The person I was talking about in the first paragraph was in a school that's internationally considered a university! People in "we all went to university" bubbles may not all be that type of smart, although - yes - many of them will be. Degrees primarily show whether someone thrives in a structured school setting, and most people not acting very dumb is not surprising when they're near (but below) the average

I've completed the highest and the lowest mainstream education levels in my country. Long story how that came to be, but what that taught me is that while university students frequently have an easier time memorising facts on paper than those who "work with their hands" (not sure if that's how you say it in English), it's not a given. There were kids smarter than me at the lowest level: they just couldn't be bothered to do homework and wanted to skip class to buy or sell drugs. Some others in that school sounded really dumb whenever they asked a question, but when this came up with a teacher once, the teacher asked if I knew what grades the student in question ended up scoring (I didn't) and that this is just their way of learning the subject matter effectively. Okay, at least for some of them :P. Meanwhile, not everyone whom I know with a university degree can hold a job

Btw, what I also found interesting is that people score differently on IQ tests through the ages, way too short timescales for brains to evolve at a population level so our actual smartness as a species isn't what changed. I wrote some stuff here but then checked my facts and actually this is a better article so I'll just link the Wikipedia instead :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect. But that's not what you're talking about since you don't mean IQ scores literally but just how people act around you, if I understand correctly now. Just thought it interesting as an aside

I'd say that attitude, mental health, learning styles, social skills... lots of things play a role in how we perceive people's wits besides their actual wits. People are hard to capture by one metric. Which is also why I'd call many of the examples in this thread into question btw: service workers often interact with someone only on a single topic, often even only during a single session (support call for example). It could sometimes also just be some neurons not making the right connection in that moment, rather than the person's intellect. Or regarding the attitude they gain towards the general public: who needs support most frequently? Surely not the people that are particularly resourceful and make smart decisions. There's a massive selection bias there

Okay, last anecdote. Two people with a university degree (one of them has even two university degrees in IT) are put in front of an Apple device which is of course super intuitive and needs no manual. It's so easy that neither of us can figure out how to complete the unskippable device setup wizard. We call Apple support. The solution? Scrolling down. I tried that, but the part of the screen that I touched wasn't a scrollable element and so I concluded there was nothing to scroll to, which of course the support person couldn't know. The person receiving that call would fit right in in this thread with a story about someone not realising in 2026 that there is such a thing as scrolling down to find the 'continue' button below the form. Nobody (afaik) considers either of us dumb and yet there's plenty of ways to end up as one of the service job examples in a thread like this xD