is, no one is excluded from Dunning Kruger syndrome. It’s very easy to feel like you understand something, and it takes a LOT of effort to avoid referencing concepts or jargon incorrectly.

David Dunning himself puts it bluntly:

“If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent… The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”

So then how do you avoid being stupid? Here are five ways to make sure you’re not the idiot in the room: