Hundreds Of People Just Had To Share The Stupidest Things They’d Ever Seen An Intelligent Human Do, And Here Are 50 Of The Best Ones

To be smart and to be intelligent may seem like the same exact thing. However, according to Difference101, intelligence is the ability to learn, while smartness is the ability to apply what has been learned. Just because you’re carrying around a lot of information doesn’t necessarily make you a genius if you can’t then apply it. 

However, sometimes we’re faced with situations where neither intelligence nor smartness does any good, and a pure sense of dumbness takes over. Such moments were described by hundreds in the online community of r/AskReddit after user SnooTomatoes1254 asked this: “What’s the best example of a smart person being incredibly stupid you’ve ever experienced?” 

Intelligence as a whole is a very interesting thing when we take a second to think about it. Each and every one of us is better at one thing than another, and according to Howard Gardner, a psychologist and professor at Harvard University, there are eight types of human intelligence, each representing different ways of how a person best processes information.

They are spatial intelligence (the ability to think abstractly and in multiple dimensions), bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, musical intelligence, linguistic intelligence, logical-mathematical intelligence, interpersonal intelligence (the ability to interact effectively with others), intrapersonal intelligence (sensitivity to one’s own feelings, goals, and anxieties), and naturalistic intelligence (the ability to understand the nuances in nature).

When we gain a deeper understanding of our natural talents, we have a better chance of figuring out how to achieve goals in both our personal and professional lives, and this is why this is so important to consider. Yet, in the middle of all these different types of intelligence stand two that we are most familiar with: street smarts and book smarts. 

According to Ed Butts, a person who has book smarts is someone who is intelligent and well-educated academically, but less knowledgeable and capable when it comes to handling important or immediate decisions in practical situations common to everyday life or “the streets.” One is not inherently worse or better than the other; they’re just different ways that people learned how to problem solve. 

Regardless of all these bits of intelligence available to us, we still make some of the worst mistakes ever. Like putting cream in a carbonara—the Italians hate you for that. But there is a difference in the types of mistakes we make, or rather, what pushes us to make them in the first place. 

The Austrian novelist Robert Musil presented an idea in 1937 that stupidity was not mere ‘dumbness,’ not a brute lack of processing power. Dumbness, for Musil, was ‘straightforward,’ indeed almost ‘honorable’. Stupidity was something very different and much more dangerous: dangerous precisely because some of the smartest people, the least dumb, were often the most stupid.

According to Sacha Golobis, a reader in philosophy at King’s College London, stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job, which results in an inability to make sense of what is happening, therefore leading to more than questionable actions. 

He believes that stupidity is based on a lack of the necessary intellectual equipment and a sense of misguided innovation, which roots from groups or traditions, not individuals. After all, we get most of our concepts, our mental tools, from the society we are raised in! According to Golobis, once stupidity has taken hold of a group or society, it is particularly hard to eradicate—inventing, distributing, and normalizing new concepts is tough work.

Combatting stupidity will typically require the construction of a new way of seeing ourselves and our world. But that takes effort, time, and a complex organization of thought since, as Dr. Donalee Markus states, complex problems are dynamic systems with interdependent variables that may or may not be knowable and can change over time. 

That’s enough ‘smart’ speak for one day. As you continue scrolling through this list, make sure you’re upvoting your favorites, leaving comments along the way, and sharing your own not-so-smart experiences. Have a good one, and see you next time!