Have you ever met an actual dumb person?

I don't think we've met yet.

I can't get away from the idiot. I have to see him in the mirror every morning.

As far as a funny story: My friends brother isn't very bright sometimes. My friends computer chair broke, one of the 5 metal supports that lead out to the plastic wheels snapped. My friends brother was learning how to weld so he tried to fix the support and in trying to test the strength of the weld he started bashing the seat against the floor and broke every plastic wheel... lol

It's incredible how easy it is to remain in a bubble. Family, friends, neighbors, college, work colleagues - all are going to be closer to you than the average person.

Anyone who has worked retail, customer service, or otherwise general public-facing jobs will have this put in perspective pretty quickly.

Yes bro. I work a customer facing job and drive in traffic. I encounter morons every day.

Not every low IQ person is the same, but generally they are just frustrating to deal with and need a lot of slow, extra handholding. If you give them a paper with directions/explanations, they're not going to read it and try to understand it. They're going to ask you to explain it, and they may just give up on trying to understand it. If you need them to look something up and figure it out for themselves, they just won't. If there's a consequence, they don't modify their behavior or seem to care. They'll do what they'll do, and whatever happens after will happen after. They operate through the world with really poor understandings of everything that goes on around them, and it doesn't bother them. Someone else will tell them what to do.

I didn't meet anyone that would fit on the left half of the bell curve (less than 100 iq).

I promise you that you have. I don't care what industry you worked in. You were vastly overestimating a lot of people.

I worked in a call center that involved a lot of repeat calls as a matter of course. Most were elderly, some had mental issues. We had some characters for sure. A lot of people who clearly didn't have access to a good education growing up, or who burned their brains out on drugs when they were younger, or who were literally high right then and there.

But of course! One I know well. He's a very friendly and likable person, and never judges anyone. He has a large social circle, a steady job doing manual tasks. He has a delightful longtime girlfriend. But he can't grasp abstract concepts, or any but the simplest logical concepts. He hides any lack of understanding with a quick joke, but is highly susceptible to propaganda.

Indeed, contact with the public will do it quickly.

I work with a long list of clients at my work who seem to lack any type of critical thinking skills whatsoever, a significant fraction of them are apparently functionally illiterate, and a shocking number of them are actually incapable of understanding abstract concepts. These people cruise through life just as happy as you please, at least until they run up against some frustration that they can't understand at which point their default response is typically to get violently angry, and as an outside observer it's equal parts fascinating and deeply troubling. I can't imagine existing that way. Being unable even to read, and with every new concept or technology being an inscrutable puzzle box so terrifying that your only recourse is to scream and tantrum and threaten until someone else comes along and makes it go away.

And yet, most of these same stupid people are highly derisive of smart people. This notwithstanding that without these purported nerds, geeks, Poindexters, and wimps they'd be freezing in the dark as they starved to death. Somehow they've managed to get jobs, afford cars and mortgages, and they're allowed to vote, procreate, and even buy guns. It's enough to make me never want to leave my IT dungeon or, perhaps, never return from the mountains. But I have to, so here I am.

I interact with truly stupid people on a daily basis. I could tell you all some whoppers from my time in the trenches.

Education and employment level do not preclude stupidity. I too work in stem. I have had antivax colleagues.

TIL that dumb is defined as having scored less than 100 IQ.

Anyway, I've worked enough customer service to say with some confidence that I've met at least a few people who truly just exist and let the world happen to them with zero curiosity.

Yes, I knew someone when I worked in retail who was quite dumb, she was a super sweet person though.

I realized how dumb she was when we encountered a mouse in the back stocking area. It crawled under the door and out to the back of the building. She turned to me and said “I heard the reason mice can crawl under doors like that is because they don’t have any bones”

Me being a biology major with a big interest in all things animals and insects that loves to educate people tried to correct her. I told her about how all mammals have bones and that mice were just very flexible to be able to fit under the gap in the door. I told her about how we used to dissect owl pellets when I was in 3rd grade and put the little skeletons back together. She did not believe me and still thought mice just don’t have bones.

I do sometimes wonder if she ever finished nursing school.

I spent 20 minutes (I timed it) on the phone diagnosing a tech support issue and instructing the user on how to fix it. It took about 10 seconds for me to realise that number lock was turned off.

The rest of the 20 minutes was trying to get the user to find and press "Num lock" on the keyboard.

About 10 minutes in, they actually found and pressed it. Apon noticing that nothing had appeared on the screen, they tried pressing it again, then announced it didn't work.

Somehow, just getting them to press the button one more time was not simple, as they now had to begin their logical left-to-right scan of the keyboard again to find this mysterious new "Num lock" button they'd never heard of before.

This person (on another call) would say the name of each key as they pressed it. They would say "Caps lock, A, Caps lock, Enter" when typing a single "A" on a line, but didn't know what "Caps lock" was and couldn't find it on the keyboard when asked to press it immediately after having said and pressed it.

Ive known several MAGA people.

One in particular stands out, she was in charge of processing bills for our company, and she basically got all her propaganda from fox news. The company is/was a civil engineering firm (I no longer work there), we specialized partly in large municipal water projects, dams, water infrastructure, injection wells, large scale stormwater percolation, reservoirs etc.

During the big California wildfires (when firefighters kept not getting water out of the hydrants), the head engineer and the lead technical engineer held one of their once-a-month training lunches, and they decided to go over the California wildfires and the effects on the water infrastructure.

This lady stands up, and interrupts the lead technical engineer (who was going over flow/pressure/friction equations to show why hydrants ran dry when there was so much demand), to insist that the reason California is running out of water is that "Newsom drained the reservoir to protect some stupid fish" and other fox news idiocy. Spent a solid 5 minutes trying to tell a bunch of civil engineers a bunch of "information" about water systems that was so hilariously wrong that it was actually impressive.

That was a very awkward few minutes while HR tried to tell this lady that she needs to let the engineers actually learn how to do the job.