Are people who never read books dumb?

Outside of a required textbook (and even then I didn't read everything) I've not read one entire book after college. I owned a large financial company and retired earlier this year and live off interest and dividends. Are books overrated? It's up to each their own. Just was never for me.

The definition of being smart is not reading one entire book after college, owning a large financial company and retiring earlier this year and living off interest and dividends. Are books overrated? It's up to each their own. Books, culture, thinking about anything other than money that is for the poors and the dumbys.

money==smart

read the best-seller lists, and you'll see the non-fiction section is generally dominated by celebrity bios and other such fluff. Is the Britney Spears autobio for smart people? Well it was #1 a couple months ago.

So, fiction and stupid topics are what is mainly in books.

Isn't it dumb to think reading material is only in books? There's magazines, research papers, pamphlets, newspapers, and of course the internet. Whatever smarts is in a book, you can get much more efficiently by other means without having to waste a lot of time going through hundreds of pages.

Yess, pamphlets.

I read books, and I'm extremely dumb.

I stopped reading books after I came across this high quality forum.

personally I judge people that dont read as uncultured, but all the non readers I know are just as smart or intelligent.

Not dumb but definitely missing out.

They are not dumb, but ignorant. Plenty of very high functioning people throughout human history were illiterate. However for those who never read, they are willingly cutting themselves off from thousands of years of human wisdom. They are entirely self-centered, epistemologically speaking. They assume nothing important came before them, and they have nothing to learn.

There was a study that linked reading at a young age to high SAT / ACT scores. not sure that correlates to “dumb”, though.

For someone who’s so well read, your vocabulary and sentence structure sucks. Are you still on the golden book series?

It's weird to me that grown adults have so few responsibilities that they indulge in reading stories in books. To me this is something you do before you're really an adult and before you're running businesses and providing for a family and community.

I read books for the free pizza from Pizza Hut.

Around fifteen years ago, some books came out suggesting enhanced abilities associated with reading processes (Proust and the Squid) and the effects on thinking from types of text read, such as online/social media (The Shallows).

I’d guess there’s a correlation between how many books a person has read in a lifetime and intelligence, but one of the factors there will be duration of education and investment in the educational process (many other factors, too). It would be tough to be sure about the relationship to people’s habits in adulthood (on reading for pleasure or personal edification), for reasons touched on in other posts. I believe proponents of reading making you smarter suggest that some features of memory, processing, concentration, pattern recognition, etc. can develop regardless of content (as for the poster who sees trash on the bestseller lists). But it nevertheless holds that more challenging material creates greater improvement. I liken it to running. Any running is good; well constructed training is better.

i mean, I suppose I’d have had a chance to make myself smarter by taking more time to understand Feynman’s 3 book lectures on physics and could have abandoned the Gleick biography of him without losing a thing.

There’s the obvious, though: Some nonreaders are exceptionally intelligent, and some voracious readers aren’t especially sharp.

And I don’t recall tons of cognitive scientists hailing those books as groundbreaking or saying they offered unassailable truths.

In terms of fiction, the classics will always be worth reading.

I will defer to the expert on this subject.

Is this why people like Gates, Buffet, Zuckerberg and Bezos always have book recommendations? They must have too much time on their hands. They need to get jobs with real responsibilities.