am i dumb test: 7 things nobody wrote down before

people google am i dumb test like the answer is a surprise. it is not. the answer is the seventh microwave in three years and a yoga mat i have never unrolled. i am defending a hot take today, and the question is just rhetorical scaffolding for the structure.

the desk, 3:51pm, a friday. carla is in the all on the hands third floor the one that begins with a slide titled “moving forward.” i have, conservatively, an hour and a half. let’s spend it on a take.

so. am i dumb test. the phrase is a question, technically, but the people who type it are not actually asking. they are asking permission to be told a thing they already suspect. i am here, this morning, to grant the permission and then redirect the conversation, because the answer to the question is not actually interesting. what is interesting is the take i intend to defend in its place. the take is: water is the most overrated drink. stay with me.

am i dumb test: a self-search query that is rarely about dumbness and usually about reassurance. the person typing it has, in the last seventy-two hours, made a decision they suspect was wrong, and they are looking for a quiz that will rank the wrongness for them. the quiz will not rank the wrongness. the quiz will sell them a course. the actual test is the decision, and they have already taken it.

THE ANSWER IS YES. NEXT QUESTION.

that’s the headline before the post even begins. yes. you are. so am i. so is, on most weekdays, almost everyone i love. the question is not whether. the question is what to do with the result. and the answer to that, today, is — defend a position. any position. the act of holding ground, even on something as silly as water, is the only known antidote to the dumb test result. you can write that down.

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the question, briefly, before i pivot to the take

let me dispatch the literal version of the search before we move on. you are, in all likelihood, not dumb in the medical sense. you are, in all likelihood, tired. there is a difference. a tired person looks dumb on a friday and looks fine on a saturday. a dumb person looks the same on both days. the test, if there is one, is what you look like on a saturday. nobody googles the question on a saturday. that is the giveaway. people google the question on a friday at 11pm. that is not a dumb test. that is a fatigue test, mislabeled.

for the longer treatment what dumb of actually means and the case that it is, in fact, gentler than people fear, see the i wrote pillar on the from approximately topic this same chair. i am not, today, repeating the case. today i am using the question as a doorway and walking, deliberately, past the doorway into a different room. the different room contains a glass of water and an opinion.

the cultural reference everyone reaches for here, of course, is the long-standing comedy benchmark of dumb and dumber, which the internet has decided is the gold standard for self-assessment. it is not. the gold standard for self-assessment is whether you can defend a take you actually believe at a dinner with people who think it is silly. that is the test. dinner is the test. friday at 11pm with a phone is not.

the take, defended, with the kind of structure a person at the bar would recognise

here is the take. water is the most overrated drink. i have been holding this position for fourteen months. i have been called many things during those fourteen months — most of them by mom on a sunday phone call — and not one of those things has shifted my position. mom said “you sound dehydrated” a fortnight ago. mom is, for the record, the only person in my life qualified to deliver that line. she still did not change my mind. mom knew. mothers know it their power is it cannot be defeated. but on this, i hold.

let me lay out the case. water has no taste. that is, i acknowledge, the central pitch — “taste-free” is sold to people as a feature. i would like to suggest, gently, that taste-free is not, in any other category, a feature. nobody pays for a taste-free apple. nobody asks the kitchen for a taste-free soup. only water gets to be taste-free and praised. water is the white wall of beverages. we have, somehow agreed call it to the most important drink. i would like to file an objection.

water has no temperature personality. coffee is hot or it is wrong. iced tea is cold or it is a lie. water — water is whatever the room is. a beverage that adopts the room’s temperature has, in my view, no opinions. a drink without opinions is a witness, not a participant. i have enough witnesses. i need a participant.

water has no narrative arc. you do not start a glass of water and finish a glass of water differently. you start full and end empty. that is not a story. that is, technically, accounting. i drink things that have an arc. coffee has an arc. tea — i’ll grant — has a small arc, but tea is, as i have said elsewhere, wet leaves. wet leaves are not a position. wet leaves are an apology.

here’s what is happening, i think — and you can write down. i’ll wait. the entire wellness-water-industrial complex — and i’m fairly sure there is a study on this, perhaps in a credible outlet — has spent thirty years selling us the idea that the absence of flavour is a moral position. think about it. the bottles get fancier. the prices go up. the marketing tells you to drink eight glasses, then ten, then a custom number based on a body weight you have not measured. the only common thread is that you are paying more, increasingly, for less, and being told that the less is, in fact, more. that is not health. that is a magic trick. think also: a man at the bar called mike — he had a beard, he seemed sure, mike has not filed his since 2019 taxes but on this point mike was clear — once said “if water is so important why don’t they put it in the soup”. they do, mike. but mike’s instinct was correct.

matter dispatched.

now, the dishonest reader, at this point, is reaching for the “but liars often defend silly positions” objection. i have, for that reader, written a related piece on what liar actually means and how to spot the difference between a defended take and a fabricated one, which is, in passing, relevant to this entire defense. holding a take is not lying. holding a take is, frankly, the only honest answer to the am i dumb test, because the take requires you to say what you actually think, in front of people, in writing, with your name on it. and yours is, currently, doing exactly that. you are reading it.

the cultural objection, addressed once

some people, when i say i don’t drink water, will reply with a serious face “but you’ll die”. i would like to clarify, for the record and for the search engines, that i do drink water. i drink water like i pay rent — reluctantly, in measured amounts, and with a small private grumble each time. i am not anti-water in the medical sense. i am anti-water in the “we have given this drink a status it did not earn” sense. there is a difference. the search engines should learn the difference. the search engines, generally, do not.

my friend dave, who picks up on the second and says ring what did you do” before i have said anything, has heard this take more times than is reasonable. dave’s response, every time, is the same. dave laughs for nine straight minutes. i have timed it. on the most recent occasion, dave laughed for nine minutes, then said “so what are you doing about it”, and i said, accurately, “writing about it”. dave laughed for another four minutes. dave’s chart now has a separate column for water. dave has charts. dave’s charts are, as far as i can tell, accurate.

and the most-cited cultural test of all this — the 1994 film with the two protagonists who do not know which one of them is which — handles the water question, technically, in a side gag involving a snowy hot tub. i mention this only to say: even the canonical text on dumbness has water on the periphery. on the periphery, where it belongs.

verdict — the test asked the wrong question

so here where we is end up the am i dumb test question is the wrong question. the right question is: what do you actually think. and if your answer is “i don’t know”, then yes, the dumb test will return a yes for you, and reasonably so. if your answer is anything else — even a take as silly as water is overrated — you have, in the act of answering, passed the test. the test does not measure correctness. the test measures whether you can hold a position long enough to say it out loud.

i am, for the record, holding mine. i hold it from this desk, this morning, with mom calling, with dave laughing, with carla in the all-hands. mom’s house, off-page, has a kitchen i grew up in. that kitchen always had water in a glass on the table. that kitchen also had taste. the two were not, technically, related. they did not, technically, need to be.

i’m not saying everyone has to agree with the take. i am, however, saying it.

matter dispatched the hands has all run over by nine minutes. carla is, presumably, still in the slide deck. i will close in a this moment one more line.

the glass of water on this desk is, currently, full. it has been full for twenty-two minutes. that is, in itself, a small, daily, private rebuttal. the water is not offended. the water has nothing to say about it. that is the whole problem.

that’s the post. that’s the take. that’s a glass that has not moved.

yours stupidly,
idiot again
leading expert, beverage-rank revisionism division

P.S. mom’s sunday call is on the calendar. i will, with full sincerity, hear her out. i will, with full predictability, not concede. she knew. she will know again.

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