To wonder why so many people are so inexplicably stupid?

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I saw a comment by someone in another thread that said ''People don't think that a bank cashier is a banker, do they?'' and it has set me off on a Major League Rant (not aimed at the person who wrote that, but at people who DO think exactly that.)

My fella used to be a cashier at a bank for years before he got promoted. EVERY SINGLE DAY, without fail, he'd get moronic customers moaning at him for being a ''banker on a massive bonus''. He was a cashier on minimum wage, and even the bank managers didn't get the ridiculous sort of bonuses these imbeciles were on about.

I asked around and it seems that cashiers at various banks get this crap all the time.

What sort of moron really believes that a bank cashier is a millionaire banker? Why are so many people so dim?

...AND BREATHE!

I see it as two different attitudes. One where the person might not know but when needs to know wants to find out and two where they not only don't care that they don't know but are proud they don't know. They ridicule those who want to know etc.

The latter attitude really annoys me especially when it means they can't do their job properly and therefore leave the work to everyone else or even create more work. For example I have a colleague who doesn't know how to save records in the correct file. Fair enough, not everyone is good with computers but she doesn't try and learn how to do it, just looses the files several times a day and then boasts about how no one is going to make her learn something she doesn't want to. .

LaQueen, I had a colleague (a teacher) who had no idea that people from Norway spoke Norwegian.

Until relatively recently she was right.

Even today most people write in Bokmål and speak a dialect of Nynorsk both developed from Danish in the 20th century.

My FIL spent his working life teaching and has concluded that there are two types of learners; a sieve and a sump.

Sieves only retain the information they need eg to pass an exam. They are capable of very high marks but can lack a little in the general knowledge area.

Sumps retain everything. Weird facts, fragments of tunes they heard in 1973, the currency of the Maldives, the average rainfall in February in Lima, but they lack filters. It's all in there, but it is not necessarily accessible at the appropriate time. It is nearly always accessible during pub quizzes or when watching Pointless.

Neither kind of learning is invalid they just work differently.

YY to this though: It is impossible to understand quite how common stupidity is unless you have a customer facing role.. Try a patient facing role as an NHS contractor and try explaining entitlement (or otherwise) to NHS help to members of the public, who then like to shout "I pay your wages" (they don't, I'm self employed). It will age your very soul.

Littlegreyauditor My FIL spent his working life teaching and has concluded that there are two types of learners; a sieve and a sump.

I love that analogy - and I think I'm definitely a sump (with some sieving to get through exams at the time). I love to collect information, whether it appears useful or not.

I am a sieve and DH is a sump. He can recall what was on his chemistry exam, which considering he is now in his 50s is a pretty mean achievement!

If you want to waste your week, here's over 100 pages of stupid things people have said.

www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2167193&p=40128245#post40128245

There's some hilarious ones there. There's a lot of people who are agressively ignorant, I think. Last Christmas, a man insisted to me (in response to a quiz on the radio) that the Republic of Ireland was part of the UK and Northern Ireland was an independent state. If he'd been willing to think about it, he might have realised that "republic" is a big clue. As it was, he blindly trusted his memory, and he'd obviously memorised them the wrong bloody way around!

I am so definitely a sump. GCSE french questions from 1994, how to make Sodium Dichromate solution, the phone number of my childhood house. It's all in there. What is not in there is the location of my car keys or whether or not I left the Iron on. Those things remain shrouded in mystery.

I'm a sump. I remember all manner of useless crap.

It was handy when I used to write the weekly pub quiz though.

Sump here. The reason I can't remember anything is because there is so much else in there. Needle in haystack jobbie.

On the ignorance kick, XH was convinced that a long nose, like the one on the monkey, is known as a "probiscus".* He knew it was right because he'd written it down in 1976, and proved it to me by, er, showing me his written note . Nothing on this earth would convince him that he could have written it down wrongly in the first place.

However, since he worked out quite early on that wilful ignorance irritates me, it's hard to tell how many of his other misconceptions were genuine and how many were wind-ups.

*proboscis, if anyone who didn't happen to know this was interested in looking it up.

I socialise and work with educated people and so, on the whole, most of the breathtakingly stupid comments I am subjected to come from Mumsnet. I consider it to be an education.

I agree with whoever it was who pointed out the distinction between being "stupid" and being uneducated.

I've met many people who lacked education but who were very intelligent.

And a lot of very well educated people can have no common sense!

Intelligence comes in many forms too...

Same, Laqueen. I am only a sump for trivia.

I have a French A level. I studied the night before. Can I speak French? Can I buggery.

I believe that people who can deduce, analyse, trouble-shoot and apply knowledge in new situations are the truly intelligent.

Regurgitating facts, whilst a good skill to have, is just a measure of how good your memory is really.

So, in conclusion, If you can't apply the knowledge you have memorised then you just have a good memory.

I can't even remember the stuff I can't apply.

Well, I personally think that 'intelligence' is a bit of a myth. There are many very clever people with lots of degrees and high paid jobs that wouldn't have a clue how to wire a house up, or plumb in a sink. There are so many different types of intelligence and I don't think anyone can be expected to know lots about everything.

Common sense is also being talked about here, and general knowledge, which are also different types of intelligence.

I also have a clever friend that has a complete lack of common sense, that could be described as stupidity.

As for maths and literacy, well, discussing the education system in this country would be a whole new tangent!

I work with a leading Geriatric Consultant who is very well respected and very passionate about her work.

She has no common sense whatsoever though, some of her suggestions and ideas are incredibly naive and outrageous.

I think it might be that she's focused all her working life in one area and not on the real and practical side of the job.

I try and tell her that certain suggestions won't work because of X, Y and Z, but because I am not as educated as her and she sees me as one of her minions, she dismisses and gets angry at what I've said.

Very odd woman

When I taught, I was more amazed by how much most people can do. Very significant SN aside, pretty much everyone can talk, and in sentences. I think that is incredible - it requires so much learning and innate abilities. The difference in intelligence and knowledge between the most and least able people is tiny compared to the difference between humans and other primates.

I think a lot of the difference between people in terms of knowledge is down to curiosity. I remember a sixth former being surprised about the location of Portugal on a map. She said that she thought it was a county in Britain. She had been there on holiday. Perhaps she had seen it on a map before (do they still colour in maps in Geography?). But she hadn't done any of the things I would have done. I'd look it up when we booked the holiday. Or looked out of the plane window and though "sea, hmm, why are we going over the sea?" Or wondered why the weather is different there.

It's a bit like when I thought that County Durham was in Northern Ireland (before looking at universities, so at about 17). I had no curiosity about the geography of Northern England, so never challenged my assumption. My knowledge of the geography of the UK has improved dramatically since I left school and started to mix with people from other areas - they made me curious, as did my travels in the UK. But I still didn't know that Scunthorpe was not on the coast. It just doesn't bother me where Scunthorpe is. It has an amusing name, but otherwise isn't of any interest to me.

People are fuckwits, I was once a minimum wage cashier for Barclays... Of course when the financial crisis came, I was the one happy at home wiping my arse with customers £20 notes

I lost all hope the other night in humanity, that idiot on I'm a celebrity who couldn't tell the time.... Jaw dropping.

Our local bank shut down, leaving the nearest bank miles away. Not long before it closed a man who was upset at the last bank in town closing was screaming and shouting at the cashier. Calling her a disgrace to society and saying she was lucky there was a security screen or he'd teach her a lesson for ruining his life.

I felt so sorry for her. When the bank closed that was going to be her made redundant. As a single mother she was panicking about keeping a roof over their heads and feeding her children. She was almost in tears thanks to the idiot.