What Do Stupid People Talk About?

I think Newlyweds will help you more than The Simple Life here, though, because of its candid slice-of-life approach to stupid.

Then they talk about how they won the Lottery.

that's my dad! though he's not an idiot.

So stupid people would talk about all the things other people do, except without ... um, the meat of smart.

29/06/2004
15:19
Re:

what a pile of gob shite. I so wanna be a critic or reviewer, then I could spend my days spouting off my own particular brand of opinionated gob shite.

as I have said, time and time again, and tirelessly say once more............why listen to the opinions of others when we all have our own..................and that is not going to change by hearing somebody else's - nor is yours gonna change somebody elses either!!!!

IP: 64.236.228.41

Nick

29/06/2004
15:29
So what you're saying then...

Is that ALL communication is pointless and no one ever grows, develops or changes?

Nice.

IP: 144.173.6.74

Karim

29/06/2004
16:00
Usually

The people who learn nothing from others' opinions are those whose matter least.

IP: 81.136.229.131

edo

29/06/2004
16:12
Re:

seriously, what does that even mean.

IP: 130.159.248.44

Nick

29/06/2004
16:15
I'll use big letters...

IF YOU NEVER PAY ATTENTION TO THE OPINIONS OF OTHERS, THEN YOUR OWN OPINION IS PROBABLY WORTHLESS.

IP: 144.173.6.74

Karim

29/06/2004
16:22
Granted

I missed out the word "opinions", but you know, it wasn't too hard to work out for anyone with the ability to read.

IP: 81.136.229.131

Nick

29/06/2004
16:25
YEAH KARIM BUT...

WHY READ OTHER PEOPLE'S POSTS WHEN YOU CAN JUST READ YOUR OWN, AFTER ALL YOUR POST ISN'T GOING TO AFFECT MY POST AND NEITHER IS MINE GOING TO AFFECT YOURS, EH, WHAT WHAT, THAT MARGARET THATCHER, WONDERFUL LADY, NO SUCH THING AS SOCIETY, EH, WHAT WHAT, ONLY INDIVIDUALS, ARE YOU A SHED SEVEN FAN, EDO, ARE YOU GOOOOOOOOING FOOOOOR GOOOOOOOOOOOLD?

IP: 144.173.6.74

Nick

29/06/2004
16:31
HEY EDO...

WHY BOTHER LISTENING TO SOMEONE ELSE'S SONGS, EH, CAN'T YOU WRITE YOUR OWN, YOU'RE NEVER GOING TO ENJOY SOMEONE ELSE'S SONGS AND NO ONE ELSE IS EVER GOING TO ENJOY YOUR SONGS SO YOU MIGHT AS WELL LIVE IN A CAVE EH, WHAT WHAT, THAT NIETZSCHE, NICE BLOKE EH, WHAT WHAT.

IP: 144.173.6.74

[No Name]

29/06/2004
16:37
Re:

Ok - so if you take what i said literally to the point that you have taken it to, i admit it does sound foolish - and even in writing it, I could see how what I said could be misconstrued - but my point is, people should think for themselves and have their own opinions, and the opinions of others shouldn't be used to justify their own. Why should a particular review of embrace be used to justify your own opinions which you've formulated yourself. There's no point - the whole point is that they're your opinions, your thoughts, no one elses, and as long as that is the case they don't need to be justified by the opinions of others.

If you want to listen to other peoples thoughts, maybe even agree with them, or if you so choose, take them as your own, then that's up to you, but my point is that we can all think for ourselves and we can all formulate our own opinions without the aid or help of others.

IP: 64.236.228.41

Karim

29/06/2004
16:43
Well duh

...of course we can, but if no-one clashed or agreed or loved or hated then there'd basically be no point in anything. Ever. Interaction is healthy, you know? Discussion and debate are the breeding grounds of creativity.

IP: 81.136.229.131

Nick

29/06/2004
16:43
THAT HELEN KELLER...

FUCKING MAGIC, COULDN'T SEE OR HEAR OR SPEAK OR ANYTHING BUT SHE STILL MANAGED TO GIVE BIRTH TO A DUCK.

In the following exchange, I appear as Martin. I've no idea who any of the other people are. (My brother, Darren, had posted earlier in the responses, tho he is not the Darren who posts here. This is just the tail end of the comments for the entry before I locked them.)

---------------------------------------

aimee is amazin

Posted by me at May 20, 2004 06:11 AM

jen n aimee run the show!!!!

Posted by the 2 of us!! at May 20, 2004 06:12 AM

HEY DARREN ITS AIMEE N JEN!! lol a showd aimee this after m/s n u can add things :-D mwuahahahah lol.
darren smells :-P

aimee n jen o.a.m!!!

Posted by aimee n jen at May 20, 2004 06:41 AM

OMGWTF!!1 U R ALL GAY K THX CYA!!!!1

Posted by martin at May 20, 2004 08:10 PM

no rely that wud jus b u

Posted by jen n aimee at May 21, 2004 12:48 PM

Apparently irony is lost on you folks. I think it's especially funny that you've been finding this comments page by doing a google search on "darren is so cool" when you probably don't even know who the Darren is who posted here. I don't even think you have any idea that this page is part of another site.

Take a hike, fuckers.

Posted by martin at May 21, 2004 01:43 PM

fuk u martin!! hey hey jen n ami!! wot yaz up 2?? soz a neva replyied a woz away wotchin a film! lol not as bad as uz :P!!!! lol ko
cya l8a
memba 2 keep ritin :P

Posted by darren at May 21, 2004 02:18 PM

fuk u u big gimp n a half!!
who cares if we found it that way. at least we'r not sad enuf 2 sit out n wurk out why ur on it. get a life n stop gettin wide 2 ppl u dont no!

anyway hey darren :-D lol nuthin much u? lol no bother :-P tok 2 u soon xxxxx

Posted by jen at May 21, 2004 02:46 PM

lol gimp n a half wot an insult jen :P u must be such a cool guy! ^o) ur prob bout 30 or summit livin wif ur maw. ya stupit prik!!!
so newayz jen.. samez reely. wb

Posted by darren at May 21, 2004 02:49 PM

"apparently irony is lost on you folks"
lol haha ur such a fukin sak!! lol a cant stop lafin at u hahaha

Posted by darren at May 21, 2004 02:52 PM

The reason I was able to work out how you got here is because it's my site... I can see it in the log file.

I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't use the comments on this site to send your friends semi-literate notes. As such, I think I'll turn off comments on this thread. Use the extra time to learn how to spell you fucktards.

Posted by martin at May 21, 2004 03:05 PM

"Hey, Charlie, you old son of a bitch, you trainwreck of a cunt, you gimp and a half, how's the wife and kids?"

This is a serious sociological inquiry on my part as well. I really want to know how the fuck AOL-speak happened.

I don't live wif my maw, but I'll be damned if it wasn't a dead on guess that I was bout 30 or summit. I'll be 30 in August! ya stupit prik!!!

Whatever.

For fuck's sake, it's just like art lessons! You gotta learn the fucking form before you can really do a good job of fucking with it for effect!

yeah benito yr right, there is a point where all this 'everyone has their thing' stuff breaks down and ppl are just straight fucking DUMM.

I'll bet they talk about Robert Bly and "Fire in the Belly"...

Mostly for each other via email or instant messaging, but I have seen it bleed into academic writing in a lot of instances. More than once I've seen a kid write a paper that includes an emoticon or spells "your" or "you're" "y-r" in more than one place.

Ditto writing. More people write now on a regular basis than ever have, not just by a little but by a lot. It's only recently that writing has been part of casual language use, and it's really, really easy to overlook what that means, especially for people who would have been inclined to write regularly even if they'd been born 50 years earlier. Writing is becoming part of genuine, natural, native language, rather than a formalized register.

All the tics of spoken language come into it as a result -- not in specifics, but in spirit.

I will campaign to have this phrase turned into a metaphor of indeterminate meaning.

Sadly, it almost makes me feel a bit like a writing bigot, as I'm probably in the group who'd have written had I been born in the 20s instead of the 70s. Part of writing de-formalizing bugs the hell out of me.

Also, damn your tacos. I am starving and must take cats to the vet after work. Hopefully I will be able to snag something to eat very quickly while grabbing up the cats at home.

It bugs me too, like I said -- that's the thing, I hope I sound more explanatory than like an apologist. For three years I worked as a writing tutor primarily with semi-literate college kids -- I just had to get to where it could bother me without horrifying me, or it would've been a worse job than it already was. (Ultimately, I quit anyway.)

The other way I look at it is, if it bugs me too much now ... what the hell am I going to feel in fifty years? Whether he sounds alien to me or not, I don't want to be unable to understand a 20 year old, however much older than him I am.

(xpost; please do not name stupid people "Get Taco Bell.")

I cannot do this, as my stomach would not be happy with me after the fact. (This is an observed behavior that I don't really want to test ever again.) If I did choose to risk it at the Bell again, I'd be pretty limited just like I am at most fast food places since I don't eat red meat.

Dammit, Aaron kinda beat me to it. I was gonna say "George W. Bush" to answer RJG's question.

crossposts

Tep, I don't know why I didn't notice right off of the bat, but I called it "AOL-speak" even though I was referring to writing. Curiouser and curiouser...

Tep, I don't know why I didn't notice right off of the bat, but I called it "AOL-speak" even though I was referring to writing. Curiouser and curiouser...

Weird. I didn't notice that either. It's not like it's just you ... "-speak" as a synonym for "language," I guess, but it's not like we were talking about people actually saying "Ell Oh Ell."

Benito, I assume those girls were from Delaware (i.e. from another state with no sales tax, i take it) and don't really venture too far from their state. Now... I can understand people in Oregon not leaving their state too often as it is a fairly large state compared to the east coast... people never leaving Delaware seems slightly more odd to me.

(although don't most business establishments in states with sales taxes bordering on those with no sales tax offer to slash the sales tax for them provided they show their ID from that state? They do here in Washington. Most people who shop at the one IKEA here just south of Seattle come from Oregon, make an entire day of it with their kids -- therefore making this IKEA particularly painful to shop at, but that's another thread -- and show their license, and get the rather high sales tax off their purchases)

I'd say there's a relationship between the two, going back and forth, but it might be easier to discuss them the way the author seems to want to if we divided them up into more than just the oral/written dichotomy. The fact that the languages being used change completely over his timeline there isn't mentioned, and that's not something I'd be willing to gloss over in talking about how communication changes.

what you have, hold.

im so much faith and hope within me.

lets keep walking on, ill meet you on the other side.

(5 s | dying wish)
[28 Jun 2004|06:03am]
"look!- i've got no-thing, no single thing"- tom wingfield in glass menagerie.

im alone now. left with nothing but a broked heart and hope.

(dying wish)
get ready@ [27 Jun 2004|05:25pm]
im getitgn my hair cut on july 22! i rule! on july 10th im gonan orgasm whiel i boogie with my granny!

(dying wish)
[27 Jun 2004|04:10pm]
my brandon boo is in liek so many of the byd pics on rttp! !!

Aimurchie, if that ISN'T a real conversation, I'll be severely disappointed. (But then I'll wonder why you haven't published a book yet or something.)

yes, except for the colon. Surely a sign of literacy.

Escaped my notice until now. I wasn't even paying attention to the fact they were supposed to be blondes!

I've always imagined it was from Orwell's newspeak.

Everyone's a writer. Now consider the proportion of those words written in AOL or txt shorthand... that's got to be a sizeable proportion of words written in the English language that AREN'T in the English language as The Queen would understand it (or maybe she would, who knows [hey Chuck meet me 4 a drnk l8r k thx bye]??) or as it's detailed in dictionaries, grammar-guides, etcetera. That's a pretty big fucking seizmic shift in the way we communicate, and it's basically all happened in the last 6-8 years.

I seem to remember Mark C starting a thread about 'stupid people' some time ago and being vilified for it; is this (thread) the same but acceptable?

Anyway I am being pedantic I will shut up now!

http://www.cooltechzone.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=277&Itemid=0

http://www.mywisecounty.com/news/062804-3.htm

These are professional writers retained by US publications, and they don't know how to tell a story or how the language works.

I'd say that although Jess might feel he's meeting a wider range of people because he's working in a record store, that's still a restricted group of people: it's within the set of all people who care about culture of some sort, for instance. For encounters with real 'stupidity' he's not ideally placed even there.

If I want to see what *really* stupid people are up to, I just use this (potentially nsfw).

"OMG that person is stupid!" is just "wow, you do things differently to me". Having said that I do despair at abbreviated AOLspeak but not in itself (I love the deconstruction of language so in itself I dont mind it), but the lack of individual thought behind a lot of what I read worries me. I dunno. What are we but the sum of what we read anyway?

(4 s | dying wish)
[14 Jun 2004|02:02am]
:( van!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ma, they is pickin' on me!

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-war-on-stupid-people/485618/?utm_source=atlfb

what would ilx do without stupid people to make fun of? probably die!

Many people who have benefited from the current system like to tell themselves that they’re working hard to help the unintelligent become intelligent. This is a marvelous goal, and decades of research have shown that it’s achievable through two approaches: dramatically reducing poverty, and getting young children who are at risk of poor academic performance into intensive early-education programs. The strength of the link between poverty and struggling in school is as close to ironclad as social science gets. Still, there’s little point in discussing alleviating poverty as a solution, because our government and society are not seriously considering any initiatives capable of making a significant dent in the numbers or conditions of the poor.

That's a wrap then

I don't disagree with much in that piece but it's kind of all over the place

Also kinda ironic to write that during the Trump administration, and while the POTUS's supporters are the most popular subjects for field reporting in the history of journalism

trump would be the backlash. the 21st century version of shooting everyone who wears glasses.

yeah, it is all over the place. and people have always made fun of dumb people in this country (it's the bedrock of the comedy tradition here!) and sherlock holmes has been pretty popular for awhile...

but it is true that the tyranny of the test rules the land now. if you suck at tests you are often sunk.

As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

When America was great?

"Check his teeth."

Idk where to start with this exactly but the article does at least help explain why academics with PhDs are thriving across the continent. Oh, wait.

I agree with what seems to be the article's thesis. (Not going to read it via #solidarity.) From adolescence on, I've only ever run in crowds that valued intelligence -- especially when manifested as savviness or sophistication -- and demonized stupidity. It kind of makes sense there would eventually be a backlash against the self-appointed cognitive elite -- been brewing for some time.

I don't really know what people expected to happen. Reduced opportunity + a meritocratic nationalist ethos that scorns failure = seething anger and resentment among the losers, insecurity and neuroticism among the winners

I feel like the 'backlash' has been going on as long as I can remember? Making fun of smart people was surely as much of an 80s/90s comedy staple as making fun of dumb people, if not more? American conservatives railing against the academic elite didn't begin with Trump.

Yeah very true, but in the past that anger was harnessed to elect politicians who still presented themselves as members of the professional/managerial class. Trump is defiantly crude by contrast.

Even with Big Bang Theory, I'll freely admit that I stopped watching after the first few seasons, and can believe that the characters grew more sympathetic because they had to, but I did not get the impression that, like, Sheldon Cooper is a cool guy who all the kids want to be. And Sherlock Holmes is an addict and a sociopath, especially in Cumberbatch's portrayal! xp

I read the headline and was all where do I sign up? Imagine my disappointment

Politics in the USA has been predominantly anti-intellectual since the Jacksonian revolution asserted the ascendance of the common man. England has a fairly strong anti-intellectual tradition among the working class and we inherited it. See also: Anti-intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter.

Yeah, I've no doubt that there are cultures that glorify pure academic aptitude and achievement over qualities like athleticism, physical beauty, entrepreneurship, business acumen, or even hard work, but I'm not convinced that America is one of them.

nobody self-identifies as "stupid", though. it's easy and convenient to declare war on a label that nobody identifies with.

What has self identification got to do with it

unsurprisingly, the author lives in Boston

I mean that to say I felt like the piece does come from a perspective that strikes me as particularly DC or Boston in nature, because that's where the scholastic-achievement-obsessed "meritocracy" seems most concentrated and self-obsessed

The ambition for power infects every walk of life, including business owners, the clergy, academics, and the common clay. They all think their undeniable merits deserve to be ascendant.

also this guy seems to have a schtick & it's not a good one

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-h-freedman/

The War on Stupid People

How Junk Food Can End Obesity

The Perfected Self

What's Eating the Small, Loud Band of Alt-Med Critics?

Evidence, Not Anecdotes

Placebo or Not, These Treatments Work

The Triumph of New-Age Medicine

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

Clickbait fail. Best practice is for headlines needs to begin with a number, like "12 Baffling Reasons for The Triumph of New-Age Medicine (#7 will amaze you)" or "Five Things that Are Eating the Small, Loud Band of Alt-Med Critics (You Won't Believe Number #3)."

needs

i work with someone like this and she always starts conversaions like, "do you like burger king or wendy's?" listening to her talk makes me feel dumber by the minute

The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along

Shhh! I think you mean "family background" and "appearance".

you can tell the smart people from stupid people because they are always talking about how stupid other people are

so people live in different environments, and have access to different levels of education. people in general are differently-cognitive. assuming that some of these people have correct brains and everyone else is a hopeless case that all you can do is point at and feel superior to. this seems self-gratifying and not really helpful, they had an opportunity to educate and they used it to belittle someone instead. clearly if you are more educated about a subject you should offer that information up in the hopes of informing the stupid person who was not lucky enough to have born with your cognitive privilege. there is a genetic and geographic privilege that comes with being smart. the smarter-than-thou attitude is a symptom of a larger issue that has plagued all of western civilization, the demonizing of the mentally disabled.

ahem, mentally disadvantaged

thanks for the new dn though

in answer to the thread question, and h/t to Morbs

... the president’s chief of staff said the White House is actively considering a change to libel laws affecting news reporting.

“I think it’s something that we’ve looked at,” said Reince Priebus, appearing on ABC’s This Week. “How that gets executed and whether that goes anywhere is a different story.”

so they're actually moles for BRITAIN!!!

stupid people go on dating sites and call themselves "sapiosexual"

Itt ppl complaining that there is a word for stupid rather than discussing what stupid ppl discuss

Hrm yeah so I have a son with what is currently called an "intellectual disability." In other times he might have been called retarded, or simple, or slow. Of course I love him to pieces, but a lot of what he says and does is - shall we say - not smart.

While other children in our social circle are getting voluminously praised for their ability to play Rachmaninoff / do differential calculus / hit a triple / win a chess game / design world-changing solar panels / etc., we have to manufacture these microscopic relative victories like "he put on his own socks today" or "he didn't spill his apple juice much" or "he followed two-step directions three times out of five."

I bring this up NOT to shame those who mock stupidity. I'm not going to claim that stupidity is just a different and totally equal way of being in the world. Nor will I contend that we should add "stupid" to the list of protected classes. Nor that stupid is the new gay (or whatever). But it's nuanced. For me.

I'm also fully aware that there are some people whose ideas and utterances and actions are, well, stupid. One of them currently has an extremely important job. And I don't think that individual should be let off the hook. Nobody made him apply for that job, and lots of his caregivers could have said "You know what? I respect his autonomy but I don't think this job is the best idea for him right now."

Stupid people have inherent human dignity, which should be respected. There are jobs we should not entrust them with. I'm happy that my local grocery store employs some people with disabilities as baggers, for example, but I am not sure I would want them as eye surgeons.

i don't know if the internet is completely to blame, but the dehumanizing vitriol i see and hear does seem a bit different now than from what i remember in the past. a lot is class-based obviously. but i don't remember so much hate. dumb hicks and rubes and hillbillies (dismissive and condescending for sure) are now garbage people or disgusting walmart zombies or whatever and i might have thought this was funny and cathartic when george carlin did it but most people aren't george carlin. and i never actually believed that he hated everyone. brainy people used to revere (in a heavy-handed and maudlin way at times) the working class and poor and now i mostly see disgust. before trump too. way before the election. not simple snobbery or dismissal (a la meryl and mixed martial arts). disgust and hate.

so it FEELS different now. but maybe its not.

mostly, i just think that empathy is underrated. i understand frustration. but hate is so strong and damaging. unless you're watching that dumb guy on all the zombie shows who starts ranting and getting all loud and everyone is telling him to shut up or the zombies will hear him and you just want him to die already. then hate is okay in that moment.

russia

scott otm

I honestly have no idea what scott is talking about but I don't do the fb or whatever

I've been reading Thomas Frank's latest book today and there's a lot in there seems to be trashing the assumptions of technocracy & meritocracy.

Rick Perlstein's "Outsmarted" also seems relevant.

Didn't we all read Twilight of the Elites

I've sampled Twilight of the Idols, does that work?

yeah right like i would read one of those stupid twilight books

clearly if you are more educated about a subject you should offer that information up in the hopes of informing the stupid person who was not lucky enough to have born with your cognitive privilege.

hate to break it to you dude, but ...

The new hatred for the rubes is easy to explain and entirely justified: last year the rubes made it very clear that they were not just stupid, but stupid and irredeemably malicious.

Also, "they" appear to hate "us" (using both pronouns extremely loosely) so returning the favor is pretty natural.

I think there's a distinction to be made between people who are undereducated or who aren't, like, book smart and the people who are willfully ignorant or have (or don't exercise) critical thinking skills. A lot of the people I'd classify as 'stupid' are often more educated people who maintain steadfast self-righteousness wrt the most ridiculous or insane ideas. Like the people with college degrees who get sucked into fringe-y right wing radio and viral FB bullshit, y'know? They're the real fuckin' dummies.

That's called "evil", and I really think it needs to be called out as such more often.

I'm of a divided mind about that. It drove me nuts when W. used to sling that word around with impunity, and I'm not completely sold on it as a concept, but there sure are a lot of people out there who resemble that remark.

right, why are we back to the assumption that trump support is somehow a matter of "intelligence"? trump has next to zero support among minorities, and as such there's no reason to believe that trump support doesn't involve either overt racism or depraved indifference to racism. both of which, i think, can safely be described as "evil".

FWIW, to the extent that I'm comfortable branding anyone as evil, anyone seeking to perpetuate or strengthen white supremacy certainly fits the bill.

oh hey another trump thread

I ain't gonna explicitly drag that motherfucker into the discussion, but he's kinda the elephant in the room. Who We Talk About When We Talk About Stupid People.

mostly, i just think that empathy is underrated. i understand frustration. but hate is so strong and damaging. unless you're watching that dumb guy on all the zombie shows who starts ranting and getting all loud and everyone is telling him to shut up or the zombies will hear him and you just want him to die already. then hate is okay in that moment.

― scott seward, Sunday, April 30, 2017 10:21 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, I don't know, maybe what I'm really aiming for when I rant about how people need more empathy I'm really looking for something more in the line of ethics?

and not "ethics" of legislators enforcing their own morality through laws or questioning whether science is right, but the ethics of acknowledging we live in a system of overlapping communities and that doing things for the common good, and recognizing a social contract instead of twisting yourself into knots trying to justify why you deserve more than the next guy is a waste of energy

whether that's racism, sexism, or some sort of "intelligence" bias, it's a bad look to act like you're superior. most people have strengths, some more than others, but no man is an island

yelling guy in the zombie shows really does have it coming, though

The Orange Individual inserted himself into the discussion - grabbed it by its pussy, if you will - by surfing to world-shaping power on a wave of explicitly anti-elite politics. Those elites who think they're so smart are actually dumb poopyheads, etc.

The appeal is hella racist too; that should never be diminished or forgotten, but it is aggressively anti-intellectual as well.

Hey fellas hey did you know that professionals built the Titanic and amateurs built the Ark?

we were having a perfectly good discussion about fascism and some dumb motherfucker had to bring up hitler

the ethics of acknowledging we live in a system of overlapping communities and that doing things for the common good, and recognizing a social contract instead of twisting yourself into knots trying to justify why you deserve more than the next guy is a waste of energy

Not just a waste of energy, I think, but actively corrosive to the concept of a civilization. The companion of 'deserving' (which is a word/concept I increasingly loathe) being blame and scapegoating of the Other (e.g. those who clearly don't deserve whatever it is that I clearly deserve), which seems to be a favored tool of the stupid.

btw what stupid people talk about is what scenes in movies mean.. but not the actual twists or mysteries, but really obvious scenes that aren't meant to be multivalent

overhearing people who, between both of them in a conversation, can't figure out the basic plot of a hollywood film is mind blowing

But that kind of thing happens on ilx all the time. Check out the game of thrones threads

yeah but I can see how that would confuse people - you get one chance a week to reconcile dozens of characters across a bunch of different locations, none of which are well-anchored to internally consistent geography or logic or even passage of time

True but even still (omitting the more understandable examples) many times I was amazed at what people were having trouble with.

in medieval times the most learned men, Latin scholars, proponents of secular science and free speech, the original Humanists, spent a lot of time talking about how brilliant they were and how they had everything figured out. Latin was the ultimate in civilization and a secular rationalist pre-Christian philosophy was our only hope and would cure our ills and result in Utopia (made possible by slaves of course). they fetishized it and would stand around in Roman-style gardens drinking wine and reading poetry to each other about how pleasure is all that matters and how brilliant and elegant the Latin language is while their slaves served them. often the slaves did the manual scribe work for them as well, a fact we know about because the Humanists were constantly writing letters to each other, complaining about the quality of the works they sent to have copied. most of the Humanists worked for the Catholic Church, as Latin was a valuable skill, and they worked writing Papal Bulls and the legal language that justified the church & state sponsored Inquisition. during that time the most brilliant and idealistic minds enabled horrible things in the same of personal comfort, and the Latin/Humanism fixation was the intellectual opiate of choice. when they retired they lived tax free and put all their energy into their Humanist club, where they could live the gratifying daydream of a restored long-lost civilization.

I am curious if mh can share an overheard example

"It was called Rocky 3 but I swear I only counted one Rocky."

there are lots of different kinds of intelligence, I've always believed that, and the original article Scott shared was particular to scholastic achievement (and how if you suck at taking tests you're kind of screwed out of a lot of things in our society). also the majority of people just have days sometimes.

Tooootally agree. Testing well is sometimes like a magic trick (like kicking ass in job interviews) which isn't necessarily reflective of much beyond one's ability to perform well on tests.

I wouldn't call it a magic trick insofar as it is a skill that can be learned like any other. I do agree that its value has its limits.

I was a little disappointed that the GRE (the first standardized test I had to take) didn't count for more when it came to US grad school admissions and funding tbh. I kicked ass on that test.

if you suck at taking tests you're kind of screwed out of a lot of things in our society

I would have been fine with that mess of an article if this was all it was saying btw.

I was born being good at standardized tests, as best I can tell, this skill is now worth exactly zero to me, unless I can come up with a racket of fraudulently taking the LSAT on behalf of others or something

my skill at destroying standardized tests got me a significant increase in pay this year because they decided to start using professional certifications as a bar for retention bonuses

If people had equitable access to education -- and equitable access to the kinds of stable homes that enable academic achievement -- this cultural line between the "dumb" working class and the "smart" professional class would vanish. Unskilled jobs wouldn't be stigmatized, the people who worked them wouldn't be "left out" of the relevant conversations of the day, and there would be no reason for rancid right wing anti-elitism to catch on. This social issue, like all others, comes down to the issue of inequality. If you have a society where people see themselves as being in competition with their neighbors, where people are hyperconscious of education as a class signifier, you're going to have an ugly society. Trump and his anti-elitist rhetoric is a symptom of deeper social malaise.

Even though Trump voters were mostly middle class, they were deeply anxious middle class people, paranoid about the coastal types who think they're better than them, more than willing to buy into racism and other forms of sublimated ressentiment to salve their frail egos. Fuck them for being weak enough to turn to hate but still, their unkindness is reflective of a deeper sort of unkindness that's embedded in how our society is structured.

There are not multiple intelligences. Here's one review, though I'm certain there are better sources: http://ocw.metu.edu.tr/pluginfile.php/9276/mod_resource/content/1/s15326985ep4104_1.pdf

"lots of different kinds of intelligence" is not a reference to MI theory

good paper though that was fun and actually pretty well written too

I don't understand the distinction, but I posted that contra the canard that standardized tests only reflect test-taking ability, which is absolutely incorrect. https://research.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/publications/2012/7/misc2009-1-high-stakes-testing-higher-ed-employment.pdf

"It was called Rocky 3 but I swear I only counted one Rocky."

I went to see Kenneth Branagh in Henry V, but I didn't understand much because I hadn't seen the first four movies.

There are not multiple intelligences.

It would be much more accurate to say that the Multiple Intelligence theory advanced by Gardner is not testable and has never been validated by experimental data. As a popular framework for thinking about why different people seem to excel at some types of tasks where intelligence is required while doing poorly in other areas requiring intelligence, it has some practical utility.

It's pretty damned obvious that current IQ tests leave much to be desired. There seem to be many important ways in which they have poor predictive power.

moving the goalposts

it might be more accurate to say there are different degrees of inclination and ability that allow people to achieve different degrees of mastery in different fields and skills but the idea that there's one big generalized intelligence that is universally applicable is obviously not the case

sorry, I've had a LOT of coffee and no lunch

he idea that there's one big generalized intelligence that is universally applicable is obviously not the case

that's not obvious at all!

Don't you know anyone who, like, had a hard time learning basic academic skills but excels in other areas like music or sports?

as one of the smartest 2% of people in my generation, according to the ACT, PSAT, SAT, ASVAB, and DLAB, I disagree

May I adduce the entire membership of Mensa as Exhibit A?

Don't you know anyone who, like, had a hard time learning basic academic skills but excels in other areas like music or sports?

I'm no psychologist but I'm not sure that "people are observed to have different strengths" necessarily proves that human intelligence is not more generalizable/universalizable than one might think.

I mean I think we're talking past each other because there's a definition of Intelligence in pedagogical settings that's a capacity to learn, reason, etc and then there's a more generalized, broader "small i" definition that includes abilities and affinities both less specific and more discrete than "Intelligence," the latter is what most of us are thinking of -yes no?

OK, well, I was definitely thinking of the first kind.

I guess "universally applicable" gives a lot of wiggle room, but the positive manifold holds (on average) across a shockingly large set of domains!

musical ability (can't find full text sorry): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886989901736

reaction time and height too. I can find refs for those if you want, or you can find them yourself

It seems much more useful to think of intelligence as a potential rather than as an ability. How, or if, a potential will be realized can not be predicted from the fact of its existence. There are too many contingencies. Which is why you see so many stupid smart people.

the problem with generalized intelligence is that some people are saddled with horrible personalities

Not to mention lower rates of mental illness, positive associations with what are thought of as the "positive" valences of personality traits (lower neuroticism, higher conscientiousness, etc). I can find refs after work if y'all are interested

xpost!

(I say all this as a lazy, very neurotic, guy of below average height

I'm pretty much on Tombot's side here. For another example, I fully believe that different people have different ways of learning, BUT at the same time I don't buy into the 'learning styles' theory that is often espoused as a pedagogical certainty. I don't buy into it one little bit. There's a significant gap between the first belief and the structural frame that's created to support the second.

The original thread, though. *smh*

xp I was going to say, I think some of those traits are masked by higher critical thinking skills and ability to succeed within academic norms. If you can do well in standardized testing, it's also an indicator you've adapted well to the learning/testing framework and your aptitude continues to be challenged and gauged along the same lines in adulthood

That is to say, part of intelligence is the ability to mask your atypical mental state or develop coping mechanisms

yeah totally. smart people are better at being "high functioning" for longer

To the extent that saying 'there exists only one variety of intelligence' is true, it's also an overly-prescriptive way of valuing one particular set of facilities over a number of 'lesser' facilities that arguably have their own (often contextual) utility. AKA drop a book-larnin' sumbitch in any number of situations where book-larnin' ain't so highly prized and see how well he fares.

"And yet it moves", I guess.

yeah totally. smart people are better at being "high functioning" for longer

― your cognitive privilege (El Tomboto), Monday, May 1, 2017 11:21 AM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk I feel like everyone I know who I think is smart has a mood disorder

When Zeno's Paradox was explained to Diogenes, he got up, walked around a bit and said, "It is solved by walking." So, who was smarter, Zeno or Diogenes?

When Bishop Berkeley's theory of immaterialism was explained to Samuel Johnson, he angrily pounded his walking stick on the cobbles and said, "I refute it thus!" So who was smarter, Berkeley or Johnson?

And do stupid people talk about these questions? (<- staying on topic)

Based on the first anecdote, Zeno def sounds smarter than Diogenes.

And is being stupid a permanent existential state or merely a transitory one?

i don't like making fun of dumb ppl who lacked educational/nutritional opportunities but i think dumb, incurious ppl from the upper class should be fair game

i do save my ire for people who had the tools/opportunities to know better.

talking to a well-educated new age woman from my area once and i told her where i lived and and i asked her if she ever went there and she wrinkled her nose and said no and i asked why and she said because there aren't any "good" people there. i couldn't get home fast enough. that's the kinda dumb that makes me see red.

I think Yiddish is far richer in distinguishing and naming categories of people with personal character flaws and intellectual shortcomings than English. The whole idea of lumping together all "stupid people" is insultingly gross in its breadth and generality, while the differences between a putz, a shlemiel, and a shmo are worthy of close study.

Dan I:
I want to know more about where the g factor fails and how. Thinking about when the military recruitment station had to decide on whether high scorers got the nuclear engineering test or the foreign language aptitude test, I would hypothesize that the overlap of people who would score high on both is pretty limited. You do meet people in the Navy who went from one school to the other because they did well on both tests but didn't pan out in training.

idk I feel like everyone I know who I think is smart has a mood disorder

― softie (silby), Monday, May 1, 2017 1:39 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel like part of this is also the luxury of introspection and class? There are practical issues where, if you're working your ass off doing manual labor you're not going to have the time or resources to seek out a diagnosis -- you're just pushing through. Likewise with very driven, monetarily successful people who we view as less intelligent but are quick to assume fall into a narcissistic personality type -- narcissists aren't going to seek out a diagnosis because they think they're right.

So if you have both the time and interest in figuring out your own shit, you're more likely to have a diagnosis. People without the time or curiosity are only going to find these things out if they have an actual need for treatment in order to cope.

I mean, both of my parents are incredibly anxious and/or depressed people and it led to some really weird dynamics but without media explaining these things and with the social stigma of mental illness or even therapy, you just assume this is how most people are because it seems normal

Don't you know anyone who, like, had a hard time learning basic giving a shit about academic skills but excels in other areas like music or sports?

I wasn't talking about people like that.

Tombot, says here that Navy line scores for different specialties are based on different subsets of the subscales of the ASVAB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Aptitude_Battery

Doesn't the recruit have some say in all this? Presumably if you did well enough on the ASVAB you could do whatever you want, although obviously you'd know better than I

ohh, I see, they're administered separately.

Wait, no they're not. I dunno man

I always kind of wondered how I'd do on the ASVAB but I never wanted to take it because I had no interest in fielding calls from pesky recruiter types

ASVAB subscores are almost certainly highly correlated with each other, just like with every other standardized test.

In practice, I'm guessing a lot of the time recruits who score well across the board are railroaded (Shanghai'd?) into whichever area the recruiter needs to get his own recruitment stats up for.

My high school made us take the ASVAB, and because I grew up a military dependent and was also a total rebel, I didn't want any part of it and didn't take it at all seriously and apparently still did well enough to get calls from pesky recruiter types.

they always need infantry, man

Sorry about hijacking the thread. I had to leave academia because of the impossibility of finding a tenure-track position (too stupid, I guess), but individual differences psychology was, like, my thing. so I get all excited when it comes up in conversation.

Presumably g factor fails when The World rewards things other than performance! For example, success in the upper echelons of the business world depends as much or more on height (!) than on IQ (although, again, they're correlated).

infantry, riflemen, and unrated seamen are a dime a dozen, though. Percentagewise you're probably more likely to be physically unfit than mentally unfit for those jobs.

the ASVAB is given all at once. the nuke test and the DLAB are only given if you score well enough on the ASVAB as Dan notes. And he guessed correct about the recruiter's practice of ensuring that they allocate the high scorers according to their own incentives, i.e. cash money for linguists. once you score above a certain number the variety job codes you can go into shrinks dramatically, unless you REALLY REALLY want to start your career by winning an argument with an NCO (also note, the NCO has all the time in the world, you're the one looking for a crazy low-paying job).

I went to see Kenneth Branagh in Henry V, but I didn't understand much because I hadn't seen the first four movies.

― okey-dokey, gnocchi (Ye Mad Puffin)

even worse they did that stupid "harry potter" thing where they split the fourth movie up into two parts. totally unnecessary!

i don't like making fun of dumb ppl who lacked educational/nutritional opportunities but i think dumb, incurious ppl from the upper class should be fair game

― Mordy, Monday, 1 May 2017 18:51 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i do save my ire for people who had the tools/opportunities to know better.

― scott seward, Monday, 1 May 2017 18:54 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cop out. no quarter for morons of any class.

I didn't say I don't do it just I don't like it

I had to take the ASVAB in high school and remember the really "smart" kid (who was taking college math classes) being irate that I scored signficantly better than he did because he had zero exposure to or knowledge about mechanics, electronics, etc. He just couldn't understand how any of that worked and why it mattered as he was so used to book learnin' over practical things.

I did get called all the time by recruiters for the next year and a half; I'd tell them I was a pacifist, that I was missing a foot, that I was gay, and so on to hear them getting confused or angry.

i saw the first film in the henry prequel trilogy and boy they really went in a totally different direction with it

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYjA2NTY4YjMtNWViOC00MDgxLWI0ZTItYTk5MDJjODNjNzVmXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQxNzMzNDI@._V1_UY1200_CR88,0,630,1200_AL_.jpg

I pissed off my best friend who was in college math & physics because I did one point better on the ACT

All but like one of my best friends in HS were AP Calculus & Physics types. I was AP everything else but.

sameish

A couple of years ago the guy who was co-Section Leader of the trombones in our marching band got appointed as our new Assistant Secretary. Now he's in a sinecure at one of the TBTF banks. Anyway, when I saw him, I reminded him that I was the better trombone player. He had to acknowledge it was true.

I was in some trial group where they had kids in, I think it was middle school, take the ACT or SAT and I remember doing pretty well on it then

Yeah, I took the SAT when I was like 12 and did pretty well. Wound up graduating high school with something like a 1.6 GPA - they basically pushed me out the door.

Word!

My GPA was exactly the median of my graduating class

I hated doing math because it required practice to understand, and I took any inability to immediately grasp a subject as a personal failing. Stopped taking accelerated math classes after my sophomore year of high school after doing mediocre in calculus, completely lost most of my practical math skills by my senior year. Probably affected my test scores on college entry shit, but whatever. Still graduated high school as a valedictorian (we had weighted classes and anyone with a GPA over 4.0 was a valedictorian so we had five or six of them, lol).

smart kids talk about their test scores

jjj and I took the PSAT when were were like 13-14 and scored the 2nd- and 3rd-highest scores in our school district

Yeah but then only one of you got into Harvard

trying too delete my post. mods help

I hated doing math because it required practice to understand, and I took any inability to immediately grasp a subject as a personal failing.

This + it bothered me that people I didn't think were very smart would get good grades just because they fucking studied. I remember bitching that, yeh, I could get A's too if I ~studied~. I had the idea that homework points were kind of BS and the most honest grades came from tests you barely prepared for.

like why are we congratulating people for getting points on things when they didn't have to try hard? i just showed up and filled out some bubbles in the way i was trained to

i blew the fucking lid of the GREs man

*off

it reflects nothing

I graduated from HS with a 3.8 GPA and scored a 1330 on the SAT, then -- because of factors having nothing to do with "intelligence" as it appears to be being discussed -- flunked out of college with a 1.8 my sophomore year. There are lots of factors standardized tests can't take into account, obvs.

(btw I did go back and finish my BA)

This was already a bad thread. Now it is a bad dick-waving competition thread.

"I SCORED TEN BILLION ON ALL THE TESTS (tests mean nothing btw but I'm still going to go on for hours about it)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiMHTK15Pik

I'm smart and not stupid

I have all the points and still regularly shit the bed

I think those of us talking about our test scores we're doing two things

1. Hmblbrggn because of course
2. Anecdotally registering why we disagree with the universality of spearman's g

xp good point emily; i wish i didn't mention my gre scores.

tbh, i think doing well on those tests is a learnable thing. i tutored kids for the SATs and sometimes their scores would go up. more pertinently, i think that by tutoring kids for the SATs i was basically studying for the GREs, because i did way better on them than i did on the SATs back when i was a high school student, and got the worst score out of all my friends.

i don't believe in unintelligent people tbh. some people are better at certain types of reasoning or whatever but the human mind is the most complex thing in the universe and we barely understand it. we just take everything in the world for granted because we are always comparing things.

I misread GRE as GED and was thinking, wow, Treeship must have an interesting story to go with that, I figured he finished out traditional high school

I'm sure you've got some other interesting stories

(tests mean nothing btw but I'm still going to go on for hours about it)

lol, I misread this as "going to go on all fours about it" and thought god I love UK slang

lol nice anecdata u nerds

i am not a nerd i hate nerds

i'm pretty sure someone called you a nerd in a bar just last thursday

A search on threads titles from ILE that include the word "intelligence" produces a list of threads containing some interesting past discussions. And some less so.

I know there's at least a couple of threads lurking in ILX's archives where large numbers of personal IQs and SAT scores are flung about. Not sure how best to unearth them, as IQ is too short a search term. Hmmmm. Maybe I could substitute "gabbneb" and see what turns up.

I am stupid for spending half an hour reading this thread revive.

Article deliberately obtuse for clicks and now I have given it an extra click

Test scores - are those scores a much bigger deal in US? I don't think I remember any scores I had in school/university (except the degree) as once you have your first or maybe second job do people really still care?

imo intelligence is a thing but in many cases squandered bc intelligent ppl just use it as a substitute for effort

http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html

posted? Cosma Shalizi Wittgenstein's ladders g.

2. Anecdotally registering why we disagree with the universality of spearman's g

― your cognitive privilege (El Tomboto)

the spearman is mightier than the tank

I think Shalizi is awesome, but I do think he's pulling an RA Fisher / tobacco, which is to say that he's prob wrong, but is such a genius that he's capable of presenting an argument that matches his own ideology but is difficult to assail despite being false.

"But" "but" "but" forgive me, I'm three drinks in the bag and posting from my phone

And who can blame him, so many of the people who discuss individual differences in intelligence online are racist pieces of shit. Fuck them, but also g is real and strongly influenced by genetics . Shrug emoji

thx for that CS post

I graduated from HS with a 3.8 GPA and scored a 1330 on the SAT, then -- because of factors having nothing to do with "intelligence" as it appears to be being discussed -- flunked out of college with a 1.8 my sophomore year. There are lots of factors standardized tests can't take into account, obvs.

1330 is a fairly mediocre score, is it not?

Is it? (Or was it in 1987?) I have no idea.

(googles)

It appears the mean SAT scores in 1986-87 were 507 on the "critical reading" section and 501 on the math. (524/514 for white students.) My scores (checks) were 640 and 690. So above the mean, whether it's "mediocre" or not would I guess require knowing percentiles for that year. Which I'm not remotely interested in looking up.

1330, pssh, I did better than that when I took it in middle school :P
(for a gifted program like mh described upthread)

... but it's also worth noting that my parents bought me an SAT test prep book and made me work at it every weekend. I think the best I did on any of the graded practice tests that I took beforehand was a 12something, which shot up to a 1480 on the real thing, and then a 1600 when I took it again in high school. That was enough to earn me a full scholarship to university, which I immediately lost due to poor study habits and general slackassedness; now, ten years later, I'm still trying to finish my bachelor's degree. I spent many of those years viciously reacting againstn and tearing myself down, believing that my so-called 'intelligence' was less-than-worthless since it had failed to secure my happiness or my livelihood -- assuming said intelligence even existed at all, and wasn't just an illusory product of structural factors like class and race.

Weirdly, as I learned from recent conversations with my mom, a lot of the difficulties I ended up experiencing had been predicted in a special session my parents were invited to (after the test I scored 1480 on) about exceptionally bright children whose emotional development lags behind their cognitive abilities.

either way, one 'counterexample' can't prove or disprove anything. at best these theories claim to explain one third of variation in outcomes (graduating from college, in Phil's case), Phil just got pwnd by the other two thirds of senseless chaotic variation

the point C Shalizi was making is specifically about drawing causal inference from principal components/factors (with a heavy dollop of the elite statistician's scorn for dirty social scientists) he says himself it doesn't disprove the existence of general intelligence (if I tell you your clock is broken and your clock reads 12, I'm not telling you it's not 12)

the best proof that we all believe in "intelligence" writ large of some form is to close this thread and open a politics thread. it's impossible to call Donald Trump an idiot without the concept of a non-idiot. you really want to give up the ability to flippantly call people idiots on a message board?

xp ... and I'm still not smart enough to do things like type all that out and delete it before clicking "submit post"

xp lol I got pwnd because I am lazy and, as you said upthread, tried to coast without expending effort

same ;-)

but also, because i was hopelessly Internet-addicted and discovered ilx at age 17 >:(

"hey hey jen n ami!! wot yaz up 2?? soz a neva replyied a woz away wotchin a film! lol not as bad as uz :P!!!! lol ko"

I am over a decade late to share the following startling sociological insight, but in the early 00s I was friends on IRC with someone who typed like this all the time, and I confess I thought he was not exactly stupid as he was interesting to talk to and a good & imaginative musician, but "differently smart" perhaps

then he became the editor of a respectable-ish national magazine and it turned out that all along he could in fact spell and form coherent, concise grammatical sentences better than the verbose drivel like what I am currently spattering over the internets

to answer the thread question more directly, I am way less clever than all my acquaintances and I like not talking whenever I can get away with it lest people find out (also overcompensating with archaic words like "lest")

1330 is a fairly mediocre score, is it not?

7 short from being elite

i did pass irish and didnt have to attend classes, got a b2

honours: physics, economics, english, french, maths, history

wrote a really good essay for the english higher in particular

is this right is this what we're doing itt

1330, pssh, I did better than that when I took it in middle school :P
(for a gifted program like mh described upthread)

... but it's also worth noting that my parents bought me an SAT test prep book and made me work at it every weekend. I think the best I did on any of the graded practice tests that I took beforehand was a 12something, which shot up to a 1480 on the real thing, and then a 1600 when I took it again in high school. That was enough to earn me a full scholarship to university, which I immediately lost due to poor study habits and general slackassedness; now, ten years later, I'm still trying to finish my bachelor's degree. I spent many of those years viciously reacting againstn and tearing myself down, believing that my so-called 'intelligence' was less-than-worthless since it had failed to secure my happiness or my livelihood -- assuming said intelligence even existed at all, and wasn't just an illusory product of structural factors like class and race.

Weirdly, as I learned from recent conversations with my mom, a lot of the difficulties I ended up experiencing had been predicted in a special session my parents were invited to (after the test I scored 1480 on) about exceptionally bright children whose emotional development lags behind their cognitive abilities.

― bernard snowy

wanna take a break from test-score dick-measuring to say that my experience was similar (though my sat score wasn't anywhere close to 1600) and that all the self-undermining aside you _can_ do this. it took me a long time, but i did finally suck it up, do the work, and got past the hurdle where i freak out and say "fuck it" when things go wrong and sorted out the problems instead.

guys you are discussing your sat scores on the internet

answer to thread title

lol

ha! yeah, its a little too perfect.

but love to all you weirdos.

Every time I click on this thread, I have a flashback to freshman year of college.

thread is an episode of Saved By the Bell

I haven't read much through this thread yet because I can only imagine that it is bad and terrible, but every time it comes up to the top of sna I think:

https://vimeo.com/6306434

It is hard in this world to distinguish oneself. One grasps at whatever distinctions offer themselves, even if it is as trivial as having attained a perfect SAT score amid the general wreckage of your life.

When I feel like crying I start laughing, thinking 'bout...glory days.

Did so well on the SATs
Glory days
Now I drink to stop the DTs
Glory days
Glory days

I failed to mention my actual weighted GPA on the four point scale

it was 50

A teacher told my best friend in high school that he'd never amount to anything. My AP English teacher made a big deal at some school-wide senior awards convocation that people should watch out for my name because she expected big things. My friend went on to do SFX in Hollywood and is probably the most successful person from my graduating class. My English teacher didn't even recognize me at my brother's graduation a few years later, and I lost both of my hands in a threshing accident. Nothing means anything, man.

oh yeah that year I started to really flail in math class from not doing homework (and having what was probably the onset of my anxiety problems really starting to dig in), my mom practically cried after the instructor explained at conferences that I was doomed to life failure or something

I mean, just because I was in advanced math or whatever doesn't mean I'd automatically pick up study skills or understand why my comprehension was lagging. At the time I figured I was just a big fuck-up, but really there are a million things he could have done, from regularly collecting homework (he did it the day after the test) to actually talking to me

I'm gonna live forever, baby remember my name

Click on my post history to find out!

would be a good first post. damn.

the principal of my high school told me once that if i didn't watch out i might end up like my brother.

did the principal murder your brother

nah, he just meant being a loser living in my parent's barn with no electricity and driving a gremlin. i mean i did kinda end up like my brother but fuck that guy and his tough love.

I got ketchup on my SATs

are you sure that wasn't blood from when you stuck two pencils up your nose and tried to commit suicide

no, it was ketchup

why was there ketchup up your nose

wait. the scantron, or the exam book? which part of the test got the condiments?

scantron? cripes! when I took these tests it was always "use a number two pencil to completely fill in the circle next to the correct answer", unless, of course, it was the incorrect answer. what the hell is a scantron and can I see one in use in Tron: The Movie?

Oh same thing. The scantron was the machine that needed you to completely fill in the bubble so it could rapidly determine your "g factor" and predict your life

thenthe scantron was that devise which was wholly devoted to and adoring of number two pencil graphite. it had no eyes for any other substance, such as ketchup, which caused it to revulse with disgust and dock you precious "g factor" points.

have you ever used a scantron machine? it sounds like a machine gun.

my understanding is that machine guns are more Scranton than scantron.

why am I feeling dizzy, i think i need to lie d

ah dizziness. smart people don't get that.

FAQs

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41CulmIRDnL.jpg