35 Times PhD And Multiple Degree Holders Made Themselves Embarrassingly Stupid

Having a degree doesn't equate to being smart.

May

• Published in Interesting
• August 24, 2023

Some people may have finished with multiple degrees and even Master's and PhD's, but that doesn't mean they're smart. They may specialize and know so much about a field of study, but they can lack in the common sense department, too.

Then, some people become so stuck up just because they hold these impressive credentials. Getting many degrees shows dedication to learning in one subject, but being smart means more than just school.

Figuring things out, understanding emotions, and handling change aren't always linked to how many degrees you have. In the end, being smart is about different things, not just degrees.

Over at the AskReddit community, a topic started by user SgtSkillcraft discusses these types of people.

Here's what they asked the community

Richard Feynman said, “Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.” What are some real life examples of this?

The thread became viral, with 61.8K upvotes and over 12K comments. Lots of people started sharing their experiences with well-educated people who, at the same time, either lacked common sense or did pretty stupid things.

According to the original poster (OP), people value education so much that it's prioritized over experience. But what's more important are genuine skills and hands-on experience.

The bragger

I worked with a girl that graduated from Brown...she would never shut up about it. always Brown this and Brown that.

I went to a state school and it was apparent that she looked down on anyone that didn't attend an Ivy League school, so one day she was doing that and I couldn't stop myself, I said something like " Oh, you went to Brown? and yet, here we are, together in the same place, doing the same job."

Absent-minded PhD and Mater's degree holder

My wife has two Masters and a PhD, is internationally recognized in her field, and is an absent minded doofus. My role in her life is to ensure that her car works, that she takes her meds, and that she eats things other than yogurt and eggs.

She can be brilliant one minute, then walk into the side of a moving bus the next.

I love her dearly but she's a numpty.

Everyone becomes stupid when drunk.

Not quite PhD. But I was at a party (in the uk) full of med students and stereotypically everyone was off their face drunk. Well some guy fell over and broke his collar bone and immediately got rushed by a dozen of them all fussing and asking him the same questions over and 'going through the checklist".

Half an hour later and he's still on the couch in pain and I go in to ask if anybody knows why the ambulance is taking so long. Nobody had an answer because nobody had called one.

A party full of medical students hadn't called an ambulance or made any transport arrangements for a guy in severe pain with a broken clavicle. Idiots.

He's lucky to have such a wife.

In a personal note: my wife was a PhD candidate when we moved in together. Early on we went to a party and when we got home I told her I felt inadequate because I was the least educated person in every room and felt kinda dumb listening to them all go on about things I had no idea about.

She said to me “they each know the most about some little thing they just got their PhD about. Some gene mutation or how some molecule interacts in some rarefied environment, but apart from that, they’re all just regular people who can’t figure out how to match their socks or talk to a member of the opposite sex.

”She said “ you’re one of the most curious people I know. Your library is bigger and more diverse than anyone else I know and you’ve actually read them.

You ask questions and talk to everybody and have actual things to talk to them about because you know about things they’re interested in.” Now she’s an MD PhD and all our friends are doctors of one kind of another and I’m STILL the least educated person at the party but now I can see people are just people and yes, you can be super smart about one thing or another and still by a f**k-up in the real world.

It’s waaaay more important to be a good kind person who does what you say you’ll do than the smartest kid in class — at least that’s how we raised our kids anyway.

It took rudeness from a patient for these doctors to something right.

I went to 3 ERs when I felt something was wrong with my arm. It felt like a bug bite day 1 and by day 4 a bungee cord from my elbow to my wrist.

3 doctors said it was a skin irritation or dermatitis. I kept telling them something was wrong.

I have no medical degree. I work in Property Management.

Day 5 I walked into another ER and said “I don’t care if I have to pay out of pocket or sit here all night but something is wrong with my arm”.

Finally, after many rude looks and comments I was given an ultrasound of my arm. Then rushed to a MRI.

Then told I was being admitted. A 3” blood clot in my upper arm, 2 in my chest area, and one had passed my lung already. Diagnosed with Factor 2 Gene Mutation 22 days later (blood clotting disorder).

Everyone became experts during the pandemic.

The entire pandemic response in the US. Everyone became a virologist, except the actual virologists who were called sell outs and liars.

Information doesn't have to come from people with credentials.

>I don’t need to listen to you, I have “credential, credential, credential…”

If you aren’t willing to consider novel information because of the messenger, sorry, you’re an idiot.

A chemist's excuse

My wife's stepfather was a chemist who currently has diabetes. One night he went to the ER because his blood sugar was dangerously high.

He claimed he was eating well (he normally doesnt) so there's no reason why his blood sugar was high.

In his car was a 2-liter bottle of ginger ale mixed in with grape juice. He said that the two canceled their sugars out and we didn't know what we were talking about because he was a chemist and he knows how to combine things.

About an AIDS denialist

Peter Duesberg. Molecular biologist who works as a researcher at UC Berkeley and has an otherwise stellar career and well-known for his work. Became an AIDS denialist, claiming there's no link between HIV and AIDS.

Led countless people down the rabbit hole, including many who were HIV positive. These individuals ended up infecting others and refusing antiretroviral therapies.

This included an AIDS denialist activist named Christine Maggiore who infected her infant through breastfeeding thinking "Hey it's not a big deal it's just HIV it doesn't cause AIDS."

At least, they're aware.

I have a PhD and I am an idiot in most respects.

All it takes to get a PhD is to be really good at or persistent in doing research in one narrow area of study.

Edit: So several commenters pointed out that I simplified things too much. A PhD also requires hard work, luck, and some basic competence in a topic.

But that doesn't preclude one from being completely clueless in other aspects of life.

This doctor didn't bother with the basics.

My first call at my first IT job was in a medical laboratory. There was a doctor who had been in the job for years and she called saying her computer would not power on.

I walked her through some troubleshooting and nothing worked. "Is the computer plugged in? Ok, is the monitor on?

Ok, when did the problem start?" type of questions were asked and she answered them all. I go up to her office and indeed the computer is plugged in to a power strip which is plugged in to itself.

Cleaning crew had deep cleaned her office and never plugged anything back in. Dr. plugged the power strip into itself thinking that as long as it was plugged in, that's all she needed.

Common sense matters.

My college roommate, smartest person I've ever met, spent nearly an hour trying to shove a desk back into the corner of our room at an angle. She wouldn't listen to me because in her words she "got this."

After she finally gave up, I walked over. Pulled the desk out completely and straightened it with the wall, and pushed it back in. One movement, no struggle.

Many a time we had where I'd realize she might be the smart one but I've got more common sense.

Since when did pyramids become grain storage?

Dr. Ben Carson, one of the most skilled neurosurgeons alive, thinking that the Egyptian pyramids were used to store grain.

It doesn't take a spelling whiz to be able to spell xylophone.

I worked IT for a hospital. I was speaking to a doctor who forgot his password.

While he was spelling his name phonetically over the phone, he said, "Z as in Xylophone." Needless to say, my eyebrows raised.

A display of arrogance.

I'm an attorney. I was taking a class at my local university for a graduate program and the professor, not knowing about my day job, proclaimed that having a PhD legally gets you out of jury duty, because the law is that you're too smart to be on a jury.

I spoke up, and said that was simply not true. There are no restrictions on being a juror in my state, other than being a US citizen.

She was pissed, like red-faced, vein-popping-from-the-foreheard angry. She said she'll prove me wrong next class.

And she never did.

The power of connections

As an aside, look at how much nepotism factors into getting into an Ivy League school before being automatically impressed that someone has a degree from one

Not what you'd expect from a math professor.

I had a professor for higher mathematics who had real difficulties figuring out how to extract a cup of coffee from the vending machine. Bless him.

Poor baby.

A doctor telling me my 6 month old couldn’t have strep because she was infant and taking her to the ER because she was getting worse and no urgent cares were open and finding out she had strep.

A reputable doctor promoting a scam.

Dr. Oz. He really went to Harvard. He really is a University Professor. He really did pioneer several cardiac surgery techniques.

Also, he promoted hydroxychloroquinine to fight Covid after reading about it on the Internet.

I don't mention the obvious scams that he flogs on his TV show because I don't think he really believes in them; I think it's an act he puts on just to scam gullible people.

World domination by idiots

I have been told that idiots are running the world, but if thats true I would have thought I would be a little higher up.

A GPA is nothing if you have no common sense.

I was at a keg party at college and the (gravity keg) was set up. Someone complained that the beer was not flowing, so I check that the keg was still almost full.

Turns out someone closed the air intake on top. I opened the intake and poured myself a beer.

Problem solved. A few minutes later someone else complains the beer is out.

I told them the keg was full a few minutes ago and it was a tap problem that I fixed. They told me they just came from the keg.

I go back to the keg and find the intake was closed again. Opened it and poured the young lady who said it was empty a beer.

As she is leaving my suitemate comes in and goes to the intake can closes it. Now my suitemate is a straight A student who gets all As mostly due to his photographic memory.

Back to the keg. So I tell him that he needs to leave the intake open to let air in to displace the beer coming out of the lower tap.

He then proceeds to tell me that since the beer is carbonated air is not needed to replace the liquid volumn lost when the beer is dispensed. So I asked him two questions; If it is not needed, why is there the upper tap, and does he really think the amount of gas the carbonation gives off in a glass of beer is equal to the volumn of the liquid beer?

He thought for a few seconds and his only response was, "I have a 4.0, what is your GPA?" Then he walked away.

If only it were that simple.

Not a PhD but I know someone who has a masters in finance and thinks everyone should just own a house, I was like how are they gonna pay for it?

He was like they should work hard . I couldn't stop laughing

Too much ketchup is bad for your knees, according to this linguistics professor.

My ex-boyfriends mother was a linguistics professor and knew over 10 languages. She was also one of the dumbest people I've ever met.

Some examples: she believed that in case of emergency stewardesses catapult out of the plane; she was also convinced donating blood causes some blood disease and you can die because of it. But my favourite one was when she said her son's orthopaedic problems are not a result of a serious injury he had.

His knee hurts because he eats too much ketchup.

Lots of doctors lack common sense, according to this user.

As someone who works security in a hospital I can say a good 90% of the doctors there are smart but lack any type of common sense and sometimes I wonder how they function on a day to day basis

EDIT: I also forgot to mention I’m almost 2 years in a relationship with a pediatric cardiologist and it’s as shocking at home as it is with the ones I work with lmao but I can’t say it’s boring

Professor gets catfished.

A physics professor got catfished by someone claiming to be a supermodel who asked him to bring her suitcase from Brussels to Milan. Of course, the suitcase had drugs.

An idiot would have seen through that in two seconds, but a super smart guy convinced himself it was real.

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/physics-professor-catfished-by-super-model-imposter-lands-in-jail-for-drug-smuggling/

The common sense level of some academics

I used to work at a university, and tons of academics are incredibly educated in their chosen field, but have the common sense of your average dachshund.

My favourite was probably an entire group of geology professors and PhD candidates who got "stuck" for a good few minutes in an entryway because they didn't think to check if the door required a pull rather than a push. Bearing in mind that they'd just entered with that same door not an hour before.

But they're supposed to be experts in law, right?

All of Trump's lawyers have passed the bar exam, otherwise they wouldn't be lawyers- and yet time and time again they keep proving that they have either no understanding of how the law works, or disregard any understanding they may have had.

The reality is that some people become more arrogant once they get their PhD's.

I have a PhD, and I work with a bunch of PhDs. Basically, a lot of them think that because they succeeded in one area, they are an expert in every other area of life.

And they always have strong opinions about everything. I think it's also called a PhD syndrome.

Mom lacks common sense in caring for a child.

My ex had a real lack of knowledge and common sense when it came to children.

She's currently completing her PHD in biochemistry and molecular biology. She was confused though when I said I couldn't go out after putting my toddler to bed as I had no one to babysit.

In her mind, once my daughter was asleep she no longer needed anyone here to take care of her.

I chalked it up to cultural differences and never being around children. Eventually though our opinions on raising kids differed too much and I had to end things for my daughter's sake.

Some degree holders lack social awareness.

My great uncle is a brilliant engineer but has zero social awareness.

If I tell him a joke about, say, dogs he won't laugh but he'll tell you about how dogs evolution mirrors humanity's and how our species are symbiotic or some s**t. Then we explain to him that it was a joke, he'll replay it in his mind, and *then* laugh.

Edit: I appreciate all the online diagnoses, but he's absolutely not autistic

Smart in academics, an idiot in the kitchen.

My uncle is smart as f**k. Multiple masters degrees in education and science, constantly wins awards for his teaching and high averages from his students.

Tell me why this idiot needed me to remind him how to make ramen several times over?

CEOs aren't the best with computers.

If you work IT you feel this. Every lawyer, doctor, celebrity and CEO I've ever worked with is computer illiterate.

They can email, they can Twitter and that's it. They confuse the mouse, they openly call themselves Luddites, they kick the power plug out and claim the 'box broke'.

Mega-millionaires, too. Smart in other regards, but computers are kryptonite.

Science peeps still read horoscopes.

I know many people in the science field that conduct Double Blind Randomized controlled experiments in the lab and then go home and check their horoscopes...

About David Starkey

British historian David Starkey, he is only a historian in regards to Tudor England (1485-1603). Other than that, he is a complete idiot, especially when it comes to politics.

Biologist believes in magic.

That biologist lady who works for creation ministries (ken ham). She denies evolution and insists that we are descended from a mud man created by magic.

It's important to remember that achieving great feats academically doesn't mean that we're better than most people. And these stories prove it.

The true worth comes from using what we know and achieve to make the world better. While seeking recognition is tempting, real greatness shows when we help, care, and make others' lives be

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