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I don’t really know any top-10 lists, so I’ll try to name some of my favorites

• My roommate’s best friend
• My mother
• A coworker of mine who I thought of as “really, really, really stupid” but he was actually way smarter than I thought he was at the time, and ended up becoming a professor at a very respected and well-funded institution
• A woman in the department I am in who I have some real disagreements with about philosophy
• My girlfriend’s aunt
• My favorite coworker (who also became a professor) who had just been reading The Bell Curve and was very concerned about it (and had not yet realized that the book was mostly full of lies and stereotypes)
• My grandfather
• My grandfather’s friend
• My grandmother

(I’ll stop here, but there are some people that come to mind at this point)

What did your grandfather do that was so stupid?

He was … one of those people (my grandfather) who was really into, like, gardening and stuff, and would sometimes talk to me about how much he loved his garden and how he had this huge garden in his basement full of plants and stuff, and how I should go to his house with him at any time that he was home to look at his garden.

But he actually had, like, three gardens (he did have other hobbies like playing chess and reading). And there was a really weird kind of neoteny to all of it – when I told my father that I was going to take my grandfather on a tour of his gardens so he could see how much effort my grandfather had put into them and how big the gardens were, my father said “that’s not a good idea, you should just go with my grandfather so you can look at his garden” and I said “okay” because I didn’t feel like telling my father that I thought his grandfather was like some kind of weird weirdo (which I did think he was) so I just went on the tour of three gardens with him

Then I went with my grandfather to his house – which is a really big house, but also an apartment building – and we went to the apartment where my grandfather lived, and I saw his garden – there are just these three tiny concrete “patio” gardens at the front of the building next to the door, and that’s where my grandfather lived – and I saw his “gardens,” which actually just look like a bunch of plots of soil and grass which my grandfather was very proud of and also a bunch of plants growing in them (I was actually allowed to touch them and was fascinated by them, but then my grandfather got very upset with me because I wasn’t taking good pictures of them).

Basically, the only way I can think to convey the atmosphere of this experience is like you have to read a book about child psychologists being concerned about neoteny and child-focused therapy and child psychology, and I mean that literally

Wow, that’s a pretty weird story. Your grandfather was really proud of growing some random grass? Doesn’t sound like much of a garden to me either.

And why do you think your grandfather’s friend is stupid?

It was, like, some kind of weird mixture of stuff that I don’t know if I would call “stupid” – this stuff was about gardening and he was into it – but he just seemed really, really, really, really really into it. It wasn’t like I disliked it, or was disgusted by it, because it didn’t bother me at all, but it just seemed stupid in a sense that I can’t really put into words and I am also wary of when describing myself.

Okay… and what did your girlfriend’s aunt do that was stupid?

She used to be really, really into some kind of weird “biblical numerology” idea.

Like, you would have to get this from a post-apocalyptic movie: “The Great Flood happened, so the population was really low and was spread out over a wide area and everything was very scattered and people were always moving around to avoid being eaten by dinosaurs and there was a lot of incest and nobody ever built any big things because of the constant threat of a major environmental catastrophe, so everybody’s lives were incredibly boring, and the only exciting thing was to study the stars and figure out which days would best yield good crops or whatever, so people were very religious and thought about numerology and also wrote a bunch of books that had long and convoluted titles about numerology and also wrote a bunch of books that were basically just essays or poetry but were really well written and had really long titles about numerology, and they were very expensive and were all published by people whose name sounded like a made-up language invented for this purpose, like ‘Abraham L. D. Zeba, Theoden the Blind, Moth the Master of All Arts,” and then a bunch of stuff got added on later that basically said ‘The Great Flood happened, so all that stuff was probably false, actually’ and 'There was a little bit of incest, but that was a product of the Flood, not the fact that the population was low, and everybody moved around a lot, and also the people who wrote this stuff were not that into incest and were probably just like 'hey, how about that weird numerology,’ and the numerology part of the stuff wasn’t that weird, so I think that if we pretend that numerology was invented by an alien named Abraham L. D. Zeba, the numerology part was the weird part"

This is an extremely dumb story. I mean, I thought it was dumb before I heard that explanation, but now it’s even dumber.