Compared to you, most people seem dumb • Hacker News Board

Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb

#121

Post by quicksilver03 » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 10:08 AM UTC

hasenj wrote: post #39

seiji wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold down a letter and an extended menu pops up.

oh wow, thanks! Now I see where are all these missing letters from my Arabic keyboard are. Seriously, how the hell would anyone discover this feature on his own?

Totally counter-intuitive to me, as many other aspects of the iPhone interface: perhaps this is why I never send text messages from an iPhone, and why I keep making calls when I just want to see the details of a contact.

The iPhone was just made for somebody younger than me I guess.

Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb

#122

Post by nice1 » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 10:19 AM UTC

"People are not really stupid, it is just that you know a lot more. Don’t let knowledge blind you."

No, you dumb fuck. You're the idiot who knows nothing apart from useless technobabble that nobody will care about in 100 years - sorry, that should probably be 10 years.

Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb

#123

Post by DuncanIdaho » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 10:20 AM UTC

What frustrates me most is that I keep meeting people who seem to know less about their respective fields than one would expect them to, or they should at least know more about them than I or some other laic does.

Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb

#124

Post by mike_esspe » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 10:28 AM UTC

grellas wrote: post #54

People are not really stupid, it is just that you know a lot more. Don’t let knowledge blind you. The points made in this piece are very good ones but it is not primarily an issue of intelligence - rather, it is mostly about one's point of reference. Early in my legal career, I worked at a firm that represented a group of Nob Hill condo owners who had had a series of problems with contractors and who had suffered a v…

It seems, that when you slow down learning (especially outside your area of expertise and with age), you become more relatively stupid, because the world around you learn faster.

Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb

#125

Post by vineet7kumar » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 10:54 AM UTC

It's just that everyone knows more about their own trade than others. My Dad's an automobile engineer and he thinks it's kinda funny that I do not really understand how a 4-wheel drive works...and I find it funny that he doesn't get why his computer hangs much more than mine (I use Linux :P )

Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb

#126

Post by Figs » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 10:59 AM UTC

aptimpropriety wrote: post #108

megablast wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be a bit worried by anyone who has not heard of Einstein. But you make a great point, and I think the article missed it. It is not that we know more, we know more about our particular areas of expertise, just as others know more about their areas of expertise. My Dad knows a lot more about airplanes than I do, because he worked on them for a number of years.

Does Einstein really hold an important relevance to 'everyman USA'? To nearly every citizen - and, I would argue, even with those a basic (HS) level of physics - he's not so different than Heisenberg, Bohr, Bethe, Shrodinger, etc. Sure, they made great advances for the world of physics, but how relevant is that to an individual who does not interact with that theory at all? More specifically, relevant enough to cause…

Einstein is basically consider to be the stereotypical genius in pop-culture; it's not so much the details of his work that's important to the weirdness here, but that he is widely known for having been brilliant. (Consider common phrases like, "I'm no Einstein, but ...") The fact that he is unfamiliar with Einstein is like being unfamiliar with King Tut or Mozart or George Washington; at least in the US, you'd expect most people to recognize the names, even if they might not remember all the precise details about them.

Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb

#127

Post by Waywocket » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 12:30 PM UTC

boredguy8 wrote: post #26

I've found a fairly useful analogy that helps most tech people. If you're into cars and the analogy doesn't work, just think of something you need to know about at some point, but probably don't know much about at all. Mostly this helps when a customer feels guilty about needing help, or someone in IT thinks "me > all" because they can enter a command line. I think of my role like this: Your average non-tech person p…

Broadly speaking, I disagree somewhat.

I don't think there's anything I own without a working understanding of how it functions, or at the very least the ability and willingness to attain that understanding if required. If I owned a car, I might not learn how to strip and rebuild the engine, but I would learn how to check and replace any sensibly serviceable parts, and how frequently I needed to do things like an oil change - which I would do for myself.

This generalises into other skills - if it's useful to my life, I'd much rather learn to do it to a passable level rather than get somebody else to do it (unless there's a significant risk attached). The only reason I'd be happy to be completely ignorant of something is if it holds absolutely no interest to me at all - which clearly isn't the case for anything I'm actually trying to do.

I'm not claiming that this makes me a better person, and I'm not claiming I'm infinitely adaptable as you put it, but I do feel that there's a very real difference that goes well beyond simply having a different area of specialisation.

Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb

#128

Post by eof » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 1:28 PM UTC

ars wrote: post #117

boredguy8 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just multiplying my inhibitions :) It's a '94 Mercedes 500SL, so...better safe than sorry?

Every 3000 miles or 6 months. 3 months is quite unnecessary. And if you switch to Mobil-1 oil you can bump that to 6000 miles, and yearly (but only starting from the second usage of it, i.e. the first time you use it stick with 3000 miles). The oil costs more, but you'll save money by doing less changes. With newer cars you can go as much as 10,000 to 15,000 miles with regular oil.

Going synthetic in an older vehicle isn't always good. a small leak into the piston woudln't be a problem with regular oil, but with synthetics you have an issue.

Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb

#129

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 1:59 PM UTC

edanm wrote: post #114

aptimpropriety wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Einstein really hold an important relevance to 'everyman USA'? To nearly every citizen - and, I would argue, even with those a basic (HS) level of physics - he's not so different than Heisenberg, Bohr, Bethe, Shrodinger, etc. Sure, they made great advances for the world of physics, but how relevant is that to an individual who does not interact with that theory at all? More specifically, relevant enough to cause…

It's not about whether Einstein should be known or not. The point is that he is an icon, one that the vast majority of people do know about. Not knowing about Einstein means you're really uninformed.

No, Really Uninformed is a whole nother level of ignorance. When pictures of Jupiter from Pioneer 10 were on the front page , a graduate student in my Engineering school asked me "Jupiter is a planet, right"? Astonished, I answered politely "Yes, its the 5th planet". Then, and this is the good part, she asked "So, is Earth a planet?"

Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb

#130

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 2:03 PM UTC

alexqgb wrote: post #56

Bored_Bystander wrote: post #45

Tech people, and especially the circle that is absorbed in the startup/techcrunch/combinator thing, have to be the most incredibly self absorbed, solipsistic bunch of twits in creation. Most people are busy earning a living or living their lives doing something that actually matters, and the subtle nuance of details that tech startup types endlessly masturbate over is trivial background noise to most of the normal wo…

'Frame of Reference' is exactly the right concept. This is what allows you to make sense of what you don't understand. Even the smartest people with the wrong frames can come up short when challenged. Having a frame of reference is a combination of specific knowledge (typically gained through a program of formal study), and experience (typically gained from operating within a frame for some time, and building a priva…

Agreed. I tried to eat it a Korean soup kitchen the other day. There I sat clueless with some murky broth and undescipherable dishes of 'stuff' while all around me Korean students scraped and mixed and ate with happy abandon.