[PragmaticPulp]

> I don't think this attitude is helpful - it's going to leak out in your interactions and poison relationships.

Strongly agree. Keeping ourselves humble and remembering that nobody is infallible is important.

However, taking it to the extremes this article suggests (“Everyone is stupid”) is exactly the mindset that leads people to ignore experts, discount research, and promote their own feelings above the science.

The mindset is great for an ego boost because it’s an easy way to take everyone else down a notch and make everyone feel more or less equal. But when it comes to individual topics, everyone is definitely not equally informed. Pretending they are is a mistake.

The real skill is learning to identify who to trust and who to dismiss. It’s easy to mistake confidence and slick presentation or even angry contrarianism for being right these days, but learning how to look past that is very important. Putting blinders on and telling yourself that “everyone is stupid” is not a good way to do it.

[peoplefromibiza]

> Strongly agree. Keeping ourselves humble and remembering that nobody is infallible is important.

That's not how it works in real life from my experience.

I usually assume everyone is stupid, including myself, that's the most humble thing a person can do IMO.

But what actually happens is that other people assume that I am the only one who's stupid, because I'm open about the possibility, while they don't even consider it a thing.

It's a well known human bias, there's almost nothing we can do about it, except train or minds to see others and ourselves as fallible, instead of victims of the system.

[shadowfox]

> I usually assume everyone is stupid, including myself, that's the most humble thing a person can do IMO

It seems strange that the most humble thing you can do is to assume everyone else is stupid (even if you were to include yourself in to that mix)

[peoplefromibiza]

if you thing you are stupid and everyone else is just like you - more or less- you're being humble IMO.

If you assume you're smarter than everybody else, you're being arrogant, if you assume everybody else is smarter than you, you're insecure.

Assuming everyone is stupid is the same thing that assuming that everybody is smart.

If everybody is smart, smart must be a common trait, nobody is special.

Someone can still be smarter or less smart than you.

But on average assuming we're all on the same level is not bad.

Except if you assume that everyone is smart, people will think that they are the only one being really smart

The bias works differently in the two cases: of course XKCD got this right (the XKCD guy is way smarter than me)

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sheeple.png