The Ironic Truth About Stupid People | Hacker News Reader

The Ironic Truth About Stupid People

kikabink.com

68 pointsannajohnson38 comments

Open articleView on HN

What comes to mind is Occam Razor.

Thinking that Sarah is stupid is not the simplest explanation.

Couple of reasons:

1) Sarah got into university

2) Sarah finished university

3) Sarah pass approximately 32 course at university

4) Sarah maintained a high enough average to be select to work in the corporation she is in now.

5) Sarah was chosen as the expert in her field

There is only two things that point to Sarah being stupid:

1) Copying others' work and thinking that a simple change of font is sufficient enough to mask it.

2) What your mother said.

As you would have noted, evidence for Sarah being smart can't simply be explained away. It would require a few professors and classmate helping her out. It would require someone botching the interview and the selection of an expert. This isn't the simplest explanation.

If we assume Sarah is smart, why did she make such a glaring mistake and why does your mom said what she said? A possible reason why Sarah did what she did was because she didn't want to do it again. I assume the effort that Sarah placed into copying and the conversation with Michelle was not more than 30mins.

People who do a good job are normally rewarded with more of the same work. So, instead of 30mins of work, Sarah might have ended up putting 300hours of work into something that will most certainly not yield a high payoff for her. So, in this case it might be best if she pretended that she is stupid, which would basically fast track her career by months if she was to working on stuff with high payoff instead.

But, you could tell Sarah's boss about her incompetence. No you wouldn't; the easiest thing is to ask for another expert. Even if you did, she can simply say she was going to write legal a letter that it might be in the best interest of the company to purchase the copyrights of these paper, instead of having a highly qualified person wasting time and money on something that might essentially be fruitless.

Sometimes it might not be in your best interest to appearing competent all the time. Appearing competent all the time is akin to a greedy algorithm which might not be the optimal solution to achieving your end goal.

In terms of the author's mom, maybe she is right but it doesn't apply here.

In summary, the simplest explanation is that Sarah is smart, but for whatever reason she chose to appear incompetent in this scenario; I have outline such a scenario above. If Sarah is stupid it would require, more than likely, over a dozen people willfully assisting Sarah's incompetence, but if she is smart it just requires her to play dumb for 30mins.

This is not to prove comprehensively that Sarah is smart but really to show that other simpler explanations exist. If I was Michelle, a lot of alarms will be going off in my mind, and I would not simply dismiss it as she is stupid.

Good alternative explanation. I did plead ignorance sometime when was asked about some issues that I know well to avoid doing the work. People say, "so you work in IT. I have this problem at my home computer..."

I had a t-shirt for that.

If it's done on the job, I call it competency modulation.

Also called "strategic incompetence".

In my experience labelling someone as smart, just because he/she finished college and got a job, is a mistake or a bad assumption. I have plenty of ex-classmates who ware A students trough high school and college, but they fail miserably at anything that requires thinking, common sense, or coming to conclusions on your own. They ware just good at learning things from books, remembering them word by word but not understanding a thing they just "learned".

Same experience here. I know a lot of people that are not even good at learning word by word but somehow manage to go through university

I can add my experience for jobs too: most of the times people get jobs because employers do not bother to verify if they are good or not. This has sadly happened in half the companies I've been. Where I'm working now there are a couple of persons working as developers that don't know how to program and don't even have a background in programming or computer science just because the two non technical founders did not bother to have some technical guy at the interviews to verify the candidates.

Same here. I knew people who memorized their way through their mid-term and final exams, but couldn't explain any of what they'd memorized.

That applied to some of the professors also -- one even put a question on a mid-term for biochemistry asking for the rate of a reaction at equilibrium (no joke). When questioned about this, the TA proctoring the test simply didn't understand what was wrong with the question.

My chemistry is extremely rusty, but I thought that even if the reaction was at equilibrium, there is still a rate of reaction--it's just that the forward and backward reaction rates are the same, so there's no net change.

(anyone with a better knowledge of chemistry please correct me if I'm wrong)

The rate of the reaction would be the net, which is by definition 0 at equilibrium, as you described. So the answer SHOULD have been 0, but to be a question worth putting on a mid-term for biochemistry, the question should have specified starting concentrations of the various components (reagents and products) in the solution.

More to the point though, the person who wrote the exam didn't understand why the equilibrium part mattered...

The reverse is also true, some (not all) people think others are intelligent like them (or close to).

This is optimistic thinking. It never ends well.

Funny, cute, or sad, but http://notironic.com/

I often have a terrible time figuring out whether someone is being dishonest or is just stupid. Take buying a car at a dealership, refinancing your house, or anything else involving a lower-level salesman. They make absurd statements which benefit their cause if I believe them.

Last week, I was talking to a mortgage salesman affiliated with my financial advisor (who I think is pretty smart). The mortgages rates offered are about 0.25% lower with a "point" (percentage of loan amount) paid up-front. One can compute the approximate () length of time the loan must be held for this to be a good deal. This guy, without any knowledge of how long I expected to stay in my home, said, "I never put people into points....you gotta pay all that money up front, you know?"

Was he being dishonest? I don't think his commission varied much depending on which product he sold me, and he seemed legitimately interested in forming a longer-term relationship rather than making a sale that day. When I mentioned that the point of indifference was probably around two and a half years and that I planned to stay in the house, he backed off of his claim.

I suspect he was just not .too sharp but perhaps realized that, when confronted with too many confusing mortgage choices, many people would just choose irrationally not to refinance. If someone chooses to buy nothing, he gets no commission. Maybe he was smart enough to want to reduce the number of choices for me to consider. And, when confronted with the need to cough up a percent of their homes' values, many people might back out of deals, so he decided to eliminate choices which might not pan out in his favor.

I have taken the adage "Never presume malevolence for what can be explained by stupidity." to heart and try to react in such situations with the presumption of stupidity. It's really hard though when I can't figure out how someone could actually believe the things he's saying. After all, shouldn't someone who spends his days selling mortgages understand the trade-off of paying a point down up-front for a lower rate?

() I don't know how the average person figures out which mortgage product is best. I have to put together a complicated NPV spreadsheet when deciding such things. And, even then, I'm not properly accounting for the interest rate options implicit in the products.

HN uses the asterisk to style text. Ideally, the parser would be smart enough to know you wouldn't be trying to italicize three paragraphs at a time, but as you can see, it isn't.

Hopefully you will check back within the edit window, in time to correct the mistake.

Most people don't enjoy hearing all of the factors involved in things they don't particularly care about. If they want to buy a computer, they'd much rather hear a recommendation (eg: Apple) or a very simple metric (eg: get >= 4GB of RAM) than how RAM, CPU, etc affect overall performance.

Hence, nowadays I give simple recommendations which work well on average. It's just easier - they don't get frustrated at me for lengthy explanations, and I don't get frustrated at them for not caring. But I'll definitely elaborate if they seem interested.

This is incredibly condescending and to be honest, you're not that intelligent if you have to resort to the faceless ridiculing of someone in a public forum.

I had to work with plagiarism first-hand at a first-class graduate school. You would think the caliber of talent for such a prestigious university would weed out disingenuous individuals, but the truth is that plagiarism is a cultural phenomenon. Just type in "plagiarism china" into Google to find out how students are being raised to copy work and rewarded for their efforts. Then they come to learn over in America in a culture where its frowned upon, and you see them with the same confused expressions when they correct their work. Not to say that what China is doing as a country is right, but you can't simply state that people are stupid.

It really isn't held as a major sin by the general public in the US. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/b... http://www.slate.com/id/2198597/

Totally agree. What is the point of this article? To have a laugh at the "airhead" that didn't understand what plagiarism was? This article reads like a chain email for "darwin awards" to me.

Agreed. Clearly the author isn't that intelligent - as he/she doesn't understand what irony means.

To me going to university isn't the surprise. But that Sarah was apparently picked as the subject matter area expert for this topic.

This leads me to think that maybe there was some confusion going on. Is it possible that Sarah actually wrote the source article and thought that her seminal work in the field would be good background information?

And then failed to use that as a (rather good) defense? That strikes me as a stretch.

Without the author of the post being Sarah or Michelle, and given the problems I have with it... it's hard for me to tell what really happened.

Unfortunately abusing someone is not always a question of "intelligence".

A lot of con-men are not especially intelligent, they just know how to exploit one's weakness. And we all have our weaknesses, and no amount of intelligence can shield them enough.

Funny story nonetheless.

I think this is more related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, where incompetent people are very confident in their competence (inversely, competent people are not confident).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

This is a little off topic but I was a little taken aback at the elitist attitude regarding University graduates. Look at these quotes:

"Rather shocked that someone who had, in fact, gone to university and was working for a major corporation, considered it okay to blatantly copy someone else’s article"

"I don’t know which I found more appalling: that someone had made it through university and into a major corporation believing it was acceptable to plagiarize"

What about "going to University" imbues someone with automatic moral virtue? Does this person believe the unwashed masses think it's absolutely acceptable to plagiarize? While the elite University students are somehow above that?

Maybe I'm just over sensitive as someone who didn't go to college but it really bugged me.

The idea is not that those who haven't gone to university don't know better, but that going through university (which is assumed to have and take seriously an academic integrity policy) would teach them (even though many would already know better). To say that something is typically true of members of a group does not mean that it is typically not true of non-members.

Yes, this. There isn't really a single avenue of study at University you can choose where you shouldn't encounter this. Unless you can make it through a degree without writing a single paper. The idea that you can plagiarize anything in any context at all is basically anathema in almost all academic circles. Not that it doesn't happen, but most people that even attempt it are smart enough to do more than change the font size to hide it.

I did a BSC in Computer Science at University. About half my class failed our first ever programming assignment because of plagiarism. Loads of people had just shared the code between them, character for character. There were a few cases where they even left the original authors name in the comments at the top of the code.

Instances of plagiarism dropped after that. At least they learned how to change variables, function names, comments and whitespace enough to get around the automated plagiarism detection tool.

Summary and analysis of a topic based on reference materials is a prerequisite for any academic research, hence University students are given this kind of exercise all the time.

Any University graduate should have learned that cut+paste = failing grade.

It's not that non-university students are immoral or stupid. The article says nothing of the sort. Plagiarism is a basic lesson of university students on day one. You're being too sensitive.

The unsaid connection the author is making is that universities have honor codes that get drilled into you from freshman year. Those honor codes have very specific definitions of plagiarism, usually with examples. Only an idiot, lazy, or jackoff university student would plagiarize word-for-word thinking that a font change is good enough. That makes the university student 100x "stupid-er" than a non-university student that figured out what plagiarism is through intuition. :)

edit: slight wording changes.

As someone who did go to college, every class in which we had to write papers stressed strongly the concept of academic integrity, and that plagiarism was unacceptable. I've seen people fail classes because they didn't properly cite their sources, etc.

Nothing to do with morals, so relax. It's just the fact that you cannot make it through college without hearing at least once that you cannot copy other people's work.

Where I went to university, plagiarism would result in suspension or expelling, not just failing the class. There were always a few cases a year, and that info was always published so everyone at the university got to know when it happened. I went to an engineering university so the amount of papers to write was pretty light, but even if you managed to avoid courses with it, you couldn't avoid the news about it. It was just very strongly drilled into everyone that plagiarising is something you Do Not Do.

Does this person believe the unwashed masses think it's absolutely acceptable to plagiarize?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraposition

when someone claims "if A then B", they don't necessarily mean "if not A, then not B" :)

As others have noted, the point was not that university graduates are, by definition, smart or morally virtuous - merely that university courses require you to submit papers, do written exams, etc where it's made very clear that copying someone else's work is not acceptable.

Keep in mind that everyone is a Dilbert at something....

Not irony (not even the pseudo-irony that has become the norm).

This reads like one of those "feel smart by setting up a strawman" things that, ironically (yuk yuk), "stupid" people resort to.

I disagree. Basically it's saying that it's the stupid ones who underestimate the intelligence of people they try to cheat. The sort of incongruity that irony is made of. If, say, only the worst martial artists picked fights with strangers, that would also be ironic.

I don't think she was being devious, I think she thought she had done the right thing.

For some interpretations of "thought" and "right" only.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com