I don't say this with any malice, but a lot of people are just not that bright. Things that you think are "perplexingly obvious", to the point that you can't conceive of not thinking about them, just aren't to them.
From anecdotal observation, I wouldn’t say intelligence is the deciding factor, but impatience. People don’t pause to evaluate.
I have a friend who lashes out or gives up at mundane life problems (why is this hamburger soggy and how to avoid it) without pondering a solution or cause. Her immediate reaction is to find blame (even if herself), not to consider if and how the issue can be fixed.
But I’m confident she has the ability and intelligence to find solutions, because from what she tells me of her work—including customer and management reviews—she does it in professional settings.
In this situation, I think it’s more that when you really want a burger, Chinese food just isn’t going to cut it. A kinda soggy burger is still better because it’s what you want.
Also note that I'm not claiming that this is simply due to people being dumb. It's just my experience that, in the absence of an explanation for why someone does something "obviously" dumb, it makes more sense to accept that they're dumb than it does to be "perplexed". There's a cultural barrier against communicating openly about differences in intelligence, and it can lead to blindspots if you rely on it too much tk explain people's behavior. But it's my observation that the pendulum has swung so far to one side that many people don't even like to consider that others may be reasoning poorly.
Depends. If the restaurant doesn’t offer delivery, and some third party is charging you to perform delivery services for you, why is the restaurant at fault?
Invariably, the restaurant gets the blame for the failed delivery experience, regardless of whether or not they’re responsible.
As the snickers advert correctly notes: you’re not you when you’re hungry. Reason and rational thought are difficult when blood sugar is low.
Is this absurd? You have to balance it against the service you want, which is having someone drive to an arbitrary burger joint, wait for your order, and then drive it to your door. That's such an inefficient use of someone else's time that I'd expect to pay a lot for it. It's not clear to me that 15-20% is somehow "absurd". I get mild sticker shock on the few occasions I order delivery, but the sticker shock is directed at my own laziness, not price-gouging. Wasn't there an article on HN just yesterday calling these companies "parasites" for screwing investors, drivers, and restaurants, all in the name of delivering unreasonably low consumer prices?
> If you're willing to pay extra money in order to get your desired food while you're busy doing your own work, isn't it reasonable to get mad at the restaurant and the app for handling the food poorly?
Those standards don't extend infinitely. As the original comment I replied to says, some foods don't deliver well. If you get a burger delivered, it's probably not going to be as good as in the restaurant. This isn't just common sense; it's the type of common sense that a sufficiently intelligent person is usually not going to be able to avoid thinking about. As an upthread comment says, it's fine if you want a soggy burger, but expecting it to taste fresh off the grill is almost physically impossible.
The only way for the restaurant to get around this is by leaving items off of their delivery menu. But this would be a terrible idea: if I felt like a delivery burger, I wouldn't want a restuarant deciding for me that it's too low-quality to even be an option.
Fundamentally,the act we're talking about is complaining in a review that a (subsidized) delivered burger tastes like a delivered burger. It seems pretty irreducibly dumb to me.
And it can take almost half a lifetime to realize this
That other people can have so vastly different brains.
Of course there are plenty of people, both bright and dull, who could live comfortably and yet stay mired in debt and distress.
In first grade, I was in the "green" reading group, with just 4 or 5 out of about 30 kids. Nothing was ever said about abilities. I just assumed that the groups were random. I was the best in the green group by far, so it seemed that I was experiencing the other extreme of mental abilities. Late in the year, something inadvertently revealed to me that "green" was the best. To this day, I have no idea how bad the other groups could have been.
I remember being the best in AP Chemistry too. I set the 15-year record for the final exam score, permanently changing the grade scaling for the class by 3 points out of 100. (old scaling would have given me a 103 but that became a 100, and even years later all the grades would be lower by 3 points) That class was about 15 out of 350 students who started as freshmen. There were other students, about 50 out of the 350, who dropped out. I don't have much of an idea of what their science classes might have been like.
Class "adjustment" is usually simpler than you might think. Expect the following differences as the class gets dumber:
- Less material is covered by the instructor.
- There is less of an expectation that any given material will be remembered more than a week after it was covered.
- Hints for questions asked of students in class will be more direct.
- More time is spent on watching movies with themes notionally related to the class, and on playing games (think "chemistry bingo") during class.
Note that all of these are pretty smooth continuous scales; there's lots of room for tuning.
Good point. And they "self segregate" themselves too? If there're two kids, and one is a lot brighter than the other, i think both of them will tend to get frustrated when playing together or deciding what to do -- so they'll find others to play with.
Maybe this a bit applies to emotional intelligence too.
One's whole life, one a bit chooses people with similar "capabilities", without thinking about it?
And then, from time to time, one sees in the newspapers what the vastly different people do, and get surprised: can there really be such people, where are all those people
But during the pandemic I wanted a burger, and getting my car out sucked (yay city living), so I ordered a delivery burger. Immediately after that subpar experience I thought “oh, that’s why ordering delivery burgers isn’t the norm” and went back to ordering noodles and pizza instead.
It’s the leap from “culturally this isn’t a common thing to do (order a delivery burger), so obviously it’s the restaurants fault that my experience wasn’t as good as it would be in store” that I don’t get.
I also don't have any strong opinions about this particular topic, and there could very well be some other explanation. I'm just generally remarking on the common expression of such confusion at other people acting suboptimally; sometimes it's just because most people aren't all that smart or thoughtful.