<p>There's this guy who watches Vsauce and thinks he's intelligent as a result. For example, he watched some video about "photonic booms" (his words, not mine) and went on to "explain" to me what a photonic boom actually was. He then went on to say how he just figured all that out last period, but after Googling his words, I found a Vsauce video. Afterwards, I went home and looked into it further, and it turns out that, according to Wikipedia, the guy was talking about Cherenkov radiation. He tried to do this on several other occasions, as well.</p>
<p>I like to talk about things I just learned even if I don’t know very much about them…is that the kind of thing you’re talking about, or was he pretending he discovered something he didn’t?</p>
<p>I’m sort of reluctant to be overly critical of people like this, because I’m not educated enough to speak intelligently about anything either. If I only talked about things I understood, I’d never talk at all. I don’t know if being aware of my ignorance makes a difference in how I come across to people or not.</p>
<p>If I was only allowed to talk about things that I knew inside and out, all of my conversations would have to be about Roman Emperors and YouTube Beauty Gurus.</p>
<p>I asked this type of person whether they knew what pretentious was and he was like “Totally, yeah.” Needless to say, he didn’t actually know what it meant.
(I have another friend who always uses vsauce videos as conversation starters… It works well when you’re talking to someone you don’t know well and seems like they might be subscribed to vsauce.)</p>
<p>People that annoy me the most are tryhards. There are 2 in my AP biology class who speak out during class just to try to seem more intelligent.</p>
<p>Teacher: “So photosynthesis is the process by which plants artificially create food with the aid of sunlight.”
Tryhard: “So what you’re saying is that photosynthesis is the process by which plants synthesize compounds like glucose when copious amounts of sunlight are available which is the fundamental opposite of cellular respiration which occurs when copious amounts of oxygen are available??”</p>
<p>I’m too focused to worry about what other people are like. Otherwise, my whole HS Life would be consumed in that pursuit as each of us have unique traits. If you go to a school with 2000 students, you’ll end up writing a psychoanalysis paper before you graduate.</p>
<p>In my AP Gov class we used to always start the class with current events, and it was always literally the same 3 kids regurgitating whatever was on the front page of Reddit or Cracked, and they thought they we so smart for always knowing about this stuff before the rest of us. Um no, the rest of the class also visits those websites, we just don’t share it all with the class because we know we all ALREADY have read the articles!</p>
<p>And I happen to prefer the company of people the OP describes over the company of people who don’t care to talk about interesting obscure topics. At least when I correct them it sparks a conversation instead of “shut up”. :-)</p>