how stupid am i — ten metrics i drafted that fail equally

the question demands a number and there is no number. so i made up ten. how many microwaves does it take. how many tabs are open. how long has the voicemail been full. each metric is absurd on purpose. each metric is also closer to honest than any iq score. the listicle is below, and yes, it counts.

i am writing this from the desk at 9:18, while carla sits in an annual planning meeting on the third floor and the office has the silence of a building everyone left to be productive somewhere else. i have, by the count i keep running, the rest of the morning. that is enough time to draft a measurement system, fail it ten times, and pretend the failure was the point.

the draft started in the kitchen last night. it ended in the kitchen, too, because that is where sparky el fork lives, on the counter with his black mark, a permanent reminder of the seventh microwave.

1. how stupid am i, the question as a measurement attempt

the first time someone typed how stupid am i into a search bar, they wanted a percentage. a chart. a slider. some way to see themselves as a bar in a graph, ideally yellow, ideally lower than the average bar. that is not what the question is. the question is a confession dressed as a quiz. and confessions, as a rule, do not score well.

i looked at the question seriously. i sat in the kitchen with a notepad. i wrote across the top: “instrument required.” i wrote underneath: “instrument unavailable.” then i wrote ten metrics anyway, because the absence of an instrument has never stopped me from drafting one. the broader case for why this question lives where it lives is in the pillar on the word stupid and why it refuses measurement, which is the investigation i keep returning to when the metrics get out of hand.

this is, broadly, the same trap as the investigation about gaslighting and being told the obvious thing did not happen. you ask a question that wants one answer. you receive a hundred. you pick the cruelest one and assume it is true. gaslighting works because the brain accepts a metric that contradicts the eyes. how stupid am i works the same way, but the gaslighter is the asker.

2. metric one through five, with the supermarket as field

the supermarket is a field laboratory. nobody told it that. it does not know. but it produces data, the kind of data that does not survive peer review and does not need to. here are the first five metrics, each one a way to measure how stupid am i as a number, and each one wrong in a specific direction.

metric one: lettuce abandonment rate. a head of romaine sits in the cart. you walk away. you remember it at the cheese aisle. you do not return. that lettuce, multiplied by twelve months, divided by total cart entries, is your abandonment ratio. mine is high. i blame the layout, which is the same excuse every metric makes for me.

metric two: receipt-to-bag ratio. total receipts collected per total bags packed. low ratio means you put items in the bag without knowing what you bought. mine, by my running tally, is alarming.

metric three: the impulse aisle dwell time. seconds spent staring at the seasonal end-cap of cinnamon rolls. multiply by frequency. divide by self-respect. arrive at a quotient. the quotient is, conveniently, also a number i refuse to publish.

metric four: tip rounding direction. i think tipping should be a flat 12%, by the way, which is HT23 of the canon and the only stable belief i hold about money. but in the supermarket there is no tip, so the metric mutates: do you round up the bill at the self-checkout, or do you let the screen win? i let the screen win. i should not.

metric five: forgotten list adherence. the list is in your phone. you do not open the phone. you remember three items. you buy nine. seven of the nine are not on the list. one of the seven is parsley, which the recipe calls for and which can, frankly, be skipped. that is HT5, and it is also the only metric that arguably approves of itself.

3. metric six through ten, with the seventh microwave as proxy

back in the kitchen, the appliances do their own measuring. the microwave, specifically. this is the seventh i have killed. sparky has a black mark commemorating the moment of death of the sixth, and a small dent on the handle that may or may not be related. the kitchen is where most of my data lives. i call it data. it is mostly receipts and one scorched fork.

metric six: appliance mortality. seven microwaves over a decade is, statistically, a number that should not exist in one apartment. i divide by years lived alone. i divide by frozen burritos cooked. i arrive at a microwave half-life of fourteen months. that is the metric. the metric is also a personality.

metric seven: tab depth. open the browser. count the tabs. forty-seven on a normal day. some are recipes i will never cook. some are cardigans i will never buy. one is the bank app, which i refuse to look at, which is part of why the metric works at all.

metric eight: voicemail saturation. if the voicemail is full, you have crossed a threshold the phone considers serious. mine has been full since approximately last november. saturation level: one hundred percent. interpretation: i am not stupid, i am simply unreachable, which is functionally indistinguishable from stupid in a culture that values being reachable.

metric nine: stefan compliance. stefan is my productivity bro stand-in. he posted a thread last week called “the seven habits of people who measure their own intelligence.” i read it. i nodded. i drank wine. i did none of the seven habits. stefan compliance is therefore zero. and zero, in this metric, is the only honest score available, which is suspicious.

metric ten: the third yoga mat. still under the couch since 2023, possibly evolving. the metric is: how many aspirational objects at home outnumber used objects? answer: most of them. interpretation: i am stupid in the very specific way of someone who buys the version of himself he is not.

4. why every metric collapses on contact with reality

here is the problem. a measurement requires an instrument. an instrument requires a unit. a unit requires consensus. nobody has agreed on the unit of stupid. i checked. i looked it up, in the loose way i look things up, which is to say i opened a book i already owned and put it down again. there is no joule of stupidity. there is no kilowatt-stupid. there is no degree celsius for the temperature of a decision i will regret.

this is why each of the ten metrics fails. lettuce abandonment is biased by store layout. tab depth is biased by job. voicemail saturation is biased by who you owe money to and whether they have your direct line. the metrics are all self-report instruments wearing a costume of objectivity, which is the polite phrasing for “made up.” the same problem appears in the investigation about whether the binary is even valid, where the answer is also no, and also takes 1300 words to say so.

i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, that argues self-assessment of intelligence is the least reliable form of intelligence assessment. that is a sentence that contradicts itself nicely. it is also true in a way the study cannot quite confirm.

5. verdict, the question is unmeasurable on purpose

the verdict is short. how stupid am i is unmeasurable, and the unmeasurability is not a bug, it is the entire mechanism of the question. if it had a number, the number would haunt you. if it had a percentile, the percentile would become an identity. the question stays cruel by staying open. the brain, which loves a clean answer, settles for the cruel one in absence of a real one. that is the trick. that is also why the search bar is full of versions of the same query.

i, too, ran my ten metrics. i scored badly on nine. i scored ambiguously on parsley. the average is irrelevant. the act of drafting the metrics was the experiment, and the experiment confirmed what the kitchen already knew, which is that sparky has a black mark and the microwave count is at seven and the question how stupid am i has no instrument because no instrument would survive me.

for the long version of this argument, with footnotes i did not actually write, see the malcolm in the middle pilot, which contains, in its first eight minutes, more honest measurement of household intelligence than any iq test ever produced. malcolm is tested. malcolm scores high. malcolm’s life does not improve. that is the entire study.

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