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Comment by roody15 | Hacker News Reader

George Carlin said "imagine how stupid the average person is then realize half of all people are stupider than that."

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.”

He's so smart George. Simply using the law of averages...

This guy is (should I say was? ) the best. Love his stuff.

George Carlin didn't understand the difference between mean and median. Whether this makes him one of the stupid people is an exercise for the reader.

Human intelligence is normally distributed which means the mean and median are the same.

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.

George Carlin was smart enough to understand how to make a joke

Haha yeah he’s so right that most people are complete idiots. Not like us smart guys am I right brother?

HN definitely has

- above average content

- more well-thought-out comments

- 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?

>more well-thought-out comments

Oh really? this one couldn't be bothered for a single complete sentence:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37030073

Don't kid yourself, this place is filled with karma farmers. Stop sniffing your own farts

"more" is not "all" or "always"

Being better than average at a couple things is extremely common. It's not delusional to point those things out.

Most websites are good at something (excluding spam sites).

Is it really that important to you to "win" the argument, that you had to write this piss poor comment to argue your point?

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.

No I wasn’t taking a jab at HN; It’s more a jab at anyone who thinks “most people are stupid” and excludes themselves from that set of people.

“Average” can demote mode or median, though mean is the most common usage

Yes, it would have been a much better joke if he'd substituted the word "median", which wouldn't have interrupted the flow at all. /s

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