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Comment by ionwake | Hacker News Reader

Its bizarre how easy it to make smart people on HN just assume people who are doing something weird are just low IQ.

Its almost weirdly a personality trait that a trained programmer just goes around believing everyone around him doesnt understand what way the wind blows.

Government installation for backups for a government ruled by a weird religious sect, have no offsite backups, it goes up in flames? Well clearly they were not smart enough to understand what an off-site backup is.

Its like wtf guys?

Now dont get me wrong, occams razor, they tried to save a few bucks, it all went Pete tong, but cmon, carelessness , chance, sure, but I doubt its all down to stupidity.

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Yeah, all this chatter about technologies and processes that could have saved this: you don't think someone in all of Korean government knew about that?

The problem is more likely culture, hierarchy or corruption. Guaranteed several principal security architects have been raising the alarm on this internally along with much safer, redundant, secure alternatives that came with an increased cost. And decision makers who had a higher rank/social/networking advantage shot it down. Maybe the original storage designer was still entrenched there and sabotaging all other proposals out of pride. Or there's an unspoken business relationship with the another department providing resources for that data center that generates kickbacks.

Assuming nobody knows how to do an offsite backup or is plain ignorant of risk over there is arrogant.

It's a common problem in any field that presumably revolves around intellect, since supposedly being smarter gets you further (it may, but it is not enough on its lonesome).

People, in general, severely overestimate their own intelligence and grossly underestimate the intelligence of others.

Consider for a moment that most of the geniuses on hacker news are not even smart enough to wonder whether or not something like IQ is actually a meaningful or appropriate way to measure intelligence, examine the history of this notion, question what precisely it is we mean by that term, how its use can vary with context, etc. etc.

Is there a better word/assessment for "ability"?

Just wondering what it would be, just "success" in a domain?

I agree with you just wondering

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