To clarify here, I don’t feel like I’m significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying “facts.”
To clarify here, I don’t feel like I’m significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying “facts.”
Yeah, “stupid” is not defined around average intelligence. This whole panel is an example of a straw man fallacy to undermine someone saying “people are stupid”.
Sure, “stupid” isn’t defined around average intelligence, but “people” is defined around the average person. So, by saying “stupid” is not defined around average intelligence, you’re really criticizing the phrase “people are stupid”…
…which is exactly what this comic is doing
Saying “people are stupid” is the same as saying “the average person is stupid”. What’s hard to understand here?
Frankly, that is just a big pile of babble.
There’s no “definition” here. The closest to what you said that would make some sense would be “but “people” implies a generalisation around the average person”, but it doesn’t work in your argument because it does not contradict what BananaTrifleViolin said. Nor it justifies your assumption that
I genuinely think that you did not understand what the other poster said, so I’ll repeat it under different words.
The comic has an implicit definition of stupidity as “lower than average intelligence” (see panel 2).
BananaTrifleViolin is highlighting that this is not the definition that people use for “stupid” when they say “people are stupid”. And that leads to a fallacy called “straw man”, where you misrepresent a position to beat it. Munroe (the cartoonist) is doing this, either by accident or on purpose. (It is not the first time he does this; his comic about free speech also shows the same irrationality.)