A sudden epiphany.

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• baltakatei@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  “You are reading at college level.”

  Translation: “You are baseline literate.”

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  • musubibreakfast@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Advanced classes means slightly less stupid. This makes me think of Beijing University. A lot of kids who were considered the brightest and the best in their little towns their parents would go into debt and borrow money from others in the town to send them to Beijing University.

    When the kids arrived they’d discover they weren’t as smart as they thought they were and they’d flunk out despite studying as hard as they could. And instead of returning home and embarrassing their parents in front of the other townspeople they’d kill themselves.

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    • jaybone@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Did no one make the effort to publicize these stories to prevent this from happening?

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• DokPsy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  For me, it was realizing that while I was smart, the shit level of schooling was more an impediment to me gaining the skills needed to continue excelling and I continue to be surrounded by absolute dipshits wherever I go.

  In school, I didn’t have to study to pass and there was no real incentive to learn how to. This bit me when it came to university because the lectures didn’t cover everything that was to be tested on. Turns out, trying is a skill I never needed until then.

  Then, in the workforce, I’m constantly exhausted dealing with people who are at best functionally literate and I have to cater to their understanding of literally everything. No desire to either understand the problem or fix the root cause, just make the thing do what they want right then.

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  • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Did I write this last night in my sleep?

    I just told this exact story to my oldest yesterday, almost verbatim. Freaky.

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    • snooggums@piefed.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There are dozens of us!

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  • fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    school is kinda bullshit to be honest

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    • DokPsy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The infuriating thing is that it doesn’t have to be. It’s been gutted, filleted, and various other words of a similar effect over the decades to the detriment of the entire populous

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  • joan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    is this going to be me in the future ;-;

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• Apytele@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  You know I heard a quote one time that said if you’re the smartest person in the room you’re in the wrong room. But at the same time my parents always told me whatever I did I needed to be the best at it. Like they put me in tutoring because my math skills were only one year ahead. My family is all engineers, computer scientists etc. Everybody’s a bachelor’s or above except my one sister who’s specifically disabled.

  When I decided on nursing school I was like OK I’m just going to aim for something achievable for me. The content should be right at my level, at least I’ll be able to excel at that like they’re expecting. And the coursework itself was super easy. I had all the chem physics and bio I needed for the conceptual groundwork. I had all the Greek and Latin roots I needed for the terminology. Even the math was actually right on my level (basic algebra, ratio and proportion, PEMDAS equations), I just needed to up my accuracy when I had previously optimized for speed.

  But they absolutely humbled me in people skills and emotional resiliency. I actually flunked out the first time for being too emotionally immature. They made me cry on the regular and I just couldn’t get a grip on what they wanted from me interaction wise. It was actually my first shitty job at a psych hospital + going through therapy simultaneously that fixed me. It’s wild to say but I feel like the literally criminally insane men I was working with taught me better people skills than my parents did. I learned so much about respect and what it really meant to uphold a promise through adversity and how to keep my stupid mouth shut.

  So. I thought I was aiming low, and I still wound up being the dumbest person in the room.

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  • idiomaddict@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s wild to say but I feel like the literally criminally insane men I was working with taught me better people skills than my parents did.

    That actually sounds pretty reasonable to me (not to excuse your parents, if applicable). It’s not the same thing at all, but I learned much better people skills from living with a boyfriend who had abandoned his treatment for and didn’t tell me about his paranoid schizophrenia than from anyone else. He read so much into everything I said, that I learned to speak very deliberately.

    When you are working with people with a very different perspective on the world that you can’t change, and neither party feels entitled to acceptance because of family, you need to learn how to treat others respectfully and with dignity to succeed.

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    • Apytele@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah I feel like it’s one of those things that sounds completely insane unless you’ve been through it. A lot of it was learning how to respond to crazy but I did actually learn a few positive behaviors directly from them. You’d be surprised how much please / thank you and sir / ma’am they use. I also learned to stand a lot taller, swagger a little, and speak from my chest. Like people will comment on how much confidence I display which is wild to me being actually in my own head.

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    • snooggums@piefed.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      He read so much into everything I said, that I learned to speak very deliberately.

      I have found this helps but also that a lot of people hear what they want to hear no matter how clear and deliberate you are, and recognizing who those people are is another skill.

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  • NottaLottaOcelot@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I also work in healthcare. The science was challenging, but achievable with effort. The hand skills took practice and repetition. But the people skills are truly never mastered.

    I’ve been in my field for 17 years and it’s still a daily fire walk trying to avoid setting expectations too high, setting expectations too low, or somehow inadvertently inviting litigation with the wrong choice of words. The same verbiage doesn’t work on everyone, and you have about 20 seconds to decide which variation of unreasonable you have to sidestep on every person.

    I feel like I am fortunate to have employment and not worry as much as many people about affording groceries and the mortgage. And yet, I really hope my children don’t choose patient care for their career.

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    • Apytele@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      ☝️

      Yeah 10 years and a dozen Daisy noms in and I still feel like my foot is constantly in my mouth. You have to walk this horrible tightrope of remembering this is the worst day of someone’s life then emotionally file it under your 400th Tuesday. The cognitive dissonance of that alone is enough to drive you bonkers.

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  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    As an engineer from a family of engineers, yeah i wholeheartedly believe that you learned better people skills from the criminally insane than engineers. I had a real tough time learning people skills and emotional resilience

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• Crozekiel@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Yea… This was the basis for my first existential crisis in my life… All through small town public school I was basically the smartest kid in the room (sometimes smartest person - we had some really bad teachers). Thought I was god’s gift of intelligence to humanity. Went out of town to a really good engineering school and holy shit I was immediately humbled. I was clawing my way to try to reach “average” and couldn’t quite reach.

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  • d00ery@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    “A big fish in a little pond”, it’s how I described my po achievement in my first job out of uni.

    en.wikipedia.org/…/Big-fish–little-pond_effect

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  • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    My version of this was still being among the smartest people at my good engineering school but realizing I didn’t have the discipline to thrive without externally imposed structure. I coasted on skipping classes and catching up just fine my first semester, but that didn’t last all that long (a year before I was no longer near the top of any given class, 2 years to where I was struggling to understand because my grasp of the prereqs wasn’t as solid).

    So it took a few years to learn how the world doesn’t inherently reward intelligence for the sake of intelligence, but that intelligence is still a good tool towards accomplishing other things the world does value.

    I’m still sometimes the smartest person in the room, but I’ve learned to stop assigning any value to that fact.

    I’m pretty happy these days, and I directly credit my intelligence and introspection for that. Even though the “smart but lazy” label gave me some trouble early on, and I had a little quarter life crisis when I realized that being smart wasn’t enough, eventually being thoughtful gave me the flexibility to recover from some setbacks early in my career, has helped me with my social life, helps me manage the day to day life outside of work (finances, chores, hobbies, interests, family life, etc.), and otherwise has helped me set up the things that are important to me and find contentment in a chaotic world. It’s certainly a form of intelligence, just productively channeled at some point to make things better for myself.

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  • architect@thelemmy.club ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I can promise you if you are here you’re above average. Average is shockingly bad. Maybe not average for engineering school but still above it.

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• WanderWisley@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’m born and raised in rural northern Nevada population 4000ish. I barely graduated high school and went straight into a manual labor job. I feel like I’m a goddamn Nostradamus or Albert Einstein here sometime.

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  • valtia@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Winnemucca be like that

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    • WanderWisley@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Ely actually too…

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  • mrmanager@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Lol :)

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• OttoVonNoob@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  A bad teacher can stunt you. I always wanted to make video games, but my high school programming teacher’s style didn’t mesh. Even though I enjoyed the class, he suggested I drop it because he thought I wasn’t a good fit for the field, I reluctantly agreed. Twenty years later, I’ve completed most of the programming for a game I plan to release one day, though I can still picture him tapping the chalkboard every time I asked a question like that was supposed to help…

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  • rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Most programming classes are bullshit. You come out with basic knowledge of practices that aren’t used in real production. They teach you how to write code, but they don’t teach you how code is written in most businesses.

    Outside of actual gaming programs in colleges, new developers are generally bewildered and end up making stuff that’s hard to maintain.

    We had a professor sit in with us for a few months once to get the gist of what was needed so he could form classes around game deveopment.

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  • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    likewise, i have always been the family tinker/inventor. invented a hydrogen/oxygen fuel cell when i was 8 before i learned they already existed better than i had invented. i went to school, took engineering classes. the intro to CAD teacher was an ableist douche (long story) and publicly stated that it was his intention to weed out anyone he felt was not “worthy” of being in our “noble” (ranked four hundred something nationally) engineering program via his computer drafting program and since grading was almost entirely subjective (75% of each project was for “style” whatever that meant) he got to do that.

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    • fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      weeding out is horrific bullshit. I got weeded out of CS and now I don’t get to have a good job

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  • mimic_dev@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Good luck on your game! I was always too dumb to realize if I combine all the stuff I love doing it equals game dev. Only realized a couple years ago and it’s the happiest I’ve ever been.

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    • OttoVonNoob@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Honeslty, I thought it was way above my head. Im a social worker so very far from game dev. My friend sorta nice bullied me into it stating all the time anyone can do it the hardest part is getting started. He was right once I started rolling it came together. Now I do it as a hobby after the kids go to bed. I treat it like playing video games, its a creative, problem solving, process that i really enjoy. I honestly believe anyone can make a video game with a good idea!

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    • MrFinnbean@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Opposide for me. I realised i enjoy playing games much more than making them.

      But im happy for you that you found a thing you can be passionate about and spend time working on it too.

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  • architect@thelemmy.club ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I was a nerdy girl and was always pushed out by teachers. My male teachers for obvious reasons but i had a younger female programming teacher and she hated the fact I existed and took attention away from her.

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• ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Here’s the thing: we can’t ALL have been the smartest kids in our classes. It’s just so unlikely. We were the generic background idiots in someone else’s story all along.

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  • Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Maybe I’m like Forest Gump or Inspector Gadget. 🤷‍♂️

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  • MDCCCLV@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That’s entirely plausible. It’s fairly normal even. Thats still well over 10 million people and it’s common for people to be in the 95th percentile then go to college and be completely average.

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  • Knightfox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    With the barriers to entry that Lemmy has it’s not that unlikely. It’s like an incel going onto 8chan and saying, we can’t all be the most edgy people we know.

    According to this website there are only around 40-70k daily active users (monthly vs semiannual). If you look at total users we’re sitting on about 1.3 million with 11 million posts per day and 23 million comments per day.

    So 0.015% of the population on an obscure site which is not mainstream accessible.

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    • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      See!? I warned you I wasn’t the smartest.

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    • Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I don’t know about all that, I’m pretty dumb and I’m here. I run my own home lab, frigate, HAOS, do a lot of cooking and am a tech lead for a pretty diverse range of SMEs, so I feel like I’m competent but I don’t think I’m very smart. I can do things and figure stuff out but as an example just yesterday I was watching a video about this bitluni guy making a GPU and the things he just knows while explaining what he’s doing, like he’s smart, I could never do something like that.

      youtu.be/HRfbQJ6FdF0

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  • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    And I gotta say I really appreciate it!

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    • margaret_erine@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Really appreciate it 🥰

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  • MangioneDontMiss@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    makes me feel better in a way, knowing i at least had a purpose. even if that purpose was to make someone else’s purpose seem more meaningful.

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• OriginEnergySux@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Image

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• BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That’s what we call an average fish suffocating in a puddle

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  • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    One of the asian ones is a frog in a well. Though it carries more the connotation of Dunning-Kreuger, though more due to environment and experience vs a mental condition.

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• hansolo@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Oh God.

  But they were all dipshits.

  You know, this actually explains a lot. Like how I never realized this before.

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  • Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It took me many years to realize.

    I learned to read and write very young, and so the literary part of school was always super easy. This caused me to neglect studying overall, and when I moved to high school in the city, I was just average lol

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• Vespair@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Everywhere is filled with absolute dipshits. Frankly the bar for “gifted” should not be looked at a praise-worthy state of those deemed such, but rather as a scathing rebuke of the general idiocy rampant across humanity.

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• Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I had highschool classmates bragging about driving 80mph down dirt roads and one girl planned to become “richly married” as her career. Maybe we all had dipshits.

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• Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Big fish in a small pond.

  Guessing I’m not the only one in here that had a similar pathway with video games. Maybe games in general, as chess was similar.

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• selokichtli@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  In my country there is no advanced people and you can’t really fast forward years of education. I know a couple of famous cases, but is not something that happens all the time. My family treated me as a special kid for so many reasons, and being “smart” was one of them. Had to travel to the big capital city to study a bachelor in science, there was no way around it, because the expenses were mostly covered by this public university, thank god.

  The first year was hard. I failed some classes even, and seriously questioned myself if I had it in me to get my degree. Education is just better in big cities with museums, cultural activities everyday, bookstores and libraries. Back in the town I grew up we only had the little municipal library, others existed but weren’t open to the public, and one or two libraries with best sellers. In my university we had one library with several levels just for the students, there were books and journals, maps, a digital library too, etc. You need to be curious, yes, but the environment to pique that curiosity is very important too.

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• realitista@lemmus.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king

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• architect@thelemmy.club ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Opposite for me. Feels like I went to school with particularly smart people and I thought I was way below average.

  Then I learned about (and also observed) a 60% illiteracy rate.

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• stardustpathsofglory@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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• dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That’s me. Then I got a job as a software developer but most my colleagues when to university so they always going on about bougie words like polymorphism, dependency injection, etc.

  We coined the term that I am a working man’s software developer. I can do all those bougie words but I just can’t articulate what they are. Nor do I care to to be honest.

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• TokenBoomer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  You’re unique, just like everyone else.

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  • BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s sort of one of my favorite things about us.

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  • Randelung@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    “We’re all individuals!”

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    • electric_nan@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      “I’m not.”

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  • MTZ@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    We are all snowflakes.

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• WagnasT@piefed.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Just watching people do normal tasks is depressing, like watch people at self checkout, it’s painful. Surely not every person is experiencing self checkout for the first time but it hurts to watch. Same with watching other people use a computer (they get a pass on this one, not everyone has spent hours optimizing their workflow…fine. It’s fine.) Seriously, just watch people do stuff, it’s rough out there. These people can vote or run for office and I wouldn’t take those rights away, it’s just scary and it explains a lot.

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• Zannsolo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  You were gifted with a monkeys paw smarter than most people but not smart enough to do anything great so you got stuck around the people you were smarter than to watch them struggle at the self checkout

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• RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I feel like Lemmy and Reddit are filled to the brim with these “lazy intellectuals”, I’m starting to wonder if any other sort of people even exist online

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Idk if I’d even call it “intellectual” so much as “smug”. You find this all over. People self-sort into cliches. And then they get high on their own supply, insisting everyone outside their group is inferior.

    You’ll find it over in the Joe Rogan-verse, among the TradCaths, in every ethnic enclave from Cuban expats to the Taiwanese Diaspora. As common among Marxists as Fascists. As common among Americans as Iranians. As common in the board rooms as the barber shops.

    Broadly speaking - and particularly as people get older - we develop this entrenched worldview that results from accumulations of vast amounts of personal and peripheral information.

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    • MTZ@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I call it pseudo-intellectualism. These people 100% think that they know exactly what they are talking about.

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• DagwoodIII@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  If a kid gets good grades in E-12 the teachers tend to leave them alone.

  If a kid is good at sports they get a coach who helps them with their schoolwork, social life, and other areas.

  My program was called ‘college bound’ and the only thing we did was prep for the SATs.

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• Xerxos@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  An IQ of 100 is ment to be directly in the middle, so roughly 50% of the population is below that. An IQ of 100 isn’t that bright, so think about the incredible masses of dumb people.

  So, yeah. It’s not impossible that you were the one-eyed among the blind.

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• someacnt@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I am realizing I were only good at tests… So sad that I am one of the dumbest and just managed to fool some people with grades. But that does not help with real life.

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• Gonzako@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Hey! Don’t call me out!

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• Sam_Bass@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  In my defense, Ft worth was a big town

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• blarth@thelemmy.club ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That’s a me, retardando

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• Poteau_Poutre@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That’s what every Balzac novel is about

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• AffineConnection@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Isn’t this basically the premise of Idiocracy?

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  • MTZ@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    No the premise of that is that a totally average servicemember in every way is forgotten about in an experiment and is unconscious for 500 years, only to awaken with his prostitute experiment mate, as the two smartest people on earth. A documentary.

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