I think we agree, for the most part. Certainly I don't think the world is divided into 'those who think' and 'those who don't'. I recognize that virtually everybody (myself most certainly included) zones out sometimes. We all need some mental downtime, that's to be expected. My point was this: if you care about what you're doing, you do a better job.

I work part time as a bouncer. It's a mind-numbingly boring job. I sit on a chair and ask people for ID. That's it. But here's the thing: if I turn off and just do that, I'm doing a shitty job. I'm not assessing people to determine if they're too drunk to come into the bar. I'm not keeping an eye on the street around me to watch for people getting drunk outside the bar. I'm not paying attention to people leaving the bar to get high and come back in. I'm not looking closely for fake IDs. I'm not preventing problems, I'm reacting to them when they occur. I'm getting by, I'm not doing a good job.

When I worked as a temp, I did data entry. I cannot imagine a more dull job. Yes, I could turn my brain off and just punch in numbers, and honestly I did a fair amount of that. But I also thought about the process. I tried to figure out ways to make my data entry process faster. I tried to optimize the layout of the forms I was reading from, the keyboard I was inputting with, and the screen I was checking the data on. I memorized how many times I had to hit tab between each entry. I cared about doing a good job for that company (which was pretty stupid given that I was a temp), and it made me a better employee.

I will now, with a flourish, tie this to WoW and raiding. You (the hypothetical you, not you specifically Mag) are not going to get into a Downfall raid without spending at least some time figuring out how to play the game. You're going to have to know the basics of how your class works, what gear you need, what spec to use. You can find all that information free on the internet, so you don't have to actually know anything, but you have to at least have looked it up.

Once you're in, you're not going to stick around if you don't figure out how to play your specific class effectively. If your parse numbers are way off, someone is going to call you on it. They will skim through the parses and figure out what you're doing wrong, and let you know. At that point you can either correct your play style, or find yourself slowly phased out.

So as long as you can take simple direction, spend a couple hours reading some internet posts, and show up on time, you'll stick around in raid. However, if you want to really contribute to the raid, you have to put some thought into what you're doing on an ongoing basis. Look at patch notes and think about what they mean for your spec. Read the latest theorycraft and figure out what it means for you. Figure out what consumables and non-raid gear you can pick up to make yourself a more effective raid member. Read and think about strats before you face them. The difference between a raid member who shows up and gets by, versus one who really thinks about raiding, and mentally engages with it is huge.

That's what I was saying about 'those damn idiot kids'. When I was younger I spent a lot of time zoned out, doing a bad job. I didn't care about the quality of my work, in a lot of circumstances, and it made my work of poorer quality. Then I got a little bit older, started to see the ramifications of not caring. I started to give a damn what other people thought about me, and I adjusted my behavior to match.

I'm not trying to slam kids on this one, there are plenty of smart, engaged, thoughtful kids, but for a large number of people the move from 'raving idiot' to 'functional member of society' is about growing up, not getting smarter.

The idiocy of todays youth is an age old problem. The youngsters of today always seem ignorant and uncouth to adults. In many cases, I would say most cases, it's because they are. Who here didn't think they knew everything at 20? I did. Then at some point I started to grow up.

In order to spell correctly you have to care whether or not you spell correctly. Which means you have to care what other people think about your writing. Which means you have to care what educated people think about you. As soon as you do, your spelling magically gets better.
I was a terrible speller (still am, in some ways). For whatever reason I cannot hear phonetic tones. I can't sound out syllables. I'm tone deaf too. My brain just doesn't work that way. Spelling is hard for me, and for a long time I didn't give a shit. My spelling in high school and the first part of community college was terrible. I had a lot of teachers who let me slide on it, and a few teachers who gave me shit about it, but it really didn't matter. It wasn't until I decided that it was important to me to not sound like I was mentally deficient that I started getting better at it. I availed myself of the tools available to me (spell check, dictionaries), and got better. I'm still not great, spelling is not one of my strengths, but I'm good enough at it that it doesn't stick out.

It's terrible to fail out of school because of D&D, but what do you think the chances were of that guy completing school without D&D present? What are the odds something else would have taken up his time? The kind of person who fails out of school because they're too busy pretending to be an Orc is the same person who fails out of school because they're too busy doing beer bongs.

I failed out because of X is almost always bullshit. Unless X is something like 'I was hit by a car' or 'I had to take care of my invalid parent'. And then, 9 times out of 10, if you explained the situation to your professor/university you wouldn't have failed out. When I was in college my dad had a seizure. I had to take a semester off (well, it was more like a month, but it was in the middle of a semester so I lost the whole semester) to help out around the house. But I walked my happy ass down to the administration office, explained things to them, filled out a form, and boom, semester off. I came back the next semester, had to pile on a bit more student loan, and that was it. Bad things happen to everyone, what distinguishes success from failure is how you deal with the bad things that happen.

At the end of the day it's not intelligence, or even education. It's about choosing to think. It's about choosing to take care in your actions. It's about choosing to try. You can half ass your way through life pretty successfully, or you can push yourself to do your best, to improve yourself, to succeed. It's really hard to do that, though, and most people would rather get by.

Only audio. Brian Regan's "I before E Rule":