> I think I'm not being out of line to claim that on the average an American's high-school-level education is pretty poor. The thing is that it's not really t

> I think I'm not being out of line to claim that on the average an American's high-school-level education is pretty poor. The thing is that it's not really that true. Here's a typical article on Huffington Post bemoaning the American education system: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/us-students-still-lag-beh_n_1695516.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/us-students-still-l... But if you read it carefully, the truth is that we're not getting worse. We're just not getting better as fast as others. We used to be the best. Now we're in the middle. We're not worse than we were 60 years ago. We're better. Other countries have just gotten better much faster. Which is a trend that applies to a lot in America these days. Education IS improving. So, I think anything that tries to relate an absolute decline to "the failure of our schools" is wrong. Maybe that's not your point though. The thing is that what you describe at the beginning of your post is actually typically human. Experiments have shown we all have cognitive biases that make us bad at "being skeptical" and "reasoning about potential outcomes" or using past examples to predict future events (even when we're well educated.) Humans are just not good at doing that stuff. We can overcome our biases but that's not really taught in school. You can read about a lot of it at http://lesswrong.com/ http://lesswrong.com/ So I don't think it's that helpful to bundle up people who struggle with cognitive biases as "Those kinds of people" There's a chance that "our kind of people", aka people who read hacker news, are much better at being rational but it's probably because we've taught ourselves to think like computers! Because that's a big part of what being a hacker is.