My first month at Amazon someone reported me for laughing at them…I didn’t even know they existed, on the other end of the open floor. I was laughing at something completely unrelated.
That made me really think about how fragile and toxic people can be.
Another Amazonian almost got fired for reacting with a monkey covering eyes emoji to a post shared by a black person (no malintent, of course, just an innocent “mistake” most normal people wouldn’t even think twice about).
Ignorance is when you don’t know something. Stupidity is when you think you know something and are presented with evidence to the contrary, but you dismiss it because of something stupid (i.e., irrational).
Of course, all these words have some overlap. My larger point is, people rarely come to rational conclusions organically, and it takes decades to centuries for even the most empirically verifiable idea to permeate, especially in the face of misinformation campaigns or when against “common sense”.
People are stupid, always have been - took thousands of years to accept brain as the seat of thought because “heart beat faster when excited, means heart is source of excitement”.
Heck, people literally used to think eyes are the source of light since everything is dark when you close them.
People are immensely, incredibly, unimaginably stupid. It has taken a lot of miracles put together to get us where we are now…but the fundamentals of what we are haven’t changed.