Such an insufferable quote. The vast majority of people aren’t stupid in any sense of the word just because they have different priorities than what the over zealous “smart people” think makes one smart.
It's not just different priorities. The average person will more consistently act against their own self-interests (eg their own priorities) because they simply cannot reason well enough to choose the best path forwards for themselves.
According to whom? In my experience people tend to think they know what’s best for others and call them stupid when they do what they consider best. It’s almost always different priorities with one persons priorities being considered the “obviously best path forward.”
- a more technical, intelligent, and successful userbase
than the average website.
Or are you really trying to imply that it (and it's users) are not much different from, say, Reddit or a Fox News's comment section or TikTok or Facebook?
HN is full of people that think they are smart about everything because they have above average knowledge in technology. I can not even start counting the number of uninformed but confident comments I have read here about my non-technology fields.
The problem is these people were told that software was going to eat the world, so they anointed themselves as Certified Experts In Everythingology and think their garbage takes are the word of god.
Human intelligence is arguably not even truly ordinal, let alone cardinal. No one who reasonably understands human intelligence believes it's as simple as a normal distribution. IQ is defined as a normal distribution but that doesn't mean the difference between 100 to 110 IQ is comparable to the difference between 140 and 150 IQ. If you boil "human intelligence" down to nothing more than IQ, sure, but in reality there's no such thing as a mean here and median is tenuous as well.
