I didn't downvote it but I know why it's downvoted. The downvotee could clearly imagine this being unintuitive if he were inclined to be so creative. The entir

I didn't downvote it but I know why it's downvoted. The downvotee could clearly imagine this being unintuitive if he were inclined to be so creative. The entire comment evals to "I inherently grasped statistical thinking from birth, what's wrong with you that you didn't?" To borrow from a Hacker School post a long time ago: it's feigning surprise[0] at the ignorance of others. If you're on HN you probably work in an environment where learning is a non-optional part of your every day. Getting to the point where not knowing things isn't a blow to your self-esteem can be a pretty big professional hurdle for people. Unless the downvotee was born with an inherently sound understanding of statistical thinking and also has some trouble empathizing with other humans then his comment was just going out of his way to tell a fellow human that their moment of learning and realization was remedial. [0] https://www.recurse.com/manual#sub-sec-social-rules https://www.recurse.com/manual#sub-sec-social-rules Edit: After explaining it and rereading the downvotee I decided to downvote as well. The clincher was following up with the implication that the original poster was not only remedial but poorly educated.