It’s goes even further than that. Most people tend to overestimate the average person’s understanding of the world.
If you’re seriously discussing anything STEM-related, you already likely have an above average understanding of the world for most populations.
That’s not to say those below the 50% are dumb - that’d be like saying a fish is dumb for not being able to fly. But it does mean that the traditional, academic model of teaching that society uses to judge intelligence doesn’t work for all people.
Every time in hire someone to do something in the house, I’m amazed at how GOOD they are. Like, one guy carpeted my entire 2 floor half-spiral stairs in 6 hours, including lunch. His toolkit was 1 knife, 1 pencil and 4 sheets of paper. My only possible explanation is dark magic, because that would take me a week, enough paper to make a perfect copy of every step, and 25% more carpet.
Exactly what I mean. I have a fair understanding of most science and technology related topics, and I’m confident enough in electronics to make minor repairs on my own devices - but I could not tell you jackshit about carpentry.
That’s a completely dark art to me, and not one that you can really learn in the academic sense. It has to be learned vocationally.
One of the more interesting statistics I ran into was who was a victim of affinity crime. The top victims are the elderly as their cognitive abilities decline with age.
The theorized second highest was the highly educated. Experts in one field that overestimate their ability to make correct decisions in another. It’s only theorized from the testimony from criminals as the victims rarely come forward.
The education system today at advanced levels is extremely specialized. To be honest the shear quantity of information sort of forces the issue. Every person has a limit to how much information they can retain and process. So becoming an complete expert in many subjects (polymath) is extremely difficult and rare. The specialist often vastly overestimate the general public understanding of their field, but also vastly overestimate their understanding of other fields.
What’s ironic is that the general public understands being “smart” as being a polymath. If your are smart about one thing you should understand everything.
