Everyone has different ideas of what a dumb person is, but what are some things that make you think someone is dumb?

[Anonymous]

[contentious]

The English word dumb technically means "lacking the power of speech" which in Old English referred to a person that was "mute". The meaning of the word was forked under the notion that people who do not speak, do so because they are unable to respond out of ignorance or incomprehension. Thus, the word took on the meaning "Conspicuously unintelligent; stupid". I guess people use to shut their mouth when they didn't know what the hell they were talking about, but today that's not really the case. Unintelligent people spout off loudly all day everyday. They record their unintelligent rants on video and post them on YouTube and then share them on social media. So the notion of dumb in general is broken due to people's abundant narcissism. People love their own bullshit so much, they need to see it echoed everywhere they go. They are so unintelligent, they don't even know that they should be dumb. They surpassed being dumb and devolved to a new state of existence, which probably needs a new word to describe their behavior.

That out of the way, if you mean what makes me think someone is unintelligent I would say it comes down to if they are reasonable or not. People that are unreasonable are unintelligent. The higher your capacity for logical, rational, and analytical thinking, the more intelligent you tend to be and the better judgment you exhibit. If you believe something, why do you believe it? What is your evidence? How does it compare to the counter evidence? Have you even considered that, or do you not know why you hold your beliefs? Intelligent people know what they believe and why. When you challenge them, they have loads of evidence to back up their position which often makes them rather persuasive. When you encounter unintelligent people, most of the time they do not know why they hold their beliefs. They have no evidence and often parrot propaganda. They often use circular reasoning that they have been indoctrinated into.

On on surface level you can often notice that people are unintelligent because they argue illogical irrational positions and follow illogical ideological belief systems. Philosophically to travel down an intelligent path, you could start with Aristotle the father of logic and the interpretations of his ideas by Thomas Aquinas which was a major figure of Scholasticism. Intelligent people are going to learn right? Often that means they are going to attend schools to entertain the ideas of knowledge. For those that are more interested in spirituality, that would lead you to modern Christian Apologetics. For those more concerned with the physical world it would lead you to Empiricism and into the Natural Sciences (e. g. biology, chemistry, physics, etc.) and implementation of the sciences through engineering disciplines. For those focused on politics, it would lead you to Classical Liberalism. For those concerned with money it would lead to Capitalism and so on. There are logical schools of thinking which have been successful, and schools of thought that attempt to counter logic which are irrational and mystic that have lead to countless cultural disasters and endless human suffering. So when people espouse the wrong sorts of ideas, it's easy to notice they are unintelligent. When they pursue the right sorts of ideas, then you need to dig deeper into how they think to determine how intelligent they really are, and to discover how well they link knowledge and form new ideas through creative genius. The "dumb" people fall for the unintelligent ideas that lead to failure. They have poor judgement. They have no basis for their beliefs. They emotionally cling to rhetoric that contrasts evidence and they run around in circular logic trying to justify their position...

[itsannalee]

Poor people who can’t afford a kid but still have multiple kids.

[Anonymous]

[jahaims]

They lack awareness