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you may be tooting your own horn there. its a trap to believe you and/or your community is "above average" in intelligence. the community on hacker news is more
by metaphorm 10y ago
you may be tooting your own horn there. its a trap to believe you and/or your community is "above average" in intelligence. the community on hacker news is more enculturated than most for a few things.
1. working with computers
2. selling technology
3. thinking about business in the medium term
4. calling ourselves very smart with little backing evidence for that claim
and besides that stuff I am not particularly impressed by the level of intelligence displayed here (including my own)
- internaut 10y agoMaybe intelligence is like the sausage factory. People like the product but nothing that happens to make it is elegant.
- Houshalter 10y agoIt's not a trap, HN definitely has a higher IQ than the general population. FWIW I have some data on IQs from a similar online community, showing the cumulative distribution of IQ compared to the general population: http://www.leijuvakaupunki.fi/images/box/lw_ssc_iq_cdf.png http://www.leijuvakaupunki.fi/images/box/lw_ssc_iq_cdf.png HN is highly correlated with technical professions and especially programmers. Those things happen to be highly correlated with and selective of IQ.
- metaphorm 10y agopost I responded to said "smarter than average" which is not the same thing as IQ and conflating the two of those is also a trap.
- Houshalter 10y agoIQ is the best measure of intelligence we have, and correlates strongly with real world outcomes like income and academic success.
- metaphorm 10y agoI don't think we're even talking about the same thing anymore. Nor do I think we could possibly have a productive conversation on this topic.