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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> These people are idiots.

I think 'these people are idiots' is an easy thing to think but almost always the wrong thing. Few people are idiots. Most people are just as smart as you are.

More likely, these people fundamentally aren't looking at the situation like you are. Probably, they don't care what you, or the police, or the FBI, or anyone else, think about what they're doing and don't care how they're being tracked.

They don't feel the need to hide.

It's comforting to think 'nah they must be idiots' for not hiding... but maybe more concerning to realise they could be right about not needing to hide.

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They're zealots, and some of them are very capable and very determined.

Writing them all off as idiots is dangerous

> Most people are just as smart as you are.

For this to be true, you would have to be below average. That's just half of everyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution

Yes?

Most people fall into a bucket in the middle of 'generally smart'. You're probably in there. Most people are in there. Few people are 'super smart' to the right of you and few people are 'idiots' to the left of you. This is a 'normal distribution', with most people in the peak you can see in the linked graph, and few people either side in the low parts.

Your statement might be true if intelligence was say, uniformly distributed.

But intelligence (like a lot of natural phenomena) is closer to a normal distribution.

You can split normally-distributed populations into 2 halves - "average" may also refer to median. Also, by definition, half the population has an IQ[1] less than 100 (which is the mean). Gp is correct - most people are not as "smart as you are" if you are above average (IQ).

Do you know the term 'histogram'? Think about three pillars superimposed on the image you can see in the Wikipedia link - people around the middle, people below the middle group, people above the middle group. Most people are in the middle group. Most people are about as smart as you. A smaller number people are less smart and a smaller number are more smart. Get it?

> Most people are about as smart as you.

You're introducing fuzzy language/approximations, which I was avoiding: one can say - in absolute terms - that any person above the median is smarter than most of the population.

An IQ band of 85 to 115 has 68% of the population, but are those at the lower end "as smart" as the upper end? The accuracy of your statement depends entirely on how wide your histogram bands are.

> You can split normally-distributed populations into 2 halves - "average" may also refer to median.

In a normal distribution, "average" must always also refer to median; they are always the same value.

> In a normal distribution, "average" must always also refer to median; they are always the same value.

...and mode too! I am well aware of the characteristics of a normal distribution (this is HN after all). I was contrasting parents insinuation that gp's assertion on halving only works with uniform distributions

> Your statement might be true if intelligence was say, uniformly distributed.

> But intelligence (like a lot of natural phenomena) is closer to a normal distribution.

This is a baffling comment - uniform distributions and normal distributions do not differ in any way that is relevant to this topic. What were you trying to say? Why did you leave this comment?

Or you could be average, and most other people could be average as well.

*below median ;)

The average and the median are identical for a normal distribution.

> Few people are idiots.

> Most people are just as smart as you are.

Well which is it?

Both - I'm not sure what you're asking. Most people are 'reasonably smart'. Few people are 'less than reasonably smart'. Those two things aren't contradictory.

>Most people are just as smart as you are.

These people don't believe in objective reality (Biden won the election and there was no meaningful voter or election fraud) and I'm having trouble thinking of a definition of "idiot" where something like that doesn't qualify.

> These people don't believe in objective reality

Again... maybe they don't care instead of they don't believe? They may tell you they don't believe but what's not necessarily what they really think.

'They're just an idiot' is lazy analysis and dangerous. Very few people are idiots. Most people are lucid. It's dangerous because you're giving yourself a reason to be less cautious (how dangerous can they be - they're idiots, right?) rather than thinking these people aren't playing by the rules I'm playing by, what should I do about that?

Whenever you think someone’s an idiot stop and think if it’s their modus operandi to make you think that.

Being dangerous and being an idiot are completely orthogonal.

> Very few people are idiots. Most people are lucid.

I would question this. The average IQ is by definition 100. But that's not much at all! And there are 50% even below this line.

If one has a look at for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States it get's even more worrisome. A large part of the US population is actually illiterate. In other parts of the world it looks even worse!

We as a species would have solved most of our issues thousands of years ago if the average dude out there wouldn't be so incredibly dumb. And if you think about it a little bit, and judge form "normal" behavior around you, it's frightening how stupid people are actually. (Just put on the TV for a quick recap).

If you're here on this site chances are high that you're smarter than the average. Looking form this position it may be hard to acknowledge all that stupidity around you because "No, they can't be such dumb, nobody can be such dumb". But in fact they are even dumber than you could imagine...

>Whenever you think someone’s an idiot stop and think if it’s their modus operandi to make you think that.

These people aren't fifth dimensional chess masters. They're angry, and much of their anger is based on legitimate economic grievances. Instead of actually addressing that though, they fall back on the much easier conclusion that people with dark skin are to blame. The media plays a part in all this, but individuals need to take responsibility and these particular individuals never will. They don't trust anyone who seems "intellectual", so there's literally nothing I could say that would get through to them. Calling them idiots and moving on has the same end result for the target, but will convince a bystander more readily. If instead I engage with them in a debate, that automatically validates their (frankly insane) point of view, which confuses bystanders into thinking that maybe there is something to this "election fraud" nonsense. Deep down most of these folks are just terrible people who need to feel superior to others. Trump and the rest of the Republican party give that to them. They don’t want economic security, they want superiority over others. Until they change from within, they're going to continue to be "idiots".

In conclusion, why is it always "the left" that has to do the actual hard work in situations like these?

Every major institution in our society is plagued with corruption: municipal, state, and federal politics, corporate media, private industry, peer-reviewed science, religion, you name it. We know that, and yet when one of these corrupt institutions produces an answer beneficial to our tribal beliefs suddenly we appeal to its authority and integrity.

[...]

Misunderstood comment

You don't need a fixed address to vote.

> You don't need a fixed address to vote.

[...] also misunderstood

> where something like that doesn't qualify.

Desperate people mislead by skilled con-artists. You can focus on the fact they got conned, and judge them harshly for it; or, you can focus on the fact that they're that desperate in the first place.

I think we only stand a chance at solving the latter problem, so sorting the "idiots" from the enlightened doesn't seem like a meaningful activity.

One of the things that surprised me is many of these people aren't in a desperate situation. One of them even flew in on a private jet.

Many if not most of them are not in precarious situations or at the bottom of society. Like the retired USAF colonel.

They got conned, but only because they really wanted to believe in the kind of supremacy that Trump radiates.

They 100% do believe in objective reality. But they're being lied to by everyone they trust.

Look at the number of nurses refusing the vaccine. There aren't the only people having trouble discerning truth from fiction.

Recording yourself committing sedition is pretty dumb though...

There are a lot of comments and replies to my statement but you are the only one I've seen that has understood exactly what I was thinking about when I made the comment.

Don't record yourself breaking the law.

It doesn't matter which side of history you end-up on. It doesn't matter if in 10, 50, or 400 years, history decides that you were right. Right now, the authorities will find you guilty.

Peaceful protests often involve visibly breaking the law. Rosa Parks even did it without cameras! Gandhi, MLK, suffragettes, conscientious objectors, Thoreau etc.

There is a long history of police and intelligence services surveilling and infiltrating peaceful protest movements. Authorities of the day definitely will imprison people.

The big difference is that the QAnon/Trump/etc crazies are planning violent criminal action. Those people end up grouped with IRA/UVF, Nazis, ISIS, Hezbollah, mafiosos etc.

> Most people are just as smart as you are.

That's a pretty bold assertion on a site filled with engineers.

What, you've never met a stupid engineer?

Asserting that the average engineer is stupider than the whole-population average is indeed pretty questionable. The odds that chrisseaton was correct are not good.

I believe the original assertion was that the word 'idiot' is often used as shorthand for people that have different priors and indoctrination as you, so to propose that engineers are somehow less susceptible to that seems like the more questionable take here.

> They don't feel the need to hide.

Exactly; a good portion of them probably really believe that somehow #45 could order, and authorize, the things that happened. The rest were probably just looking for a strong opportunity to go full anarchy and guns equal power moment.

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