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> Most people are mediocre, and when consensus or even majority is the norm they have the power. No, most people are not mediocre. Most people are mediocre at
by hnbad 4y ago
> Most people are mediocre, and when consensus or even majority is the norm they have the power.
No, most people are not mediocre. Most people are mediocre at any given thing by definition. Individuals can excel at a given thing. Some can even excel at multiple things. But let's not allow our hubris to blind us to our own shortcomings. Picking arbitrary data points to rate people on a scale and discard the majority as "mediocre people" is painfully half-witted pseudoscience.
Much like Interesting Numbers, there really is no such thing as an exceptional person because there is no unexceptional person. When we judge people as "mediocre" or "exceptional" we view them in a given context and we only look at a momentary snapshot of an aspect of them. People are infinitely more complex than you allow yourself to imagine and even if you can find a way to grade them that takes this complexity into account (surely as an intelligent person you don't believe antiquated, unscientific, disproven number games like IQ test scores are a helpful tool for this) you'll find that other than sharing whatever metric you used to declare them mediocre, "the mediocre" don't share much of a meaningful in-group identity as a collective.
The Great Man Myth makes for appealing storytelling but it's such an oversimplification and distortion of reality that it should be considered an insult to any intellectually curious individual. Great Men arise not despite society but because of society. Without society you would wilt, naked and abandoned in a desert.
Just think of it from an evolutionary standpoint: what's the point of evolving such that most individuals are useless or at best capable underlings and the survival of the species hinges on the eventual appearance of a natural leader? That sounds less like science and more like the kind of fairytales we used to justify the Divine Right of Kings.
I'm honestly shocked to see such a reductive and uncurious take on a site like HN which prides itself on the intellectual curiosity of its community.
- mekoka 4y agoYou're isolating a sentence by GP and proceed to attack it on the pretext that it was not specific. But maybe you just misunderstood it, as you seem to be arguing against your own interpretation of it. The specificity was implied, since people don't form consensus on generalities. I.e. if you take any given thing around which a regulation is being drawn, most people participating in or assenting to the process will be mediocre. At any specific thing, most people are mediocre, a few people excel. Saying this is hardly hubris. It's a recognition of an aspect of human nature. The entire world's culture is rich in examples and aphorisms that point to this. > I'm honestly shocked to see such a reductive and uncurious take on a site like HN which prides itself on the intellectual curiosity of its community. Now, this qualifies as hubris.
- bjornsing 4y agoApologies if the word mediocre offended you. I was just trying to get a point across as succinctly as I could. Personally I don’t attach much emotion to the word. I’m mediocre at most things, of course. I tend to think of ability as normally distributed. A spread of three standard distributions covers more than 99% of the probability mass. These I think of as the mediocre. But in any significantly large group there will be outliers at +2, +3, +4 or even +5 standard deviations. This is just how normally distributed abilities (like e.g. IQ) work.
- hnbad 4y agoThis is a prime example of a motte-and-bailey: The motte: - when consensus or even majority is the norm, [the mediocre] have the power - [to outlaw the outliers] is in the interest of the mediocre The bailey: - most people are mediocre You're defending the bailey but that's not what I was attacking. I very much stated that "[m]ost people are mediocre at any given thing by definition", which is what you're falling back to here as if I disagreed with that. To paraphrase, your argument was that "the mediocre" share a group interest and that group interest is to suppress ("outlaw") those who are exceptional. Instead of further qualifying that, you refer to it as human nature. You also state that consensus-seeking or "majority rule" enables this suppression. Based on your framing this is not only a thing that happens but also a bad thing. The logical but unstated conclusion is that any form of democracy or consensus-based rule is bad because it kneecaps exceptional people in their ability to be exceptional. This is why I referred to the Great Man myth, which states that historical advances are the accomplishments of singular exceptional people rather than material realities and social dynamics. Again, the crux of your argument hinges on "the mediocre" being a meaningful group that has shared interests and that these interests involve suppressing "outliers". You have demonstrated zero evidence for either of these claims.
- bjornsing 4y agoI think the emotional charge this has for you is a good piece of evidence. You obviously oppose the Great Man myth with a vengeance. To me it seems very plausible that you will (subconsciously of course) use any influence or power you come into to make sure no “Great Man” gets a chance to outshine your “social dynamics”. I’m curious, how do you account for progress in fields like mathematics where the mediocre seldom make any contributions at all?
- throwthrowuknow 4y agoYou’re putting way too much baggage on the word mediocre. It just means ordinary or average which by definition most people are. It seems to have triggered you somehow so I’d suggest taking a few deep breaths and acknowledging and letting go of those emotions and then start again.