I'm really trying not to do that. I'm trying to understand something I don't understand. But a few here seem to chalk it up to this, so we're exploring that as well.
Well then you might want to take the time to understand that you're in a bubble. Not just you... We all are.
This board skews higher IQ than the general public. Not just that we're pretty much all college-educated, but we also self-select to be the type of people that talk about things--sometimes trivial but sometimes quite complex--on an internet message board.
Where you work, teaching school, basically everyone there has to be credentialed. Meaning they not only were accepted to a college, they made it through, got teaching certificates, survive ongoing education, etc. Which means that amongst the people you work with, they will skew above average IQ and will have a sort of natural filter keeping out the true dolts.
Where I work, I think it skews higher. If I look around at the 4th floor of my office where I work, it wouldn't surprise me if the average IQ is a full standard deviation above mean. It'll sound douchey to say this, but one of the things I love about where I work is the opportunity to talk to people smarter than me. It's not something I find in the general day-to-day life very often. But even though not everyone here is some sort of super-genius, we also have a natural filter--someone of merely
average IQ won't likely get a foot in the door, and if they do, won't last long here.
In our personal lives, we often cluster around people similar to ourselves. Which means we've largely filtered out people in our friend group that aren't "like us".
It's a bubble.
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So I might say that if you take the distribution of people who are wide-eyed at a Buc-ees grand opening, I might be disparaging them, but I think the average IQ might actually be below national median.
But even if the distribution perfectly matches the US distribution--it's still lower than this peer group of CFB51 members, of the teachers and friends you hang out with, and of the coworkers and peer group that the rest of us deal with.
If you try to apply your own preferences and thought processes to people who aren't like you, it's going to be hard to understand what they do and why, sometimes.
