how to take the dumb dumb test — a step by step from the sauna

the gym sauna is where i read about the dumb dumb test, sweating, on a phone slowly cooking itself. the supermarket failure was fresh that week. bulk membership card in the locker. air fryer at home, used once. kindle hot take simmering. step one of the test is reading it in a sauna.

writing this from the desk on a wednesday at 10:14am while carla is upstairs in the all-hands on the third floor. i have, give or take, the rest of the morning. enough.

i did not seek the dumb cluster pillar, the dumb dumb test sought me. i was on the phone, in the sauna, sweating onto a screen that was already at 23%, and the algorithm decided that what i needed, between two ads for a dating app and one for protein powder, was a small online quiz called exactly that. dumb dumb. twice. as if once was not patronizing enough.

1. the dumb dumb test, the prerequisites i ignored

the prerequisites for the dumb dumb test, i found out later, are mostly that you should not take it. you should be doing your job. you should be hydrating. you should not be in a sauna with a phone wrapped in a small towel because you read somewhere — possibly a serious magazine, possibly a comment on a video — that the heat helps you think.

i ignored every prerequisite. i opened the link with the same hand i was using to wipe my forehead. the page loaded in two seconds, which is impressive given that the wifi in the gym is, by my own informal measurement, the worst wifi i have ever paid for indirectly through monthly dues.

the test announces itself in big letters. dumb dumb test — find out how dumb you really are. the second “dumb” is doing all the work there. the first “dumb” is decorative. it is the parsley of the title.

before the first question, the page wants my email. of course it does. everything wants my email. i gave it the email i use for things that want my email. that email has, by now, its own personality. it has opinions. it gets newsletters about cryptocurrency it never subscribed to. it is, in some ways, more interesting than i am.

2. step one, sit in the sauna, alone, again

step one of the dumb dumb test, formally, is “click start”. informally, in my version, step one is sit in the sauna, alone, again, and pretend you are not the only person in there because everyone else has friends or jobs or a sense of when to go home.

the sauna is the only part of the gym i use. i pay the full membership for the sauna. the treadmills i nod at on the way in. the weights i do not engage. there is a man who waves at me sometimes. i wave back. i do not know what he assumes i lift.

i clicked start. the first question was: which of these is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of bricks. i stared at the screen. the screen stared back. the answer is, of course, that they weigh the same. they are both a pound. i clicked “they weigh the same” with the small smug glow of a man who has read a riddle book once at age eleven.

the screen said correct. it added a small confetti animation. confetti, in a sauna, on a phone, for getting the feathers question right. i felt, for one second, very smart. then i felt, for the next second, deeply embarrassed about the first second. that is the rhythm of the entire test, as i would later learn.

3. step two, the supermarket detour i had to take afterward

step two of the dumb dumb test is supposed to happen on the same screen, but in my case it happened in a supermarket, because i left the sauna mid-test to buy milk. one thing. milk. i had written it on my hand with a pen i found in the locker.

i came home with: a bag of those small cucumbers i do not actually like, a candle in a scent the label called “library”, a packet of dishwasher tablets despite owning a dishwasher i do not trust, two limes, one lemon, a magazine in french, and — and this is the part the test, in retrospect, was clearly building toward — no milk.

the milk had been the only word on my hand. the word was still on my hand when i unpacked the bag. the word watched me unpack the bag. the word was, frankly, disappointed.

this is a known phenomenon for me. i call it the supermarket failure. i have written about it in passing. i once went in for batteries and came out with a small rug. the rug is still by the door. it has, in its own way, made the door more dignified.

i resumed the test on the kitchen counter, milk-less, with the magazine in french open to a page about a chef i had never heard of. the next question was about pizza. i said pineapple on pizza is fine. the test said i was, in this matter, in the minority. i did not need a test to tell me that.

4. step three, the bulk membership, applied incorrectly

between step three and step four i made a tactical error and visited the bulk place. i have a bulk membership. it lives alone in the locker at the gym, in the front pocket, and it judges me from there. the bulk membership is for households of four to six. i am, by every metric, one. the math has never made sense and the bulk place has never asked.

i bought, in the spirit of the test, things that come in numbers a person living alone should not be allowed to encounter. forty rolls of toilet paper. six jars of pickles. a tub of mayonnaise that, if i opened it, would expire before i finished it, a fact known to me, the mayonnaise, and the cashier, who said nothing and is, in my view, the most professional person i have ever met.

i applied the bulk membership incorrectly because the test had me thinking in big numbers. the test had asked me, in step three, how many slices come in a standard pizza. eight, i said. the test said correct. i then walked into the bulk place and behaved as if every meal i would eat from now until retirement was a pizza for eight people. this is what they mean, i think, when they say a little knowledge is dangerous. or possibly that was about something else. i am fairly sure there is a study somewhere about it, possibly in a serious magazine, possibly in a free pamphlet at the doctor’s office.

5. step four through six, the air fryer interlude

step four of the dumb dumb test asked me about appliances. specifically, it asked me to identify which of four kitchen items i owned. it offered: a blender, a toaster, a kettle, and an air fryer.

i own all four. i have used three. the fourth is the air fryer. i bought the air fryer in 2024 because two coworkers, in the space of one week, said the words “air fryer” with the kind of religious certainty that, in earlier centuries, would have built churches. i used it once. i made small potatoes. the small potatoes were fine. the air fryer has, since then, sat on the counter where it serves as a kind of ceramic monument to a decision i made under social pressure.

step five was a hot take section. they asked me to rate statements as agree or disagree. one of the statements was about reading. i clicked agree on reading on a kindle is the same as reading with the speed of a man who has spent considerable time defending this position at bars where nobody asked. the test gave me a small badge. the badge said “kindle apologist”. i screenshot it. i will not use it. but i have it.

step six was the verdict screen. before the verdict the test wanted me to share my score on three separate platforms i do not use. i tapped skip three times. the third skip was reluctant. the test had earned, by that point, a small piece of my attention, the way a man at the next table earns it by saying something almost interesting on the phone.

6. verdict, the test confirms what we already knew

the verdict screen of the dumb dumb test said, in a font slightly bigger than the rest, that i had scored 11 out of 12. it said i was “smarter than 87% of takers”. i did not believe this. i suspect everyone is told they are smarter than 87% of takers. that is how you get people to share. nobody shares “you are average”. the algorithm knows this.

it also said i had failed one question. the question was about a movie. specifically the question was about “Dumb and Dumber”, which i have seen twice, in 1996 and once on a flight, and which the test asked about in the form of a quote i could not place because i was sweating onto a phone in a sauna at the time of the question.

i missed it. the confetti, this time, was withheld. the screen displayed the correct answer with the small disappointed energy of a teacher who expected better. i closed the tab. i opened the tab again. i checked the answer. the answer was obvious in retrospect. that is the genius of the test, if it is genius, which i am not conceding. it makes you feel correct for getting feathers right, and stupid for getting a movie wrong, and it does both inside the same fifteen minutes.

the dumb dumb test, in the end, confirmed what the seven dead microwaves on my conscience already knew, which is that the relationship between knowing a thing and doing a thing is, in my case, a long and largely unsupervised one. i can identify all four kitchen appliances. i still bought the air fryer. i can do the feathers riddle. i still came home with no milk. the test cannot help me. the test was never going to help me. the test was a small confetti animation in a hot room.

if you want to know more about the cluster around all this, the older posts in the dumb cluster cover a lot — the dumb and dumber manifesto walks through the official record, the dumb diary keeps it personal, and the long dumb road is the road version of the same investigation. they are all, in their way, prerequisites i ignored.

↑