People thinking American's are stupid.
 

They may have a point.

*Not meant as racism, just slightly shocking*

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

I'm sure if you walked around London or Sydney and asked the same question you'd get just as many people giving stupid answers. I wonder how many hours of correct answers they have to cut for each wrong answer ?

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

"I'm a little mixed up between the Palestinians and Israelis, which ones are the ones throwing the rocks ?" is brilliant though.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

that is really long and doesn't really show anything except some people in America are ignorant. If you did it in any other country it would probably be the same. It would be cool if a proper survey was carried out arcross the world (highly improbable and impracticle) to see which country had the highest and lowest marks. though this still probably wouldn't mean very much.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

It was slightly amusing though heh.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

it truly was amusing.
As an American, myself, I do know that ignorance is present, and as much as it appauls me, i have to deal with it.

But u have to realize that these people WENT OUT OF THEIR WAY to get as much bullshit on this vid as possible... i mean, common... who goes to texas to get american oppinion !? Not to be messed up, but they still hit people over the head with a brick for Death Penalty. (and yes, texas does still have death penalty)

They should have done it in my town.

lol @ australia's prime minister

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Clearly they didn't edit out the correct answers people gave.

But yeah, a lot of Americans are stupid.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Not really shocking.

Most americans doesnt read books. In fact, a tiny minority read books (I think it's 8% or something).
Most americans doesnt even score well on test on american history.
When they have asked americans about where Iraq and Afghanistan is, after several years of war, a majority has not been able to correctly identify it on a map.

You will find plenty of ignorent people in europe too, but probably a smaller percentage.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Ten seconds of googling would have shown you that estimate is wildly inaccurate. You make yourself appear ignorant with such nonsense.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

I know English isn't your first language, but this kind of statement always makes me smile.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

The figure was used by participents at a debate on americans and book reading (the participents were all americans themselfs).
The point isnt the number, but that its quite few who read books.
(what is the definition off a book for instance)

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

From dictionary.com

"a written or printed work of fiction or nonfiction, usually on sheets of paper fastened or bound together within covers."

A story perhaps? Begining, middle & end?

Or does that 8% consider an instruction manual to a deep fat fryer a "book"? It is probably bound with covers and provides information to the reader.

However, I believe it is just a matter of scale. Take the UK & the USA. The UK mostly likely has relatively the same ammount of thick people in proportion to it's population. However you then have to factor in quality of education, living etc.. Thus getting to the more user friendly conclusion that the world is full of thick people.

I found it ammusing that the American's made a news artical calling themselves stupid and setting out to prove it, or was that the point in some irronic twist?

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

I think it was made by Austrailians or it is satire similar to the day today because afaik there is no American newsstavion called CNNN.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

I see, fair doos then.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Well, the number does matter quite a bit since that was your entire point. A study by the National Endowment for the Arts* gives a figure of 46.7% of Americans as literary readers in 2002. Is this lower than many would want? Probably, but it's not a tiny minority either. When you consider there is something like a billion books sold in the States every year, it's unlikely that the number of readers would have fallen below 10% of the population. Now, maybe a good proportion of those books aren't "worthy" books, I'm sure there's a hell of a lot of Tom Clancy, J.K. Rowling or John Grisham in there. But that's an entirely different argument.

Besides, I don't read many books these days either. Does that automatically make me ignorant?

* source : http://www.nea.gov/pub/ReadingAtRisk.pdf

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

There are always individuals and groups in the US who set out to have "man on the street interviews" and to ask average people questions on current events, geography, etc. Sometimes, there are legitimate ends to the poll, interviews, whatever. However, what always ruffles my feathers are the smug bastards who set out to entertain us by making other people look stupid.

Most people, in any country, are primarily interested in their own little lives rather than the big picture issues. Most people are not well informed on issues for a variety of reasons.

I would like Jakiri to make up a quiz to give those assholes and see how well they do.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Isn't that the point of 'reality' tv?

I think that would be considered a crime againt humanity. So I'm all for it.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

If you had Mark make a quiz, he'd be the only one to get the answers right and probably would debate himself on multiple answers anyway.

However, you can make this type of video in any country in the world and portray their inhabitants as stupid without any trouble at all, so it's not representative for anything. It's still amusing, however.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Recently I've taken to asking people who state gravity is an unquestionable law to derive the formula on the spot. It's proved fairly successful so far.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

I'm not convinced that's a common discussion topic amongst drunken Irishmen down the pub.

Or do you live in some sort of Irish scientists alchoholic utopia where every important discovery made is rewarded, not with grants and funding, but with crates of beer?

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

It's like person X says random thing Y is a fact. I say facts don't exist, they say what about gravity and we're onto the above. It's only happened twice but **** you that's often enough.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

*slaps forehead*

i also find it amusing that some people in that OBVIOUS COMEDY SHOW speak with english accents... in Texas.

Someone bring on the smarting pills !

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Pointing out American ignorance in most subjects is not really a new concept. Jay Leno has been doing 'Jay Walking' where he goes out and asks these sorts of questions to people on the street for the past 10 years or so and basically you get the same results. Although he does occassionally show people actually answering the question right.

I particularly liked the pointing to countries on the 'map' where they had different names over Australia, and the one guy saying he didn't realize that North Korea was so much bigger than South Korea.

Edit: Changed Vietnam to Korea after being corrected.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

What do you have against Tom Clancy, J.K. Rowling, and John Grisham?

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Ah, you are American!

It was North vs. South Korea.
Actually someone should said 'Wow, I always thougth the 38th grade was somewhere else!'

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

They all used to bully me at school.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Maybe you should advise them on using some real facts. Maybe we can shift this off-topic discussion to what are real facts before MrL gets here and discounts all facts as being mere suggestions of facts that are backed by inherently unfounded assumptions and that there's no real reason to suspect that we're not all the figment of some sort of twisted mind, ergo, all facts are meaningless as if the twisted mind's been eating a lot of cheese lately, there's no reason why it shouldn't start raining tutu-wearing Chinese men playing violins and singing the Marseillaise.

I'll start with a real fact:
All Americans are stupid.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

I wouldn't blame anyone for not reading Tom Clancy though, I've been reading 'The Bear and The Dragon' on and off for like 6 years now because I get so easily bored with it.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Oh come, Tom Clancy couldn't have been that great a foe. In the time it took him to describe in exacting detail how and by whom the symbols on the handle of the exquisite blade were carved, the shape, colour and heft of the fingers by which the handle was grasped, the sinewy tissue that made up the arm to which the hand of the fingers was attached, the numerous acronyms that made up the militia groups that had trained him to use all of the above to full effect with minimal energy expenditure and the social security numbers of each of the trainers who taught him in each of those organisations, he still wouldn't have gotten around to telling you he was going to cut you.

Seriously you could just set up a deck chair and watch for half an hour then walk away bored before he even started to describe the neural process by which he would assess with his eyes your position to stab you.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

quoting for irony


Also not being able to find countries on a map isnt really that important - it would be quite possible to get political knowledge about a place from books/news agencies without bothering to look for its geographic location. All you need to know about the geography of Iran is that its 'somewhere near Iraq and Israel'. I assume you could finish a degree in nuclear energy without having any idea what a lump of uranium actually looks like.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Grisham is a different story though, I read through the first 16 of his books after picking one of them up in about a 5 month spread, that's including the time it took me to track down all of them. At least he knows how to use humor and doesn't take 3 chapters say something that a paragraph or two would suffice.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Considering you can't even pluralise the word "American" correctly, I don't think you should really throw stones, especially not ones based upon clips from Australian comedy shows.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

To Dante:

The survey you linked to seems to be off good quality, so I accept your 46.7% number. However, since it is a survey, the number isnt in reality that high, since people know that the "good" answer is that they have read a book.

The people I watched must clearly have gotten it wrong.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

So what did the other people do? Spy on people with secret video cameras for a year or two to see if they read books?

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

I'm merely pointing out the problems with surveys in general.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

You made a point earlier in the thread which relied on a survey.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

You have a point there.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

i remember watching show like this on an out-takes program once where they were doing the whole 'man in the street' thing asking people about sun-tanning and causing skin cancer.


the reason it was on this out takes thing is cos they go up to one guy and reel of the question and his reply was just
'of course i do i advise on policy about this to *some hospital or other*'


i laughed anyway

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

I'll take that part of your spinal column and raise you a sphincter.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

YOUR INABILITY TO READ AMUSES ME TO NOW END.

When a survey states that 47,6% reads litterture, then you basicly substract a few percent becouse of what I wrote. It doesnt mean the survey is bad, it just means that there the result should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Surveys have a few problems, and for further reading on the subject I can recommend "Citizen Politics" by Russel J. Dalton.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Well, inherent flaws with surveys aren't really that important here as any use of statistics (e.g. 46% of Americans read) would generally be to compare with other countries or the past. As such, if we had a statistic which said (say) 46% of American's read and 56% of Swiss people read then we wouldn't need to worry about people lying (unless we had reason to believe one country was more likely to lie). Similarly, the big story in the study I quoted was that the figures in 2002 were 10% down on a few years back.

Generally though, while people do lie to people who conduct surveys I'm not sure how strong that trend would be. The thesis about the United States seems to be that an anti-intellectual culture is developing and people are "proud to be dumb" (well, that's sort of what Moore hints at). In such an atmosphere would a lot of people really pretend to read?

(It depends on how the interview was conducted - if the interviewer was a sophisticated North-Eastern Ivy League chick then I guess more people would say whatever would impress her.)

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

I'm still trying to make sense of the thread topic. Who or what is 'American' and what does he/she/it possess that people think is stupid?

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

That's a fairly meaningless and pedantic point. I doubt if someone told me 43.6% read books I'd actually remember that as being specifically 43.6% the next day but rather something in the 40s with a number after the decimal point. Surely these things come with explicit margins of error designed precisely to avoid these questions anyways?


PS T&F, I think he was referring to the confusion arising over the unnecessary apostrophe which appears in the thread title.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Dear G.K.Zhukov,

I'm one of the 52.4% who doesn't read so could you perhaps recommend another way of extending my knowledge on this area. Perhaps a nice documentary, or audio CD with information on.

Many thanks,

Tom

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

Congratulations on being possibly the only person in this thread to realise the stupidity of arguing the topic.

For those (pretty much all of you) that do not know the clip is from an Australian comedy show called CNNNN which is a piss-take on real news shows and should not be taken seriously.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

I remember seeing something similar. A clip from the Australian news, where they go up to a man lying with just shorts on, sunbathing in the middle of a patch of grass.

"Do you know what the Ozone Layer is?" they asked.
The reply, in a thick australian accent, came back "Of course I do, I'm a particle physicist."

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

i think you missed his point there somewhat :(

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

I do fail to see how the fact that the clip is from a comedy show means that it's results - that there are a reasonable amount of people who lack common knowledge about the world we live in, or are willing to believe any ludricous claim based on an accent and a camera, is not to be taken seriously.

It's not as if the videoclip pretends to be a scientific study.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

On the flip side, it gives us no reason to believe that the selection is not incredibly biased, or even scripted.

Re: People thinking American's are stupid.
 

I'd reckon the former to be highly probable, the latter slightly less so.