dumb people do exist
just hear me out 🤓
the phrase “everyone is intelligent in their own way” functions as a social sedative.
i don’t believe everyone is intelligent.
this isn’t me being an elitist, though, so hear me out.
stupidity isn’t necessarily low cognitive capacity. i’ve observed it to be a pattern of refusal.
refusal to revise beliefs when faced with evidence, refusal to listen except to reload talking points, or a refusal to notice contradictions between what someone says, believes, and does.
a smart person can act stupidly. a tired person can be ignorant. a traumatized person can be wrong. these are all states. i’m describing stupidity as someone’s inherent disposition where learning is treated as a threat.
we all have dumb moments, but stupid people defend the error as their identity with a stubborn unwillingness to learn. stress, fear, pressure, and grief all shrink cognition. it’s only human. what matters is whether the person returns and whether they ask, later, “was i wrong?”
a dumb person never returns. contradiction is fuel, while evidence against their claims are just attacks. one tends to feel pretty hopeless when talking to these kinds of people - it’s like talking to a brick wall that has been placed in the middle of a high-traffic street.
truly stupid people are actually quite rare, but social media, outrage cycles, and performative certainty amplify them. a small number of epistemically irresponsible people can distort discourse far beyond their actual proportion.
it’s why we end up with political superfans that can’t list off a single promised policy. :)
i do believe most people are intelligent in their own way, but i don’t believe that this statement holds to every single person. refusing to name stupidity doesn’t make us kinder. it’s important to avoid boxing intelligence into one metric, but claiming that everyone is intelligent just makes us careless.
when we flatten all failure into “different kinds of intelligence,” we lose the ability to defend truth, competence, and responsibility. we excuse people who should be challenged.
there’s compassion in patience, yes. there’s also compassion in boundaries. calling someone stupid for how they engage with reality, not for what they know, is a boundary. intelligence begins the moment a person becomes willing to return.
today’s drops 🔍️
solo founders application closes in 5 hours
analyst internship @ td (summer 2027)
apply to the 2-month regen fellowship for technical builders