Comment on What's the difference between ignorance and stupidity?
Deconceptualist@leminal.space 3 days agoinability to learn is a choice.
Not always. Someone close to me has issues with executive dysfunction and short term memory as a result of brain trauma. She really struggles with algebra and she’ll almost certainly never learn calculus even if she wanted to.
lots of people I met recently, love to tell me how stupid it is because it’s not a ‘useful’ thing to learn.
That’s a different issue entirely. If they think they’re experts at judging what’s useful, that may be the Dunning-Kruger effect.
jmp242@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
I think we overuse dunning kruger. “useful” is very contextual. I would agree that for many people it would take some specific and dare I say unusual circumstances where learning another language is particularly useful to them. There’s some use in that you get a bit of a puzzle to overcome, you can potentially eventually get good enough to consume content in this other language (though one thing LLMs are pretty good at is translation), maybe you get a more direct exposure to Dovstoyestky (sp?). Cool and all, but probably not going to get them a better job or help them with most life tasks.