Some people are smart, but a whole lot of them are dumb af. We see it all the time, and it's sometimes truly a wonder to behold. Not Knowable readers though, y'all are a cut above.
spaghetti-soup asked: What made you think: "People are f*cking stupid?"
Submissions have been edited for clarity, context, and profanity.
No annual fee? It's all free!
Well, I work at a bank and hear stupid sh*t all the time... one that comes to mind:
A guy was offered a credit card, with the promise that the first annual fee was for free. He somehow misunderstood the offer and thought that the bank was going to pay for everything he used the card to buy for the first year, instead of y'know... not charging him the annual fee for having the card. Naturally, he maxed out the card and was in for a big surprise when he contacted the bank because it was suddenly being declined everywhere.
Reminds me of my one friend that thought taxes were a loan to the government, and expected to get 100% of his taxes back on the refund.
Omg smh.
I listened to a call from a tech support agent speaking with a customer that was convinced her iPhone had a virus on it. "It has little red and pink bumps on the screen, even when its turned off!" After 20 minutes of the agent trying to figure it out unsuccessfully, he asked for a number on the phone and customer couldn't see it, so she called her grandson in to read the numbers, he immediately scratched off one of the "virus bumps" and asked the customer why she had paint on the phone. They had painted a nursery room earlier and some pink paint drops got on the phone.
Literally everything their device is doing that they don't understand is a virus to an old person. It's insane. I work in an electronics store and just recently an old lady came in saying she thinks she has a virus on her iPhone because this line keeps showing up in her text conversations. She kept pointing it out to me and I didn't see it for the longest time until I realized she was talking about the scroll bar.
What did she think would happen, honestly?
The woman in the news this morning who tried to take a selfie with a jaguar by going into its enclosure and got mauled.
I came here to say this. "The zoo says they have no plans to euthanize the jaguar"
To the woman's credit, she went back to the zoo and apologized.
Harambe died for this progress.
Those stupid chain letters.
Scrolling through any social media platform and seeing those god forbidden posts saying "Share for 7 years of good luck!" or "[said app] is going to start charging users 4.00$ on may 1st! The first 10,000 people to share this post do not have to pay!" I mean seriously, how do people really believe this crap?
I bet you can't think of a word that both starts and ends in t. Bet you can't think of a country with the letter a in it. Bet you can't think of a single name with the letter d in it. If you can you are an amazing linguist and so very smart. Top intellect in the world with the highest iq.
These posts just feed on the
Dunning–Kruger effect. People think they are geniuses for solving these stupid problems.
Oh and another type is the stupidly easy math problems: "What is 1+1-1+1*0? Only 5% of people get it right!!!!" And then you look at the comments and see a significant number of people somehow getting it wrong. Not only wrong, but confidently wrong, to the point where they start arguing with others about it.
All the time.
Whenever I see a bottleneck of people waiting to get through a door, and there's a second door that none of them have bothered to open.
This and people standing in front of an escalator or stairs having a conversation are frustrating to me. Or leaving your cart in the middle of the isle while you try to decide which cereal to buy, this usually ends up with your cart pushed to the end of the isle and out of the way. I don't understand peoples complete lack of regard for anyone else.
When people don't understand what acting is.
People who harass actors on social media when the character they play is being a dick in a show/movie. It happened to Josh McDermitt (he plays Eugene in the Walking Dead). I met him and he was an absolute lovely, positive guy.
He eventually deleted all his social media channels because lots of people couldn't make the distinction between him and his character and he was harassed 24/7. How can people honestly be dumb enough to not understand fiction?!
Happened to the guy who played Malfoy, to the guy who played Joffrey, the guy who played the killer in Dirty Harry, and plenty others. It's driven several people out of acting entirely.
The guy that played Jar Jar in Star Wars said he was considering suicide from all the harassment.
Honestly though, HOW? Like, I would be able to imagine that there are one or two idiots out there who can't tell reality from fiction. But, like you said, I see these kind of nasty comments everywhere. Those people vote too. Such a depressing thought.
Totally missing the point.
My school offers a discount on coffee if you bring your own mug for them to fill, so they don't have to use paper coffee cups. Makes sense in theory, except the employees measure out one serving of coffee by using a paper coffee cup, then they pour that into your personal mug and throw out the paper coffee cup....
Holy f*ck this drives me up the wall, just started working at a place where they do this.
I've seen people do this exact thing I told them it's stupid if we want to incentivise the guests we shouldnt be measuring their cups just make an honest judgement.
Please stop.
Every time someone advertises a pyramid scheme on their Insta/Snapchat story.
Hahaha pyramid scheme? It's a reverse funnel system.
Would you like to hard sell essential oils to all your friends and family until they hate you and stop inviting you to the holidays?
Seriously?
Number of years ago working at a gas station, guy drives in like a bat out of hell with smoke pouring out of his car. This is a rather large station with a lot of room but this guy decides to park at the pumps, jump out and yells that he thinks his car is on fire, I lay into him about how he is stupid if he thinks the smartest place to park is next to gas pumps when you think your car is on fire. There is literally 6000 sq ft of nothing but concrete to park on that is away from the pumps and he picks that spot. Good thing because of the white "smoke" I knew it was just an over heating car but the guys thought process really made me feel some people just shouldn't be allowed out in public.
I work for the cable company doing maintenance on the outside plant. Every now and then if a cable that is buried in the ground goes bad, we run an orange temporary cable above to replace it until a new one can be buried in a conduit. Safety cones, yadda yadda until markouts are done and then in it goes. This whole process can take a couple of weeks so it's not uncommon to have one of these on top of the ground for a bit. Well, one rocket scientist of a lady thought her neighbor was stealing cable from her so she cut it, knocking out half of the cul-de-sac. I proceeded to lay into her asking if she thought it was ever a good idea to cut random cables lying in the street. Some of these temp cables will have upwards of 90v and maybe 3-5 amps on them. Thankfully for her, this one was feeding termination so there wasn't any voltage on it. The look she gave me was one of complete bewilderment, like cutting this cable was the most logical thing for her and she couldn't understand why it was a bad idea. This was in a very upscale part of the state so it's not like these people were lacking resources to find out what the cable was before cutting it.
We know better than to click, but we still click.
The comments on YouTube videos, Facebook articles, Yahoo Answers, and pretty much any other corner of the internet where many people congregate.
The comment section of almost any NASA Facebook post makes me want to break something.
Aliens... every time they find anything interesting.... Aliens.
@WSJ/X
@victinbcn/Bluesky
@EgioVictor/X
@bartije/X
@realDonaldTrump/Truth Social