This is different than the question "Are you presuming most people are more stupid than you?"
It makes my skin crawl to say this*, but the answer for most people on HN is probably "yes, they are."
* both because people in tech are prone to Paul Graham style 'nerd martyr' arrogance, and because I often read views that disappoint me here and I do not like to admit that an intelligent person can hold them
The phrase "common sense" actually is a pet peeve of mine.
In politics, it's a red flag because it is often used to defend bad policies that only appear good when one doesn't have the fortitude to understand the better policy.
And the rejection of common sense is often used to defend ideas so bad that one has to put serious intellectual effort to create arguments for them.
A lot more "intellectuals" defended Pol Pot and Milosevic compared to ordinary chums. The denial of the Cambodian genocide was known as the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia".
Journalists have spilt a lot of ink recently about arrogance in the tech community. They point out tech figures who mistakenly think their aptitude in one knowledge domain means they know better than experts in other domains.
That's even worse. Journalists are infamous for writing articles and having opinions on things they know nothing about.
To produce plausible sounding statements on a complex topics without regard to their actual truth is almost a necessity for the opinion journalist (the predominant type of journalist of the modern era).
To be criticized for intellectual hubris by that class should be meaningless.
That wasn't an appeal to authority (as embodied, I guess, by journalists). I wanted to introduce the idea, without claiming it to be some novel insight of mine.
Well, on its own merits, the idea hits the same mathematical problem. If tech enterprises are even slightly selective it wouldn't be difficult for tech people to be smarter than most.
Smarter than most isn't an exclusive club. It's a massive class.
Yes, that is the spirit I intended to get across with the original comment.
I really wanted to avoid leaving the reader with any impression that I think (1) intelligence is easy to quantify, and (2) HN readers are some kind of nietzschean elite who have all the answers.
It makes my skin crawl to say this*, but the answer for most people on HN is probably "yes, they are."
* both because people in tech are prone to Paul Graham style 'nerd martyr' arrogance, and because I often read views that disappoint me here and I do not like to admit that an intelligent person can hold them