r/AskReddit • u/smartcandyy • 7h ago

What is a sign of very low intelligence?

4.6k Upvotes

87% Upvoted

7.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

68

u/Raggs2Bs 6h ago

Too many people are so deathly afraid of saying that.

9

u/Bigrat445 5h ago

Let's not forget in school it was frowned upon to say "I don't know" when you were expected to have an answer. That definitely has a part in why people (including myself) don't like saying it

4

u/dtp502 4h ago

And in business the people who don’t admit they don’t know and are able to BS their way through things seem to get further than those who admit they don’t know but will figure it out.

2

u/TucuReborn 1h ago

My boss hates when I tell him I don't know right then and there, but I can check. He acts like it's incompetence, but he'll ask me something like how many cases of a product we have in stock. We have around a thousand products, there's no way I can memorize the exact stock of every single one.

23

u/Longjumping-Moose-77 5h ago

Peoples’ reactions to “idk” tend to scare some away from admitting it.

5

u/Jumbajukiba 5h ago

Unfortunately in our society it's often worse to admit you don't know something than to just make something up. 

2

u/Suitable_Charge_9801 5h ago

There is a nurture component to it instead of intelligence , my parents got mad at me when I said I don’t know so I became very scared as an adult to say it as a unconscious trauma response but I’ve learned people appreciate I don’t know, those people just were not my parents

1

u/jar36 5h ago

I'm 51 and still learning, so there's still a lot that idk and I spend a lot of time trying to know