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Comment by Retra | Hacker News Reader

Hitler put himself into a situation where the best option, in his opinion, was to blow his own brains out. So he's not winning any awards for being brilliant. Perhaps being a good demagogue has more to do with luck and circumstance than it does with skill and intelligence? Maybe that's why it's not so common?

Intelligence means achieving your goals on purpose. It is something that can be taught and reproduced in others. You can't just wait for entropy to spontaneously arrange for your success and claim to be a genius, even if it works the one time you try it.

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Your definition of intelligence is quite unorthodox and so is idea that brilliance somehow excludes suicide or risk taking or over confidence - all things that can make you loose big time.

Hitler ability to speak was not luck. It was work, skill and talent. And world did not just spontaneously arranged itself for them to get power, Hitler took a lot of calculated deeps to make it so, it is not like he was only one trying to get that power. Saying that it was nothing but luck is ahistorical. Not that it makes him any less immoral.

Hitler was perhaps one of the stupidest people to ever grace the history books, and managed to wipe out vast numbers of his own people, including himself, in a completely pointless war of his own making, wherein he managed to make enemies of three of the most powerful entities in the world at that time.

The alternative was a Germany as vassal state under crippling WWI reparations and a failing economy. The war was not "pointless" even if it ultimately failed in its goals.

I'm not defending his ideology, but its important to understand the rational reasons behind his decisions if we want to prevent another global catastrophe. Even without Hitler its still likely Germany would have instigated fighting at some point.

so, that's one way of looking at it, it's the conventional view, and probably more correct, but...

Another way of looking at it is that the fighting resulted because France and the allies didn't crack down on Germany when they failed to meet the terms of their surrender.

Personally, I feel that your view (and the conventional view) is more correct, but it's interesting to think about the converse. I mean, we've still got troops in Germany today, right? What if that's the key? It wasn't about economically rebuilding them, but what if, instead the war didn't flare up again simply because the occupation never ended?

It was war for territory, "living space" and ultimately world domination. Effectively, it was imperial project. The other powers were not about to give power up for free. Those are quite clear points.

Hitler did not valued life and got used to violence in WWI. That has nothing to do with intelligence either. Both stupid and smart people can grow to not value life and be ruthless and confident and power hungry and taking too much risk.

I didn't provide a definition of intelligence, I provided a description of it. The ability to win at dice is not intelligence. That's not a controversial claim.

>Hitler ability to speak was not luck.

Nor was it particularly intelligent. Plenty of people speak well. He just had a podium in front of the right people. People who wanted to hear stupid ideas delivered with emotion. If you stood him in front of his enemies, he would be insulted and denigrated, because he wasn't a good speaker so much as he was good at finding an approving audience.

You're not a great runner if you happen to look around and find yourself a race where you win by moving slowest. If that brings you rewards, you're lucky. Not skilled. Hitler was an opportunist, and you can't learn to succeed in life by following his example. Because luck can't be taught.

What you wrote is not true. Hitler was very good at reading audience, adjusting speech to them and seeing how they react. His work and actions had impact on that movement sucess.

I would not learn from Hitler, because his idea of sucess involves imperialistic war and multiple genocides. And his ideology praised ruthlessness as a virtue. Has nothing to do with whether he had speeking skill or not, whether he could paint well or not.

Just because he was bad guy does not mean we have to go all emotional and pretend he had IQ 75. That just allowing emotions to win over what and why happened.

I'm not saying he was stupid, I'm saying he wasn't particularly intelligent. I.e., not an archetypical example of an intelligent person.

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