this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
468 points (85.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35801 readers
1316 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

To clarify here, I don't feel like I'm significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying "facts."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

There's an old proverb I like about this: a person is smart but people are dumb.

People en masse tend to be dumber than they are apart. I think you're comparing yourself to the faceless masses. It's much more humbling to try comparing yourself to someone you respect (but don't do it as a "I'm not as good as them" thing, only do it as a "goals to maybe achieve one day" thing to avoid accidentally trashing your self esteem)

Side note: old proverb here means I think my dad said it once but I have no idea where it actually came from

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Tommy Lee Jones says this in Men in Black, no idea if it was coined before that though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I choose to believe Agent K came up with it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

"The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its dumbest member divided by the number of mobsters." (attributed to Terry Pratchett)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

None of us is as dumb as all of us.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

a person is smart but people are dumb.

Whoever says that pretty much qualifies as dumb in my book.

Collective deision-making is superior.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It depends. Group psychology like mass delusion is well known. Collective decision making works in specific circumstances where the majority have some idea about what the problem is.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Collective decision making works in specific circumstances where the majority have some idea about what the problem is.

So you're saying that the only obstacle to effective collective decision-making is the withholdiing of relevant information?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think you meant "the ability to learn" because you're not getting better answers from groups of non-physicists about the geometries of black holes than from individual experts regardless of how much information you give them

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago

individual experts

Sooooo... are you suggesting that individual physicists would be better off working in isolation? That must be what you are suggesting... since nothing that I have said suggested anything about groups of people making collective decisions about matters that are completely arbitrary.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Just linking to an article about collective decision making isn't really that helpful without quoting the article for your points.

So that article you posted talks about animal behavior, and that an economic view on collective decision making is a good approach for animal behavior.

As motivated in the Introduction, our review has focused primarily on an economic view on collective decision-making. The economic view is a staple of behavioural ecology, and motivates the tools of optimal decision theory for the study of animal behaviour.

Nowhere did they make the conclusion that collecting decision making is superior, especially in the context of humans.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago

especially in the context of humans.

Were you not aware that humans are animals?