Don't wanna feel like stupid people

[andrewducker]

I've spent the last week and a half feeling stupid. Literally.

I've been able to have most conversations on auto-pilot, but any kind of original or systematic thought has gone out of the window. I've had a a discussion with Heron regarding communism where I knew there were things I was missing, but I just couldn't see what. I've had discussions about abortion and couldn't see where I was going wrong. I staggered to the bathroom last night wondering if stupid people felt this way all the time, or if stupid people can't tell that they're stupid and so don't notice.

It certainly gives you a lot of empathy for people who tell you that "X is dull" or "I don't read" or "I avoid politics" because for the last week I've lived on a diet of cartoons and staring into the distance while dribbling slightly. Anything more complex than Samurai Jack left me feeling lost, confused and wanting to crawl back under the duvet. If that's how most people feel when they encounter politics/philosophy/science no wonder the majority of people have no interest in them.

Today I've solved 3 problems that I'd been completely unable to solve since last Wednesday and I feel more alive than I have since Adam cruelly infected me.

I still don't feel entirely up to scratch (hopefully by the weekend - as it is my coughing stopped me getting more than 6 hours sleep last night), but I do feel like life is worth living again.

Comments

[spaj.livejournal.com]

1) Ha ha, I made you ill!!! your misery makes my misery seem better.

2) Samurai Jack is very complicated... there is nothing more complicated than Jack... Except why it's not spelled jaques...

3) I'm not stupid.

4) I'm not!

5) I just don't vote because my votes have no effect on the runnig of the UK. They effect NI, and NI = shit & full of morons.

Adam

[andrewducker]

You don't get a vote in National Elections?

It's worth voting in the scottish elections because we have pseudo-PR. A system I'd be happy with if the lists were country-wide rather than being broken down into areas.

[spaj.livejournal.com]

None of the major parties run candidates in Northern Ireland, since the Northern Irish parties main policies relate to Northern Ireland. As a result, no one ever votes labour, cons, lib dem etc....

infact, there are very few (if any) labour, cons, lib dem candidates to vote for...

STUPID IRISH POLITICS

Adam

[ex-digitalis869.livejournal.com]

I feel stupid a majority of the time. It's not fun.

I was cursed with just enough intellect to have a grasp of what i'm missing. It sucks great big donkey balls.

[dapperscavenger.livejournal.com]

Plus, why bother learning when there's noone to discuss it with and no way you can change anything. :x

[andrewducker]

There's looooads of people to discuss stuff with - that's what the internet is all about!

And you can change things if you try - you'll notice, for instance, that the world today is not the same as the world in the 1970s....

[dapperscavenger.livejournal.com]

I know, but people on the net are all like 'if you can't quote 15 sources for your last statement I'm going to render it invalid'. All references and no thoughts! Probably been going to the wrong sites.

[andrewducker]

Well, if you're going to be trying to persuade people of vastly different ideologies of anything then you do need an array of facts with you. Chatting to people who feel broadly similar is usually a lot easier :->

[dapperscavenger.livejournal.com]

I guess you'd have to be in some of the discussions I've tried to have. You throw source after source at them, for the simplest of little niggly things, and they still try and worm out of it. A lot of people don't know when to quit. You can't be right all the time. I gave up. It was fustrating and pointless.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I fled from the Extropian mailing list over that - I also got sucked in to (and spat out from) the eternal floating usenet gun debate.

It certainly wore down my interest in arguing about stuff. Believe it or not I argue over things a lot less than I used to.

[tisme.livejournal.com]

Humph

[dapperscavenger.livejournal.com]

*lol* yep, been there! The gun debate, the abortion debate, the puerile 'are men better than women' threads, the genetic modification debate, etc, etc. I got brain-fried.

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

Welcome to my world.
To get any valid work done I have to stare at the problem for 20 minutes as my mind paddles on air before I finally figure out what I have to do. If the problems vaguely hard it takes me days to come to conclusions that are fairly obvious.
Most of the time I can't see stuff the way I'm sure I used to be able to.

[andrewducker]

I'm pretty sure you _are_ smart.

I mean, you're the guy whoe writes the AI for Lionhead, you must be.

I seem to recall you've been published and everything!

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

But nothing is obvious, nothing flows, I feel like thinking is an uphill struggle that my body actively avoids. My ability for recall is rubbish, my attention span non-existent. The actual part of me able to carry out original thought is reasonable but slow beyond slow. Most of the time I don't feel like my neurons fire activation through axons and dendrites, I feel like they fire them through the world's most viscous honey.

Can you be smart _and_ slow.

Maybe I'm that.

[andrewducker]

You could well be. Should I point out that most of the time I let sit in the background for months and percolate before it comes to the surface? That I seem to have things at my fingertips specifically because I immerse myself in as much information as possible so that I've got vast resources to call on when I need to know something? I spend hours every day reading news sites and keeping up to date with what's going on in the tech world so that when people mention the new wave of NVidia graphics cards I can say that they seem to have lost their crown to ATI and despite the fact that they've ostensibly produced a DX9 card for $70, the performance is in fact lower than their older DX8 cards. Or that the US war in Iraq was obviously not about WMD but was in fact the beginning of a process of change for the Middle East to increase democracy so that there aren't poor Arab's furious at the state of their countries flying planes into American buildings.

Apparently it takes 10 years to become an expert in almost any subject - I'm trying to become a semi-experty in as many as I can manage :->

[tisme.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way. *sad*

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

There was actually a study that showed that stupid people are less likely to be aware of their shortcomings than smart people (I don't know how they measured "stupid" and "smart", though), so you can't be that stupid :-)

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

Stupid people don't know they are stupid, they can't. There was some experiment done where people had to predict how well they'd do in a test and the cleverer you were (at this test, so the higher scores), the larger +ve gap between your actual score and your predicted score, and the stupider you were (at this test, so the lower scores) the larger -ve gap between your actual score and your predicted score.

It does confirm that I am right in having given up (based on my own experiences) trying to explain stuff to stupid people.