Why are people idiots when it comes to satire?

[2ma2]

What's wrong with paedophilia?! It has to one of the most foolproof contraceptive methods ever! Of course, if you're gay (and therefore superior to all others) you don't really have to worry about unwanted pregnancy. I can't really see the benefit of children then - they're usually inexperienced and don't know what to do. Leave 'em to Thundercats and find yourself a nice, hunk of a man to stick it into instead.

Oh, don't forget that if you're straight and without a condom, you could also go for the grannies! Ovaries does not only develop, they degenerate. Avoid women between the age of 12 and 72!

These matters can be summed up in a tier chart as well.

[Phemar]

I just finished my degree today btw. So I'm ultra happy. And not a pedo for sure. So yeah, that sentence was a creeper.

I finished mine last week, had graduation

[Dualnames]

I just finished my degree today btw. So I'm ultra happy. And not a pedo for sure. So yeah, that sentence was a creeper.

I finished mine last week, had graduation

Awesome!! Way to go, phems!! 

[Stupot]

Everyone's graduating.  Congrats all

[monkey0506]

I'm somewhat of a prat for dragging it back up..but seriously..I (honestly) think Dual entirely missed the fact that Stupot and Calin were being sarcastic in suggesting that, albeit poorly worded, they actually took such a meaning away from his post..

Yet another prime example of the purpose of this thread!

My answer to the topic question would simply be this: all people are retarded.

Having dealt entirely with jobs (so far in my life) that involve fixing and/or dealing with other people's problems, I feel that I'm somewhat of a professional (expert) in this matter. Statistically speaking, any given individual when presented with something, as Dual so aptly pointed out, that requires "actual brain skills", regardless of education, background, ethnicity, race, origin, religious belief (or lack thereof), sexual preference, age, etc. and so forth, will utterly fail to show what is commonly coined as being an "average" level of understanding or an appropriately "average" response, nevermind something so appallingly outlandish as to exceed "average"!

The problem then is that "average" simply isn't. It's a misnomer. Like "common sense", which isn't common at all..or "common courtesy".

In short, as I said, all people are retarded. Those happy few who actually prove themselves sentient are, unfortunately, the exception to the rule.

[kconan]

Those happy few who actually prove themselves sentient are, unfortunately, the exception to the rule.

And even for those exceptions, I think a modified version of the old saying applies...You can prove yourself sentient to all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't prove yourself sentient to all of the people all of the time.

My new favorite "people are stupid" variation is "few people are sentient". 

[Snarky]

There's an internet truth known as Poe's law: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing." The law easily generalizes from fundamentalism to any ridiculous idiocy.

If you turn monkey's point around, though, you could say that it's not that people are idiots, but that people who know the answer to a task are really bad at predicting how difficult solving the task is for someone who doesn't already know the answer, or at identifying the preconditions that are required to be able to solve it. (Snappy!)

In my field, Human-Computer Interaction, one of the main principles is that it's really hard for developers and designers to put themselves in the users' shoes, because they know too much about the system--stuff that the users don't know, and shouldn't be forced to learn. This means that a lot of things will be "obvious" to the people making the system, but mysterious to the end-users. Hence the mantra of user-centered design: "The user is not like me!" And hence the focus on actually user-testing designs and prototypes, instead of just relying on usability experts and design gurus to spot problems and make good decisions ahead of time. (This also applies to games, BTW. Puzzles that the designer thinks are dead easy may prove impossible to players because the designer never thought of putting in hints that communicate what he or she had in mind. Or the solution s/he was thinking of may cause him/her to overlook other plausible solutions, leaving confusing and frustrating red herrings for players who are forced to read the designer's mind.)

People also tend to think that things are obvious just because they have a lot of training with them. "Intuitive" is just another word for "familiar." And they are usually oblivious to all the little hints that help them solve a task, and all the bits and pieces of knowledge and experience that they are drawing on to solve it. In fact, the more expert someone is at a task, the more difficult it usually is for them to explain how to do it, because it has become an automatic behavior that they don't have to think about. This is one of the things that makes teaching difficult. (I just had a refresher course today on statistics, and even though the material was pretty basic, the lecturer made it incomprehensible by assuming all those things a statistician takes for granted but others aren't used to.)

To return to the topic at hand, studies have shown that people are very bad at detecting tone in internet communication, identifying sarcasm correctly only about 50% of the time in emails. The sender knows what she means, so she fills in tone of voice and other non-verbal cues from imagination, and has a hard time seeing how it could be read any other way. (The same phenomenon leads newspaper journalists into creating unfortunate headlines like "Girls' schools offer something special – head," often known as crash blossoms.)

Of course, YouTube videos do enable tone of voice, but people can still mistake facetiousness for condescension. And there's still the issue that in addressing a global audience, not everyone may share the points of reference that we use to establish something as a joke.

And then of course, some people are just idiots.

[2ma2]

This is turning REALLY interesting. Communicative failures are more or less the most major contributor to heedless violence and or conflict throughout the history. It's surprising we dare to open our jaws at all, but I guess silence would be depicted as a reply as well - and interpreted using the preconceived desires and/or worries of the recipient.

Although, I can see WHY people don't understand what I do or how I do it. I just would like them to not question my work. It usually goes like this:

"But why don't you just do it like this?"
"I'm sorry, that's impossible to create within an appropriate timespan. I have to work within the confines of the medium."
"But I've seen it in several other occasions!"
"..uh, ok, but my reply still stands, you see I-"
"Why don't you just fix it?!"
"How about you take two years worth of system engineering, and then we may discuss these matters again?"

Ok, so the last part is not something I say, but I too often find myself having to EXPLAIN why I do things the way I do. God, one particularly horrible discussion regarded something so silly my mind boggled. I will not go into details, but let me make a simile:

She asked why the pictures in the book wasn't moving. She's seen moving pictures before. Why weren't they moving in the print.

Obviously, it wasn't a book. But her ignorance - to ME - was equivalent. She had no idea of the limits and confines of the desired medium, and her request was as stupid for me as the sentence above. The thing is, as Snarky explained very well above, that we cannot demand the ones who hire us to KNOW our job. But I would do LIKE for them to shut the f**k up and accept my reply. I know my trade. They don't. They should know this. The innovative and revolutionaries are not people ignorant of the limitations - they know them, and know how to abuse them, or how to make a new platform with whole new limits.

[monkey0506]

Snarky, I understand completely the point you were trying to make, and I think that perhaps somewhere between your post and mine would be an accurate depiction of where reality lies. 8)

I'd like more particularly to respond to what you had to say with regard to teaching though. Perhaps it's in my nature to try to help others, or equally possible that I'm simply masochistic and enjoy causing myself unnecessary grief, but especially in the context of these forums I feel a reasonably strong parallel between myself and the scenario you described.

In the 7 years (my word, has it really been that long? ..yes, yes it has..) that I've been here I have tried to give back at least as much as I have taken away, and I have learned a lot about teaching people. There is a fine line between being explanatory and being condescending or patronizing. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to tell where that line is drawn; the problem only being exacerbated by the fact that cliché though it may be, everyone really does learn differently (to some extent). As any person commentating on themselves, I am biased, though I would like to entertain the idea that I keep a reasonable balance between actual skill and understanding of AGS, and the ability to effectively explain how to accomplish said tasks.

I don't mean to sound boastful, but I think it's no small secret that I (amongst several others mind you ) regularly assist users in the technical forums in finding solutions to their (AGS-related ) problems, or at the least, stupid workarounds. When I started with AGS I knew very little (next to nothing) about programming, the AGS program, game development, or most of what anything to do with AGS in any regard was or how to do it. I am, as they say, "self-taught", which largely means that I have asked lots of questions and been given a lot of answers. Over time I learned how to find answers without having to directly ask, and eventually reached a point where I understood enough to start answering questions myself.

To me this has always been the best reinforcement for learning, to teach someone else how to do it.

In any case, the point behind all this is that if you want to be able to teach someone how to do something you have to understand two essential things: 1) how to do or accomplish the task, and 2) what it's like to not have an understanding of point 1 (presumably, just remembering what it was like before you learned for yourself). This isn't always easy, as you've pointed out, when the doing becomes routine without the opportunity to share that experience with someone else in the form of teaching them about it.

So be it poor communication skills, poor communication medium, or simply poor.."not-being-an-idiot"..skills, it's not always easy to get ideas across in today's world without someone, somewhere finding a way to misconstrue it in the absolute worst, most convoluted way conceivable..and you should never underestimate the power of idiots in large numbers.

[LUniqueDan]

Sounds like another variation of the Poe's law .

[LRH]

Sounds like another variation of the Poe's law .

Essentially yes, but I thought the blatant display of humor part was there.