Do other people ever astonish you with their lack of general knowledge?

[Ohnotanothernamechange]

Just recently I've spoken to a few people who expressed amazement when they disocovered that Chernobyl is a real place. I know that we all have gaps in our knowledge but how the hell you can not know about the Chernobyl disaster? It's a bit like the simpleton on a twitter some years ago who was amazed to discover that the Titanic was a real ship and not figment of James Cameron's imagination....

I remember one time a work colleague was going to Rome and when I told them I'd been they asked me if there was lots of stuff to see and do there. I was like well of course, it's Rome. And they asked me what they were. I then had to list the coliseum, the Trevi Fountain, The Spanish Steps, The Vatican, the countless Roman Ruins etc not to mention the countless designer shops and fabulous restaurants. They genuinely had no idea what was in Rome. I was gobsmacked. This was someone I'd assumed was pretty intelligent as well.

I can't work out if I just know too much, or these people are just really ignorant?

how the hell you can not know about the Chernobyl disaster?

I’d never heard of this event. I’m 28 so I don’t know how old you are OP?

People tend to be knowledgeable on subjects they’re interested in. It doesn’t make them “thick” if those things aren’t the same as yours. Do you know the capital of Azerbaijan? To me someone who couldn’t answer that is more ignorant than someone who doesn’t know about a random historical event.

Quite reassured by this thread as I am always nowhere at general knowledge stuff but do actually know quite a bit of it... I’m not sure how you’re meant to know what’s in Rome if you haven’t been there though.

I’m not sure how you’re meant to know what’s in Rome if you haven’t been there though.

Er, I can think of a few ways.

I know the Golden Gate Bridge is in San Francisco even though I've never been there.

Do people only know things they've experienced first hand?

I’m not sure how you’re meant to know what’s in Rome if you haven’t been there though

I bet if you thought about that for a few minutes you could come up with a few ideas about how to find out what’s in Rome.
Such as google, or the travel guides section of a bookshop.

Plus, OP said that her colleague who didn’t know what was in Rome was going on a trip to Rome.
Personally, I wouldn’t expect everyone to know what there is to see in Rome. Different people have different gaps in their general knowledge and all that.
But if someone had gone to all the bother of organising a holiday there, then yes, I’d expect them to have done a bit of research into Rome’s tourist attractions before they booked anything. It seems a bit odd not to.

I can't remember who said it, or where I saw it, but:
We live in an age where the entirety of human knowledge is at our finger tips and have access to devices that can access this knowledge. Instead, we use these devices to watch videos of cats.

As I do a lot of writing, and, despite the fact I write fiction, my brain just won't allow me to make up things, so I end up researching anything and everything that might come up in one of my stories. I realized I was a lost cause when I was googling about waste disposal and collections in Germany.
I even once wrote an essay on the differences between the venom used by elapids and vipers just because it interested me. I don't expect other people to know the stuff I research, mainly because it's random.
I did once have to explain to a former colleague what the Large Hadron Collider was, how it worked and what they hoped to achieve. That was fun as I was hopeless at physics in school, but I did manage to give a better explanation than the biomedical scientists around us.
I dod remember one lecture where the lecturer had spent around 10-20 minutes talking about PH and how the amount of hydronium relative to hydroxide could be used to calculate PH (acids have a higher level of hydronium). The lecturer then asked "So, if the substance we are working with has a Ph of 3, what makes it that Ph?" Cue one of the students putting their hand up to say "The Ph?"
There were people studying primate behaviour who had never heard of Dian Fossey, which is something you'd expect them to know.
Somethings it's OK not to know. There's a lot of things I've learned from being a writer that I wish I could forget because, unless I'm ever in those situations, I really don't need to know or remember them.

"How did you find out what's in Rome?"

By reading stuff and having an enquiring mind, like, my whole life.

Seriously, though, my FIL and father both left school aged 14, (I'm old and only one of them is still alive - they never met) and each saw it as a matter of personal pride to keep educating themselves. If they didn't know what something was, they look it up. They were both born into poverty and had flimsy formal education . It was like a fight back against the powers that be to educate and inform themselves. My mum and MIL were better educated but had the same approach.

Obviously there are going to be gaps but it just seems odd to me to avoid finding out about them.

Peoples lives experiences are different.

I play a multiple choice trivial pursuit based game on my phone, I'm good on history, entertainment, arts and not awful on the science stuff,struggle a bit with the geography (a common "question" is you are presented with a cityscape, either one photo or a montage - like those postcards you get showing the city's main landmarks) and I don't recognise the less well known ones eg and I'm hopeless on the sport questions!

Nobody knows everything and being smug about your own knowledge is actually quite arrogant!

"But we all spend more than a decade in full-time education" no there are plenty of people who don't attend school and aren't educated at home.

Chernobyl was meaningful to people of my generation and older, but I wouldn't necessarily expect under 35's to know much about it at all. Because the disaster didn't happen in their living memory time span.

There are events that happened which for my parents generation were huge but which my generation and younger know little if anything about.

Wauden - what do you think a costume drama is?!

"As a Scot, you can't imagine the number of English people who have no idea about how the UK is formed, about the Troubles in NI, that we don't have separate passports, that we used to be separate countries or that we aren't actually ruled by England. I mean, it's literally like 90% of English people I meet." I get what you mean but as a Scot educated mainly in England I understand why. The history and geography I was taught there was very England centric with huge gaps and inaccuracies.

I too was raised if you don't know something go find out. Parents both left school at 15 but well read and politically engaged. We were encouraged to ask, look up in pears or other books at home or look up on next trip to library, if we asked them something and they didn't know they didn't make a big deal of it just "you know I'm not sure, I'll try and find out" sometimes this involved asking their own friends and family because they knew where their knowledge generally lay.

Yes, I'm going to say the B word. It's sickening that people voted in the Brexit referendum and didn't understand its impact on the UK/Ireland border. At all. Not even a little bit. Not even that it was a thing that needed a bit more information. And Dominic Raab apparently didn't realise the importance of Dover.
No, lack of general knowledge doesn't mean lack of intelligence. But belligerently refusing to find out about something that is obviously important DOES.

Simpleton?

"The history and geography I was taught there was very England centric with huge gaps and inaccuracies."

That's fine but then I wish people just wouldn't comment, if they're going to say ignorant shit (eg not believing we have the same passport or speak a variety of dialects etc.)

I’m not sure how you’re meant to know what’s in Rome if you haven’t been there though

how are we meant to know anything about history if we lived through it? cmon...

Do people only know things they've experienced first hand?

No, but they tend to only know things they have a reason to know, be that because they've learnt it at school, experienced it or squirrelled some fact away after hearing it. For example, I have no idea what I might find in Budapest because I've never been there, am not planning on going there, haven't seen it on film and have no wish to google it.

I have one friend who's lack of knowledge astounds me all the time. She is very dim. I'm no genius but I'm not sure how she has made it through life and managed to keep a job.

The lack of general knowledge is exacerbated by a lack of common sense and vice versa.

A recent example is a well thought of, intelligent, mid/late 20's colleague going to Disneyland this year, discussing the tragic loss of the young boy attacked by an alligator at the park a couple of years ago.

I can understand less younger people watched the likes of David Attenbourgh and other natural world programs growing up so have less general knowledge in that area than previous generations, but instead of asking "how do alligators find their way into a park like Disney?", there was a whole conversation around her asking "why did Disney put alligators into their ponds?" and the penny not dropping before someone enlightened her.

I didn’t know that rice was grown until I was 16, I thought it was made like pasta. I also thought until recently that fertiliser bombs were made from manure.
I can tell you all about Ancient Greek medicine, WW1&2 and Star Trek though.

If you haven't been down a rabbithole of link-following on sites like Wikipedia, you haven't lived!

The random crap you find out about can lose you hours, if not days!

(why not set its "random link" as your home page - daily new learnings abound! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random)

@SoupDragon - google "Hungary 1956." I dare you.

Dare me? Don't be ridiculous 🙄

I read an adult's comment that he/she had only just found out that the seasons are reversed in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

I was very surprised to read an American make the comment that he/she was surprised to just find out that Japan and the US fought against each other. Didn't seem to know the term WWII at all. I was surprised because I thought that US schools did a lot of content on their own history.

@okaypedro, I'm not sure if I learned about the famine and the Troubles at school, or through reading several books based in Ireland? But, I do have a general working knowledge of them.

Although I must admit that I knows next to nothing about any major sporting events or famous sport people unless it's in connection to something else eg seeing Usain Bolt advertise something in Australia and wondering who he was, and then looking him up. Actually, I'm still wondering why he was chosen to advertise Optus, a local telco.

I learnt about the Irish potato famine in school when I was doing GCSE history, although it was being discussed in relation to the Corn Laws in place in the UK at that time, and how the Corn Laws made the effects of the famine worse, rather than as any attempt to teach us about Irish history.

We didn’t learn about the Troubles at school, although I’m old enough for it to be counted as current affairs when I was at school.

@MaybeitsMaybelline I imagine your hairdresser was thrilled
'Been anywhere nice this year?'
'Let's talk holocaust'

Some of the attitudes on here are astounding. I suppose people would be happy to book a long weekend in Paris, to take their partner for a romantic break and then be amazed to find that when they arrived they were in Paris, Texas. Similarly, a trip to Rome or Roma might end you up in Romania, Africa, South America or Australia. Many years ago, BI (before the internet), I was asked by my boss to go and work in South Korea instead of Italy where the interview was for. I knew nothing about the country except that it was the other side of the world and there had been a war there in the 50s.I got information from the Embassy and travel agents and found out an awful lot in just a few days. The job lasted nearly 3 years and it was the best place that I've ever been to. By finding about the place beforehand I had a wonderful time and I read everything if there are words on it and everybody should do the same no matter what their status or age. Knowledge is king and ignorance of it makes you look like a fool at times.