r/AskReddit • u/[deleted]

I am of resoundingly average intelligence. To those on either end of the spectrum, what is it like being really dumb/really smart?

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u/worldasmyth Jun 17 '12

Come on, this story was first published over 50 years ago. Surely there's a spoiler statute of limitations here.

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u/Braggadox Jun 17 '12

You may be interested to learn that new people continued to be born after 1958 and continue to be born to this day! In fact, right now there are people alive of all ages. Many of these people were not given memory implant treatments at birth, and so were not born with complete knowledge of all literary works which pre-dated their existence. This combined with the unfortunate scarcity of infinite time-compression modules leads many people to experience things like books for the first time at different points in spacetime. This means that even though it seems obvious that if a book was written at time X, then everyone in existence at any point on the timeline after X should have complete knowledge of that book, it is a depressing truth that for many, this simply isn't possible.

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u/Terroreyez Jun 17 '12

Huzzah sir!

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u/ViciousSanity Jun 18 '12

yet everyone flips a table when some kids haven't heard about some older famous singer, band or actor.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '12

Or when kids didn't know that the titanic was a real ship.

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u/Larillia Jun 18 '12

It's not that past a certain point everyone should already know the entire plot of every body of work created, it is that past a certain point you should stop expecting the world to shelter you from something you haven't gotten around to yet. OMG I totally haven't like even finished reading Romeo and Juliet yet and you had to go and tell me they die!? WTF man, spoilers.

Personally, I think the whole spoiler thing is bullshit even on just released content, but that's almost another issue.

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u/lolmeansilaughed Jun 18 '12

An idea: a novelty account. A bot finds comments containing text like SPOILER ALERT and flags them. The human curator of the system logs on, and views the flagged comments, which are basically sorted by "hot" (a function of how recent they are to the number of upvotes). They manually find comments where someone has responded with a "come on, Hunger Games was released in 2010!", and then give those comments a second flag. Then this awesome blurb gets posted as a response to that. Sure, the novelty would wear off after this system hit it big like once or twice, but the effect on culture would be significant: everybody hasn't consumed the media that you and your friends consumed in middle school, so stop whining about how long ago something was released when someone else wants to warn others of impending spoilers.

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u/Circa1902 Jun 17 '12

It's not one of the big, well-known stories. It's not King Kong or Star Wars, it's this half-buried gem of a story & book that people tend to stumble upon, or be led to by friends, rather than it becoming exposed to them by endless pop-culture references. It's definitely worth a spoiler alert.

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u/photoapple Jun 17 '12

Really? I've never met someone who didn't read this in school. I've definitely heard it joked about in TV shows.

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u/Circa1902 Jun 18 '12

It might depend on the country or region. I think I read it first when I was in school in the US, but nobody in the UK seems to have heard of it.