I have an office job that entails a lot of interaction with people who in the construction industry, small business owners, developers, bankers, etc. I’m too androgynous for my employers to feel comfortable with letting me meet people in person (thank god) so most of it is through email or phone calls. They all vary in education and income; some have PhDs, some never finished high school, some are rich as fuck, some are struggling to get by. Most of them are local but I work with quite a few people from different parts of the country.
There’s something that is common between a lot of these people, maybe even the vast majority, is that they cannot do extremely simple tasks or understand simple concepts, even when I try to explain them visually (like I’ll share a spreadsheet with them and go through each individual thing I’m doing to show them what I mean). Very few of them get it. I’m not particularly smart or amazing at math or anything, but I’d like to think I can understand simple instructions. Sign this, add these numbers, make this match this. I can’t imagine what it’s like working in retail if the average person is this dumb.
Joke answer- we are dumb.
Serious answer- a mixture of both. We are stupid, but everyone is arrogant about some things. Whether from lack of knowledge (most likely your case) or from a purposeful ignorance.
Americans are pretty fucking stupid, yes. I have multiple friends who graduated from one of the top 10 universities in the country with various MScs, yet most of them haven’t read a book for pleasure in 10+ years. One of them, admittedly the dumbest one out of our group, once seriously asked “What was Woodrow Wilson famous for…? Never heard of them” as we were crossing the Woodrow Wilson Bridge in DC.
It is incredibly easy in this country to get by on personality and the outward perception of intelligence - as long as you’re white (which, btw, everyone I am thinking about that I mentioned is white lmao).
I bet you’d feel pretty dumb if you had to learn a new data process as well. It’s not necessarily that adding numbers is hard for them, just understanding the semantics of the columns, why you’re doing what you’re doing, and so on.
I could probably write what your spreadsheet does in 20 lines of Python and the part in question would just be a + b. But if I told you to repeat it or modify it for a new situation, would you get it all the first time? Would you need repeated explanations? Is it my job or your job to know this stuff? Etc etc
Construction, yes. I can attest from experience that it is an industry for fuck ups and the down trodden
