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Comment on The fact that people this stupid exist

I’ve come to think that stupidity is the default condition of humans. If you study some evolution and anthropology, you learn that the brain is an incredibly expensive organ. Most life forms opt for a lower level of intelligence that’s good enough to get some food in their face and their genitals where they need to go. The brain is a massive risk and it’s miraculous how it’s managed to pay off in our case.

Still, thinking is hard work. I think most people would rather do hard physical labor than actually think hard about something difficult. The brain itself functions like a shortcut machine, too. It doesn’t do hard calculations on where that tennis ball is going to bounce. It makes a “good enough” guess, and that’s it. People instinctively look at what other people are doing because it’s so much easier to let your neighbor figure it out and then copy them. And, yes, people love to subscribe to a worldview, political position, or belief set that someone else is selling and just let them do all the big thinking for them.

You could look at it as willful self deprivation, and it is, but I think it’s also just the basic gravity of pure resource management constantly pulling people down into lower levels of mental activity. Thinking takes a tremendous amount of energy.

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adorablepeanut@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
What an interesting take, fits my world view perfectly.

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Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Rings pretty true in the face of trans advocacy. In our case it’s really hard to fight a very simple take on something that seems like an easy “fact” because to do so depends on an understanding of a pretty specific psychological condition that dovetails into some complex social and philosophical principles and a history of how we got medically to the place we are in regarding treatment that really weren’t mainstream knowledge… And still kind of aren’t because people are more easily sold 90’s mad scientist logic over the structures that exist.

Like trans folls and their loved ones often become versed in psychology, phillosophy, history and sometimes endocrinology as a matter of survival. It’s way more efficient for most people who don’t need to constantly defend their quality of life to just shut it all down and repeat the thought terminating cliches, feel like they are the arbiters of truth while leaving damn near everything on the table untouched.

I relate very hard to it being like fighting the gravity of low mental resource allocation. It can feel like being crushed.

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- scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Oh yeah being trans throws a whole lot of heavy thinking at people. The worst kind: having to rewrite long-settled assumptions. I find it pretty easy to modify my long held definitions of gender. It’s really just recognizing the difference between sex and gender, which I’ve always known. But even I struggle to remember pronouns and names for people I have known all my life who then transitioned. And I’m willing and trying. There are folks with no trans people in their (probably very small) immediate lives and they just can’t overcome that gravity to make the change, don’t see why they should have to bother, and this leads directly to them trying to cancel the entire category of thought. It’s depressing as fuck to see people get up and fight to defend their mental laziness.
  
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  - Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I mean for a lot of people it’s pretty easy to understand once it’s someone they care about.
    
    If a random salesperson calling your friend ma’am makes her whole damn week why wouldn’t you do that for someone you care about?
    
    I feel like half the issue with a lot of advocacy is we go a little too far into the intellectual stuff? I mean it definitely helps to know that the ethical underpinnings of the movement are epicurean but like… You go over someone’s head you rarely get em in the heart.
    
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1984@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I think it’s arrogance that is the default condition. Specially if you are educated, because now you feel confident your opinions are correct, and others are wrong.

This is mostly why people don’t get along very well. Everyone thinks they are right.

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- CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’m not sure that last sentence tracks, if people need to fight people who disagree, wouldn’t they be leaving comments, vocally disagreeing/verbally attacking the other user or their position? Just downvoting and moving is still “getting along” so to speak.
  
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  - 1984@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Downvoting is the lazy version of that…just press a button if you don’t agree with something. It’s a bit like giving reviews to people based on what you think about what they write.
    
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    BigNote@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You call it “lazy,” I call it time management. No one has the time or intellectual bandwidth to respond to all the deeply stupid comments on the Internet, so downvotes give us a quick and easy to register our opinion and move on.
    
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