An idiot is "an intellectually disabled person, or someone who acts in a self-defeating or significantly counterproductive way". Does not seem to fit the definition.
This is egalitarian nonsense. Most people are not geniuses ever.
Idiocy is also not synonymous with ignorance or foolishness.
"An idiot differs from a fool (who is unwise) and an ignoramus (who is uneducated/an ignorant), neither of which refer to someone with low intelligence."
"[Moron] was once applied to people with an IQ of 51–70, being superior in one degree to "imbecile" (IQ of 26–50) and superior in two degrees to "idiot" (IQ of 0–25)."
Ironically, years ago, moron would be the correct technical term to refer to a flat-earther.
If you're going to be "picky", please be picky about something you understand. A "small amount of/incorrect knowledge" is ignorance, not a lack of intelligence. When you label someone an idiot you're not talking about his lack of knowledge. You're talking about his intelligence.
Now, if by "idiots" he means "ignorant people" then he's using the word incorrectly. But there's no actual indication that's what he meant. At some point you just have to assume people mean what they say.
And despite what people want to believe, the last fifty years of psychometrics research indicates there really is such a thing as "basic intelligence" (which they call "g"), and people with more of it do better on a wide range of intellectual tasks. So you really can say "person1 intelligence > person2 intelligence".
Claiming someone is an "idiot" is not brutal honesty.
Are you claiming that you think they have low IQ, or what exactly are you being brutally honest about?
What is even definition of an idiot for you?
This word only exists as a tool to either manipulate or shame or simply live out your emotional rage, it's not about brutal honesty. It's not about being truthful or even trying to understand the truth.
Generally, if someone calls someone else an "idiot", I can give benefit of the doubt few times if this happens, okay it's an emotional outburst, but otherwise I would lose trust in their general resolve.
The initial meaning of the Greek word "idiot" was reserved for persons not interested and non-participating in political process, especially elections.
The original, ancient, meaning of the word "idiot" was "private person", i.e. a selfish, narrow-minded, ignoramus unconcerned with (and unsuited for) public life. Not "stupid person".
We tend to conflate this first type of "idiot" (selfish person, unsuited to hold power) with "constitutionally stupid" and it gets us into all kinds of trouble. The people in power are idiots in the first sense of the word (unsuited to hold power, narrow-minded, provincial, etc.) but they are not unintelligent. In fact, they're quite cunning and adept when it comes to holding power (those who aren't, don't last) and taking it from them is much harder than we expect it to be. They turn out to be just as smart as we are, but their intelligence is applied to getting and keeping power rather than whatever we claim to value (e.g. making the world better). This makes them formidable opponents, and we underestimate them at our peril. To crib from Paul Graham's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular", they spent all their energies on becoming popular while we spent ours on being smart and getting right answers. (Where Graham is wrong: "the adult world" is far more like high school than he admits. You have to be rich to get out of high-school-esque drama and into the utopia he mistakes for the whole adult world.)
All that said, we're right (in technology, and in the arts) when we point out that society is corrupt and run by people who are generally out of their depth and unconcerned with general social advancement, aesthetics, or doing the right thing. It's not that they lack the genetic ability or "IQ"-- they're plenty bright enough, hardware-wise-- but that they're lazy and self-interested. We're wrong when we (as technologists) assert some tribal superiority, like we wouldn't make the same mistakes, just because we have higher IQs. History doesn't support this claim; it refutes it. Venture capital is a feudalistic, relationship-based business. Most of the companies we've built in the past 20 years have god-awful cultures. Silicon Valley (the physical place) is an overpriced lack-of-taste writ large. We mock "the paper belt" while failing to realize that we've created a worse one. We've mindlessly chased "efficiency" while failing to answer the most important question: what should we do with the value thus created? Hence, instead of curing cancer or coming up with an environmentally sound energy alternative, we're stuck helping businessmen unemploy people.
Not an idiot. "Less knowledgeable about details of how a country other than your own was governed more than a century ago" does not deserve the label "idiot".
had a similar thought the other day, but I couldn't put it into words.
It crossed my mind that the word "idiot" in Ancient Greek meant to describe someone who was not involved in public affairs in a derogatory way. It must have evolved into the current meaning not by sheer coincidence: well, idiots, as in its current sense, used not to take part in public affairs.
My hunch is that, after WWI, not having a strong opinion when it came to politics was too much a giveaway of someone being poor or uneducated — traits usually associated with the stereotypical 20th-century idiot, especially in prosperous societies. Then, people simply started to fake it.
A blind spot of this coping mechanism that has been carried on to this day is that, although there is no reason to assume that true idiots have no access to education and capital in the current days, people still assume that this is the case.
So, politicians and the elites cannot be considered dumb anymore; they must have ulterior motives. If their intelligence is ever called into question, it is always in the dubious sense that Umberto Eco warned us about in his essay "Ur-Fascism."
It only scratches the surface of my thoughts, but, well, I think I understand what the author means.
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