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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4146447" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, this isn't the first time this sentiment is going to come up, and I'm going to have to call 'bogus'.  If the average is 8, it can't be '10.5'.Contrast this dispargement of the general public with the sort of stats that EnWorld members give themselves when asked to stat themselves.  When we are asked to stat ourselves, about 50% of the people here claim that they have no stat under 12 and several people without irony I recall giving themselves no stat under 15.   Do you really think we are pulling the average up that much?a) I've worked every job from landscaping for minimum wage to working as a reseach assistant in a labratory of a major university.  I've sipped cocktails with the high and mighty and I've sat down and talked with the homeless.  I've worked construction, purchasing, accounting, sales, engineering, academic research, secretarial, delivery driver, janitorial, etc.  I've worked with the smartest and stupidiest people you are going to find.  This whole 'common folk are sheeple' bit is not my experience with people, and if you haven't got the background to make the claim don't go disparging people you don't know.  My experience is that 'average people' are pretty darn complex - quite often in ways that D&D simply doesn't model.   For example, I remember working with this old guy who initially struck me as not being that bright of a bulb because he needed my help adding two digit numbers.  He was barely holding down a near minimum wage job (for that matter, at the time, so was I).  One day though I somehow mentioned a book, and he started talking about the themes of the book (which I was astounded he had read) in a manner which suggested he knew and understood the book as well as I did.  As I began to talk with him, I realized that he had read everything I had read, and held opinions I valued as highly as my own.  He wasn't stupid - he was a genious - but he was 'learning disabled' when it came to math.  He wasn't any less bright than some lit professors I'd had in college, but he never had the means to be that.That's been pretty typical of my experience.  Up close, people are alot less easy to categorize than they are from a distance.  Alot of the wisest things people have ever said to me came from people I never thought of as having much wisdom.   Ordinary rednecks turned out to have more world experience than wealthy dilletante aristocrats (to say nothing of me), because they'd been in the army, worked as missionaries, worked as engineers overseas, or worked as itinerate construction laborers across half the world back in the '50's or 60's whereas the wealthy guy that thought he was sophisticated had never actually lived in any other culture - he'd just lived in tourist areas where he largely was taking his culture with him.  Going to the beach in Mexico is not the same as living as a Mexican in rural Mexico.  Living in Italy on sabatical doesn't give you quite the same understanding of Italy as working as a migrant farm worked in Italy.  I've met ditchdiggers (literally) with PhD's (in the sciences no less).  Be careful in assuming that your experience is unique, special, or unusually valuable compared to everyone else.So the problem isn't that average people are stupid, inexperienced, unwise, rude or whatever - its mainly that we here at EnWorld aren't nearly as above average as we think we are.  This whole High School-ish nerdish defence mechanism of telling ourselves how special we are compared to the normal people really needs to go.b) Why would you think you could tell what the dump stat of people in the modern day work-force was, if you didn't have any basis of comparison with people outside the modern day work-force?  If you think people are inoridinately unwise or stupid, to whom in your personal first person experience are you comparing them?  If you think Americans are particularly unwise, you need to live elsewhere for a while.  It's just people.   Once you know them, broad classification gets difficult.</blockquote>

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