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"90% of people are paste"

Started by Neil, January 18, 2007, 04:27:02 PM

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Neil

I always get really antsy when someone uses the old '90% of people are stupid' argument.  I'm thinking about it again because of a conversation that has come about in the Celeb BB thread, and would like to hear other people's views on it.  I just find this kind of stereotyping of absolutely massive numbers of people really uncomfortable and pointless.  Anyway, here are the posts I'm referring to for context - must point out that ColaCoca wasn't making that specific argument, but it did make me think of it.

Quote from: "ColaCoca"
Quote from: "Shoulders?-Stomach!"Now all the news are saying Indian people are under the impression the standard British person is racist.

I think it's possible that the majority of people in the UK are a bit stupid, a bit ignorant and a bit racist.   In this case the sad truth would be that Jo, Danielle and Jade do represent the majority of British people.

Quote from: "Neil"
Quote from: "ColaCoca"
Quote from: "Shoulders?-Stomach!"Now all the news are saying Indian people are under the impression the standard British person is racist.

I think it's possible that the majority of people in the UK are a bit stupid, a bit ignorant and a bit racist.

Why do you think it's possible?!  I always get irked and depressed by the '90% of people are thickos' brigade.

Quote from: "ColaCoca"
Quote from: "Neil"

Why do you think it's possible?!  I always get irked and depressed by the '90% of people are thickos' brigade.

Just experience really.  I've worked in enough factories and offices over the years that I think I am able to judge this.  I hope I am wrong.  

Here are some specific examples though that have led me to this sad conclusion.
- The FM company I worked for where the manager said as he was reading through CVs 'I won't have a big sooty working here'.  The other four 20something men that I was working with thought this was hilarious and openly admitted to being racist afterwards, but 'only as much as the next person'  You can judge for yourself if this lot were ignorant and stupid too.
- The canteen lady who when talking about charity donation said something along the lines of 'it's nice to see the money staying at home for a change, I'm not being nasty but all the money seems to go to foreigners usually'
- The nice old lady at the fruit and veg stall I worked at who wouldn't buy south african apples because all the black people had been touching them.  She also thought this was why nobody else bought them.
- The mother that told her young son to be home by 7.30 because there are black people out there tonight. (Small town in Mid Wales, the black people in question were playing in a steel band that was part of the town carnival)
- The well qualified and fairly intelligent people who worked at the multinational telecoms company that I used to work with who banged on and on and on and on and on and on about asylum seekers given half a chance.
etc... etc....

I don't remember quoting any percentages or calling anyone a 'thicko'.

Quote from: "Neil"
Quote from: "ColaCoca"I don't remember quoting any percentages or calling anyone a 'thicko'.

No, sorry, wasn't implying that you had.  It's just that your argument made me think of the '90% of people are stupid' cliche that gets trotted out a lot.  And I really really hate it.  Part of the reason I hate it is that I perceive it as being spectacularly self-serving...there's always the tacit implication that the person making the statement considers themselves to be in the golden 10% of society.

Maybe I should start a new thread about this, as it's an issue I'd like to have to think about in more detail.  It just bothers me when people take the perceived dregs of society, and then state that they're indicative of society as a whole.  Why not extrapolate using the smart and non-racist people you come across instead?!

And also...isn't there a correlation what you're doing, and what some of the people you're complaining about are doing?

EDIT:  Yes, I think I'll start a new thread about this, god knows we need something other than sports, games, religion and news in GD.

So...yes, do you have a view of the public in general?  Do you ever trot out the '90% of people are stupid' cliche?  Do you get annoyed when others do?

Still Not George

I personally find it disappointing that 50% of people are below average. Can't they try harder?

Jack Shaftoe

'paste'?

Edited because it went into italics for some reason.

I can't even post a one word thing without fucking up - count me in for the 'stupid' percentage.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Jesus, those people who quote reams of text only to write one line of text at the bottom...

I do think that only a very tiny percentage of the population ever have something interesting to say about an issue. It isn't wrong to suggest that there are degrees of stupidity across society as a whole- we are not all equally intelligent. Of course the distinction can be made between being of above-average intelligence and ill-informed, to being of average intellect but being well-informed. I think if anyone on here were to say "90% of the public are idiots" they probably mean "90% of the public don't know what they're talking about", which is accurate, I think.

So many different attributes affect what we'd total up as being 'intelligence', it's unfair to make generalisations , I agree. Maybe some people are frustrated that the 'average' human being isn't as intelligent as they'd like. Is that snobbery though, or just misanthropy?

Marv Orange

90% of mob mentalities are stupid.

Smackhead Kangaroo

Why does it irk though?
Is it just the implicit arrogance? It doesn't sound like it'd be any better re-wording the statement as something like,

90% of people are wrong

or

90% of people have stupid opinions they take as fact.

It's surely not an actual generalisation of numbers but a manner of trying to explain an apparent huge number of instances of stupidity people are witness to, in comparison with presumably a very limited number of cases of inspiring wit.

clareQuilty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentti_Linkola

This guy certainly thinks so.

They may well be stupid, but it doesn't make them any worse than if they were intellectuals. I've known a lot of lovely thickos and plenty of hateful bright sparks.

Maybe the problem is that there are just too damn many of us and that's why there's a lot more kneejerk misanthrophy.

Timmy O'Toole

I hear this argument a lot, and I also pay far too much attention to the media, and BBC's HYS and their ilk and as such I'm consistently suprised at how many people out there aren't moronic racist bigots with a very poor grasp of facts.

mothman

I think it's more a case of, we tend to remember the really stupid ones, they drown out the normal, sensible, and perhaps even quite intelligent majority. The current CBB house is a case in point - you have ultra-stupid person, and three dim sheep - add to that a couple more people people happy to keep quiet lest they become the next targets, and boom - you have a cross section of society that at first glance is mostly made up of fucktards.

micanio

I think that stupid is the wrong word. Ignorant comes closer to it.

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

'90% of people are thick' usually means 'Why aren't more people as informed about this specific subject as I am' doesn't it? It kicks in when we need to feel pissed off. And I think it works the other way - I often find myself indignant that eveyone seems to understand computers better than I do, for example, or that millions of people know how to drive cars without killing a handful of pedestrians every day.

It's easy to look at the Big Brother headlines on news-stands and conclude that most people in the world are fucking morons. But then I also find myself looking at things like...well, bridges, for example, and thinking 'Bloody hell, countless people have the intelligence to design and build these things in the knowledge that they won't fall down - how the fuck do they do that?' and humankind suddenly seems intimidatingly smart.

Neil

Quote from: "Jack Shaftoe"'paste'?

Yeah, when I was starting the thread I vaguely remembered a Morris quote, from a Blue Jam monologue I think.  I'm sure that's what he said.  90% sure.

Quote from: "Smackhead Kangaroo"
Why does it irk though?
Is it just the implicit arrogance? It doesn't sound like it'd be any better re-wording the statement as something like,

90% of people are wrong

or

90% of people have stupid opinions they take as fact.

It's surely not an actual generalisation of numbers but a manner of trying to explain an apparent huge number of instances of stupidity people are witness to, in comparison with presumably a very limited number of cases of inspiring wit.

Good questions/points.  Yes, the implicit arrogance is definitely part of it, but I also think it's just an absolutely meaningless statement.  And that goes for a lot of times when people try to apply a label to an absolutely massive number of people.  I started this thread partly because I want to work out exactly why this bothers me.

Smackhead Kangaroo

10% of all people have intellect?

As an aside- the 'nice thickos / hateful cleverclogs' doesn't sit well with me. Whether someone is nice or not isn't really the issue here is it? Not only is that quite a relative division, there's also the matter of seeing things that a categorised as positive as good and negative as bad (obviously).
Take the criticism that goes on in the Comedy forum. It'd be naive to say that the people were miserable because they were very critical. If anything it's fairly obvious that person X who is extremely easily pleased and loves everything is wrong and very likely stupid as well.

Neil

Quote from: "mothman"I think it's more a case of, we tend to remember the really stupid ones, they drown out the normal, sensible, and perhaps even quite intelligent majority. The current CBB house is a case in point - you have ultra-stupid person, and three dim sheep - add to that a couple more people people happy to keep quiet lest they become the next targets, and boom - you have a cross section of society that at first glance is mostly made up of fucktards.

That's brilliantly put.  Yes, the bad stuff bubbles to the surface, which is another reason why these kinds of statements are so unhelpful and distorted.

And, as Shoulders says, you have to define "stupid" anyway, intelligence is a very broad umbrella.

Blumf

Quote from: "mothman"I think it's more a case of, we tend to remember the really stupid ones, they drown out the normal, sensible, and perhaps even quite intelligent majority.

I'd agree with that, only to add a more general principal that it's easier to cause damage than it is to improve on something, be it buildings or the reputation of a group of people/country.

Still Not George

This entire argument becomes much easier to understand when you realise that 98% of people don't actually exist.

SetToStun

I don't believe that 90% of people are thick or even necessarily ill-informed, but I do believe that 90% of the people who make the most noise are.

50 people fighting outside a club in Romford gets a lot of press. The 8,000 who went to Romford that night and had a good time without glassing anyone don't. Reality TV is skewed towards showing thick, ignorant people because they're more controversial and get higher ratings. Newspapers love to quote the ignorant for the same reason. Basically, we non-thickoes are quite possibly in the majority, but we don't get noticed half so much. It's no surprise that people tend to believe that 90% (or whatever) of the population are dolts, because 90% of the population they see on the news, on reality TV and in their papers are, in fact, thick.

EDIT: It seems that while I was wrestling with MySQL errors popping up when trying to submit my post, mothman said everything I wanted to, only in a slightly more succinct, and therefore elegant, way. The utter cunt.

Smackhead Kangaroo

What about things like the comments on youtube though? And in fact I recall reading someone say that the very content of youtube as well, where among the hundreds of comments/videos there are only a handful that are actually good.
Of course there'll be quite a lot that are just mediocre, but I'd make a harsh division that  a comment like
"Yeah that totally owned" (and the equivalent quality of video) doesn't sit in the middle o ths pectrum it's definitely crap.
I'd be hard pressed to think of anything where I find even a 90% collection of mediocre opinions.

CaB I suppose?

Jack Shaftoe

Oh thanks Neil, sorry I missed the reference.

Neil

Quote from: "Smackhead Kangaroo"What about things like the comments on youtube though? And in fact I recall reading someone say that the very content of youtube as well, where among the hundreds of comments/videos there are only a handful that are actually good.
Of course there'll be quite a lot that are just mediocre, but I'd make a harsh division that  a comment like
"Yeah that totally owned" (and the equivalent quality of video) doesn't sit in the middle o ths pectrum it's definitely crap.
I'd be hard pressed to think of anything where I find even a 90% collection of mediocre opinions.

CaB I suppose?

Heh.  There's an interesting point to be raised there about communication on the internet.  It took me years to understand it properly, even now I'm still learning.  People can appear like raving fuckwits, yet are perfectly pleasant and articulate in real life.  The notion that the internet is a level playing field, and you're judged only on the basis of what you say, rather than the colour of your skin, your age, your gender etc is a nice one, but flawed.  It leaves out the fact that so many gaps are filled in because it's just text.  In other words, I found out last year that people don't just judge you on what you say, but also on what you don't say, and in a much more pronounced way than in real life.  

Your brain is always working in the background trying to fill in details that it can't see, which is the reason I can e.g. get annoyed at a certain type of gereralisation, yet quickly find that I'm making a very similar one myself.

Smackhead Kangaroo

Yes I thought the comments one would bean easy poke but what about the content version of that case?
Also surely the internet loon, who turns mild mannered by day still holds their insane opinion, just that they've hidden their agenda better?
someone makes the 90% claim isn''t excluding the possibility that some n**ger hating misfit can't have an othewise well rounded life are they?

The problem as I see it is that the domain 'people' when disparaged seems to evoke pity where others don't

90% of all modern art is rubbish (I know nothing of art) -no emotive problems (maybe)
90% of all people are stupid

As long as we don't assume the conclusion "and is therefore worthless" at the end of the claim it shouldn't be irksome

MojoJojo

The "90% of people are thick" cliche is also an excellent way of sidestepping any real debate - in an arrogant "anyone who disagrees with me has no worth" type way as well.

In the BB thread for example, there is a sort of implied "90% of people are idiots" in all the hate thrown at Endemol for appealing to the lowest common denominator, but there is no discussion of what the appeal is. And it's appealing to a lot of people posting in that thread too.

I'm getting side tracked into stuff that should probably go in the BB thread too.

Labian Quest

Stereotyping is usually the sign of a lazy, thick or underdeveloped mind (or am I stereotyping there?) it's a mental shortcut, rather than acknowledge the fact that other people are probably as complicated as yourself with all the extra consideration that that entails, it's easier to just reduce them to a neat little stereotype.

It's very easy to slip into it, probably because categorisation is one of the most basic building blocks of human learning and understanding, you create some sort of definition for an object /phenomena/whatever then you apply a label to it, which is fine and very useful if you're talking about furniture or vegetables or something, but it can be a bit of a problem when you're talking about human beings, what with the human brain being the most complicated object in the known universe and everything.

Smackhead Kangaroo

Surely generalisation isn't at fault at all. It's very useful to generalise and use induction. In my experience such and such has occurred and will most likely occur again.
The problem is that we also imply things. Above the implicit conclusion is that our generalisation doesn't exclude the opposite of our experience. With the 90% of all people are stupid, it's only a nuisance when secretly someone says, "and is therefore useless" at the end.
For instance my brother will openly say "Asian people are filthy and don't flush the toilet and can't aim for the bowl" because in his student accomodations, populated largely by asian rude boys who appear to have been mothered to uselessness, he found that it was inevitably the case.

23 Daves

I think part of the problem is also that people have very different ideas about what constitutes intelligence.  I have a few techy and science friends, for example, who regularly tut and roll their eyes about the topics in hand, whining that "most people are so fucking ignorant about this", as if a working knowledge of basic Physics is the absolute benchmark of intelligence.  It's not, obviously.  It's just their benchmark, and of course they're not likely to pick something they're entirely ignorant of as being the foundations for intellectual society, because most of us are naturally quite vain and reticent to do that.

There again, some of these above mentioned people are also rather bigoted and narrow minded in their views of human beings, which causes me to tut and roll my eyes in turn, berating their narrow-mindedness.

It's perfectly possible to have a lot of intelligence (whether general or in one particular field) and yet be suspicious and intolerant of others, in my opinion.  Plenty of people can charm and fascinate and hold down day jobs working in complex fields of medical science and yet still stun you with the observation "and I'll tell you what, I don't trust Muslims".  Fear and intolerance are mental insecurities, really.  Not that this stops them from being slightly loathsome and a lot of hard work to get past.

A lot of people are quite obviously tribal in nature as well, and feel more comfortable not disagreeing with the mainstream consensus for fear they'll be declared unmutual.  They may not be stupid in their own spare time, but they certainly give the impression over under certain circumstances and company.

I've also noticed that the old adage "Better to stay quiet and be thought of as ignorant than open your mouth and remove all doubt" isn't one that people regard highly.  Rather than be left out of conversations on subjects they know little or nothing about, people will sometimes try to chip in idiotic asides.  I used to be terrible for this.  It caused my science friends to roll their eyes.  Which is where I came in.

Smackhead Kangaroo

Has 'reticent' been tossed around here just because fucking Russell Brand used it last night on one of the BB sub programmes incorrectly? Bastard!

23 Daves

Quote from: "Smackhead Kangaroo"Has 'reticent' been tossed around here just because fucking Russell Brand used it last night on one of the BB sub programmes incorrectly? Bastard!

Me copy Russell Brand?  We've only got a county in common, nothing else.

Mister Cairo

I think people expect those they meet to live up to a certain standered, in fact they take it for granted, and when someone does do something stupid (or indeed sing it) they remember it. If I held a door for someone and they thanked me, I'd forget it, as lots of people would do that. If I held a door and someone shouted "I don't want  you holding that door for me because I'm a woman/disabled, I can get the door myself, I'd remember it for most of the day.

Thanks to whoever put the Linkola link (!) in, fascinating. I'm surprised he isn't in favour of a reduced population and breeding for intellengence. Thereby having a world with only a few people, all intelligent, and thereby an even smaller economic niche. Perhaps he's scared of having no-one to look down on.

On YouTube, I wonder how many of those comments people mean, and how many are people trolling? Although trolling is itself pretty witless

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: "Still Not George"I personally find it disappointing that 50% of people are below average. Can't they try harder?

You can tell a lot about a person by what they're like.

zozman

Fuck, where's that from?

Edit - is it Harry Hill?