No it's just funny when a random person on internet claims that they are better because they "think critically".
My point is, you are not a special snowflake. You are one of 500M that think that they are smarter than others. You are not.
Basically, you are just like a 4-year old begging for attention. You will get some, but unlike 4-year old, it will wane quickly. All the best!
No I am just stating a fact. Also if someone perceives another person to be "better" than you, that doesn't make you dumb. There will always be people smarter than us. If you're chasing validation you can keep going and chasing degrees + institutions.
I think you're misunderstanding me. If you replace "thinking you're better than everyone" with "being more knowledgable on a subject than everyone else," then I agree with your comments.
There are people in this world who are very smart. Those people can be much smarter then you.
Often smarter people tend to congregate and less smart people do as well. So many people live in bubbles where they think they're the smartest person in the room; but the reality is there are plenty of rooms out there where they'd be the stupidest person.
I don't know who you are but the fact that you can't comprehend the existence of someone who has superior productivity is an indicator that I think you haven't been humbled. You live in a bubble. Try switching rooms sometimes to see what's out there.
Again, I see this as you mistaking "I don't understand" for "there is nothing there". I obviously don't think it's handwaving, and it has been a long time since I took unsupported accusations from Internet randoms very seriously.
Sure, you could be a very special snowflake, so smart that the world really does always break down into "obvious to brobdignagian" and "dumb/meaningless". But if you're that smart then I'd suggest that either a) you should use your smarts to make your Olympian view comprehensible to us mortals, or b) you're wasting your time talking with the likes of us.
Yes. A large part of it is size. It's hard to discuss this without sounding like an elitist or a stuck up braggart, but that is not my intent. I'm also going to use Reddit for comparison, and it might sound like I'm slamming Reddit, but I am not. I've been there for over four years, and spend a lot of time there (way too much time). If it helps, while I am typing this I'm kind of watching and listening to "Finding Bigfoot" on Animal Planet. I think admitting that should prove I have no illusion that I'm superior...
I'm a reasonably bright person. On objective tests that are usually considered reasonably good indications of intelligence, I do reasonably well (99.6 percentile on the LSAT for instance). I managed to get a bachelor's degree in mathematics from a tough school (Caltech).
I find I prefer spending time, in real life or in virtual life, in the company of other bright people. In fact, I'm happiest when I'm generally outclassed by the people around me, but they are not so far ahead of me that I cannot understand what they are saying and make valuable contributions of my own. I do not like to be one of the smartest people in the room (real or virtual).
Reddit, at least the technical groups I had frequented when I signed up there over four years ago, was like that. But now those groups have 500k to 1 million or more readers. Just doing the math, you can't put together a group on an open forum like Reddit that is that big and still has enough smart people for me to be comfortably away from the top.
Such large groups tend to have many people who can't distinguish on their own between someone advocating a repellant position, and someone disagreeing with a flawed argument against a repellant position. It gets frustrating when someone says something, especially when they are advocating a position you actually agree with, that turns out to have some factual flaw, and then you spend 20 or 30 minutes working on a reply, and then you are massively down voted. On a lot of subreddits now I have stopped researching my comments--I just go from memory. If someone wants more information, or citations, they can use my comment for ideas to start their Google search.
HN when I signed up, a little under two years ago, was ideal. Nearly everyone seemed at least as smart as me, and I started recognizing a lot of people clearly my superior. It was like being back at Caltech. A down vote on HN actually meant something--if a comment of mine got a down vote it invariably meant I had done something really dumb and I'd learn from it.
And on HN you could post a devil's advocate argument without having to first explain that you are playing devil's advocate. You could take a contrary position just to get a good argument, and people would welcome it as long as your point was well written and logical.
As HN grows, it invariable is going to become more Reddit-like, but that behavior is more damaging here. Reddit has subreddits. You can skip the cesspools of stupidity like /r/politics and /r/atheism (my vote for the most disappointing subreddit) and at least get some good stuff in /r/programming (one of the few reddits to stay mostly reasonable despite growth) or /r/physics or /r/math.
HN doesn't separate things.
I'm using an add-on to inject custom CSS on the site, and I use that to highlight down voted comments in bright red so they stand out. I up vote any such comment if I can't see a good reason for the down vote. I've been finding lately that I have been up voting 90% of these comments. I up vote these even if I think the opinion in the comment is completely wrong, as long as it is expressed well and respectfully.
I don't know if this decline can be stopped, or if it is inevitable fate of every public discussion forum. One thing we can do is back off on things where they are adequately covered on Reddit AND the Reddit discussion is as good as the HN discussion. I've taken to flagging most of the political submissions unless something stands out to distinguish them. I've avoided this for a while, but in almost all of the discussion I've not seen any sign that the discussion here is better than that on Reddit.
Recall the advice from the HN guidelines:
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On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
-------------------------------------
Perhaps these could be tweaked a little. For the "Off-Topic", maybe "on TV news" could be expanded to "on TV news or on a large subreddit".
You are indeed correct. Imagine writing a whole screed “I’m so smart but everyone else doesn’t think so and they’re wrong”. Imagine being serious about it.
If you are right, then wow, I must be even smarter than I think I am— considering all the suppression that must have happened from being told I am smart.
But I think it’s more likely that considering myself capable of solving problems is a good thing. It’s a trait called self-efficacy. Thank you, Mom, for getting me that subscription to Scientific American when I was nine.
Here’s where I might agree with you. In my youth I joined Mensa and Intertel, to try to hang out with the smartest people I could find. I can report that it is a poor heuristic for socializing. I came to the conclusion that a gathering of people filtered specifically for performance on intelligence tests results in conflict, not harmony.
As I aged and became a teacher, I found it is better to treat everyone as potentially brilliant, in some possibly undiscovered way; or at least as possessing qualities that may unlock the brilliance of others. We’re all valuable if we seek to be, and intelligence tests are beside the point of living.
OP was nice enough to answer a pretty intimate question.
You’re just insular
We don't know this person personally, so it would be wrong to make assumptions about their communication.
you’re not really any smarter
You are using their innocuous comment, to project your insecurity onto OP. Well done on proving their point. Yeah, some people are better at tasks that are traditionally considered to signify intelligence. The kind who go to study difficult majors at university at 13, are very very likely to be smarter within that definition than the majority of the people they run into.
It is fine to accept that. It is not like OP is going around taping 'stupid signs' on people's foreheads.
There's that, to a degree. But <argument from authority> PG says smart people don't think they're smart, they just can't understand how dumb everyone else is</ argument from authority>. This doesn't mean they go around telling people they suck, but that's generally the attitude at Hacker News. You often hear about criteria being about whether something sucks or doesn't suck.
Also, being pretty good implies being better than others. Whether you praise yourself or dis others, you're still saying you're at a high percentile. Being good or sucky is relative.
Basically, you are just like a 4-year old begging for attention. You will get some, but unlike 4-year old, it will wane quickly. All the best!
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