>>95868166
Tabletop roleplaying games and other nerd hobbies typically filter out the truly dumb, and the general social circles of smart people typically also filter out the truly dumb. You get people who are socially retarded sometimes, but they can at least wrap their heads around game rules.

If you're accustomed to being surrounded by smart people to the point where you think of yourself as average intelligence, the closest thing you're going to get to a dumb person is someone who's straight average or juuuust slightly above average (but thinks of themselves as smart because they spend too much time around dumb or average people).

It's jarring and annoying when you realize that someone who up until this point was capable of stringing sentences together has failed at what to you is a basic cognitive task, especially when there's some sort of collective endeavor going on;
>"oh, great, now everything's going to go at the pace of the slowest person in the group. This is school all over again."

There's also a contingent of people of completely average intelligence who think of themselves as intellectuals because of the cultural context they became adults in; most-college-educated generation, people imbibed political propaganda disguised as thinkpieces. Really they're just baseline conformists who conformed to being a smug pseudointellectual, as was the style of the time; all the external trappings of a smart person, but without the ability to think independently.

This was also the era of "Thing everyone thinks good actually bad because complicated reasons, trust me" articles, and the rise of social science using Big Data to justify political goals, when all those studies later failed to replicate. A whole generation got used to being epistemically helpless and to regurgitate articles and factoids and IFuckingLoveScience memes.

This is my defense of the "Midwit" concept. It's still over-used