#1 Too Busy To “Ackshually” To Appreciate A Joke, Only To Then Incorrect Them
The 'I Am Very Smart' community was founded way back in 2013, and it's one of the longest-existing veterans on Reddit. The moderators, even though they encourage poking fun at people who try to sound smart too hard, nonetheless don't tolerate anyone sharing any identifying information. The content's supposed to be about fun while indirectly celebrating actual critical thinking and intellectualism.
Moderator Thumbs0fDestiny was very open about the fact that the main draw of the 'I Am Very Smart' community is revealing someone else's blunder when, instead, people should be humble and succinct. In other words, the sub's popularity comes from one of the most human things ever, the joy that we get from seeing someone else fail or get humiliated, called schadenfreude.
Or, in their own words, as the mod went in character, pretending to be one of the people the community likes to laugh at: "Every day across the internet, people comment some of the most braggadocious drivel anyone could ever hope to hear, and they do so with such confidence and disregard for logic that it sometimes transcends the bounds of the page it's written on and becomes art. We collect those masterpieces of magniloquence and put them all in one easy-to-find location where people can come and talk and laugh about the cockalorum character that wrote them. What's not to love?"
"I've talked to NASCAR fans before who say they don't go for the race, they go for the crash. When one goes to the circus and sees the man put his head in a lion's mouth, somewhere inside oneself, they kinda want to see the lion chomp down. That's what you get, in the intellectual sense, when you come to r/IAmVerySmart," moderator Thumbs0fDestiny said, getting serious once again.
Meanwhile, community member OneGoodRib (loving these user names, by the way), point-blank said that people love laughing at others and there's less guilt if we all poke fun at the "chumheads" who are the targets of the subreddit. "I don’t feel nearly as bad about having a laugh about someone being pretentious as I do about laughing at, say, people who are dressed really poorly in public."
In OneGoodRib's opinion, some people are "super insecure" about their intelligence and believe that being smart is the most important thing in the world. That's why they're willing to sacrifice anything just to make others believe their IQs are hitting Super Saiyan power levels (even if it backfires... magnificently). "It’s okay that they don’t have friends, or talents, or accomplishments, as long as they just keep telling people they’re super smart. And of course some humans are just smug [jerks], it just happens that the people in this sub are smug about being smart rather than smug about motorcycles or veganism."
Nobody's a stranger to not wanting to sound like a fool, however. We've all been in situations where we end up regretting coming off stupid. However, the 'VerySmart(TM)' that are featured on the r/IAmVerySmart community overcorrect in these situations way, way, beyond the norm.
"There's a lot of id involved in the VerySmartTM commenters we feature. They seem to have much of their self-esteem tied up in the (mis)conceptions of their own intelligence, or the person they're talking to, depending on the circumstance. Who knows why," Thumbs0fDestiny mused. "Perhaps it's because everyone views themselves as the hero of their own story, and some people prefer playing the intellectual to the athlete."
They also had other ideas about why some folks try so hard to seem intelligent: "Maybe it's because they are actually of above-average intelligence and their life's circumstances have led to them being right so often, they now just take it for granted, and then we just happen to catch them when that assumption bites them on the ass. Or maybe the person views intelligence as a weapon, a status symbol that must be flaunted for its own sake."
At the end of the day, everyone's desire to sound smart can be as unique and varied as there are different individuals in the world. Most likely, it's a mix of many small, different reasons, the main one probably being that we've evolved to depend on our social group where reputation is everything... and being someone who's looked up to can mean the difference between a life of luxury and being an outcast who has to fend for themselves. However, our 'tribes' aren't dumb: they know when someone's desperately pretending to be someone better than they are.
