I know the title here is accurate to the original title, but what does this have to do with the fact that he is a white collar worker? Also, given the exceptionally low IQ, I am not sure it is truly “white collar” work as the term is normally used (normally referring more to knowledge workers). I assume whatever admin work he was doing was more akin to routine factory work with little agency.
Admin work is still white-collar work. Basically, if you can get grease or dirt on your clothes, it's blue collar; if you can't, it's white. (Because people didn't wear white shirts in jobs where they could get dirty.)
On this forum full of techies, perhaps, but in the more general social sphere of "America" it's understood that even menial admin work is white collar work.
Wikipedia entry for orange-collar workers: "Prison laborers, named for the orange jumpsuits commonly worn by inmates." [0]
The article also defines pink collar workers (service workers in the working class) and purple collar workers (principally white collar workers who occasionally do blue collar tasks, like technicians and engineers; note there's no citation for this).
I personally don't think the other colors mentioned in the Wikipedia are useful, since the whole idea of blue vs. white collar seems to be a metaphor of referring to manual labour to office work.
I recognize that this is kinda subjective, but I'm a bit baffled that someone wouldn't find 1-in-20 to be "common".
Though it's not homogenous, that's very conservatively the equivalent of one child in every classroom. It's millions of people, even in a small country.
Your definition of "common" is out of step with most people's. It means not-rare, or widespread, for example jobs in trucking, retail, and tech are all common in America without that implying any of them make up 50% of the country's jobs. Or another example, in the UK the NHS classes probability of side effects into groups where "very common" means "more than 1 in 10" and "common" means around 1 in 10+ (with the next grade being "rare" for 1 in 100+).
>Your definition of "common" is out of step with most people's.
This is uncharitable. Adjectives can be extremely contextual, and "common" is very much one of those words. The biggest factors are relativity to other things in the same domain, and deviation from popular perception. E.g. if most instances of X in a given domain are ~1 in N, people will generally use words like "common" and "unusual" for Y if it is greater than or less than 1 in N, regardless of what N is. Or say Y is exactly 1 in N, but people at large misestimate it at 2 in N. Now you might say it's "rare" despite whatever its relativity to the domain is. Now note that X and Y usually belong to effectively infinite domains, throw in the ambiguity of conversation, and it gets very fuzzy. This is basically a long way of saying that this is a semantic argument, and therefore may be divorced from the original implication of the adjectives being contested.
Depending on which scale is being used, it looks like 75 IQ is between 5-6 percentile of the population [0] so I think it is more exceptional than common, but I’ll grant that it is borderline and somewhat subjective.
This seems like a pretty objective assertion about what seems like pretty subjective semantics. Are there medical definitions of "exceptional" and "common" that are implicit in your post?
The fact that he is a white-collar worker is salient. The person is able to earn a living using the obviously highly-altered brain as the centerpiece of the work.
... because you need to be smart to be a white-collar worker? Hell, that fluid pushes a little bit different, makes him a sociopath, and he'd be on track for CEO!
Have you been in the workforce long, because raw intelligence has very little to do with any of the jobs I have seen.
