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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

Right. So there was a global consensus, promoted by certain folks, that adherence to academics was the secret to national success.

And the Soviets bought in to that propaganda, to their detriment. They spent a fortune and produced the most well-educated and thoughtful population in human history. A couple of their satellite states even achieved genuine 100% literacy. Not 100% rounded but 100% exact.

The campaign thus was a success. It was amazing. Fortunes were spent on the totally unimportant goal of an egalitarian society where everyone is respected and helped.

Being smart isn't how you succeed as top dog in this era.

edit: Downvotes away uneducated ignoranti with no counterpoints! Yee haw!

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Please stop posting ideological bait to HN.

Dan you continue to be a Nazi ideologue in the service of sociopaths. I have tried for years to help you but it's hopeless isn't it. You won't stop sucking their ass in the promotion of fascism. You horrible piece of evil.

I wish you would get what you have created for yourself but there is no justice. The innocent will be oppressed by the elitist liars you support as a sycophant and justice will never prevail. It's horrible. You could switch sides but they are tossing bones at you and you will sell out the good for a tiny token. It's horrible.

I'm pretty sure it's not deng who needs the help here...

> Downvotes away ignoranti!

Not a mod, but that’s against the HN guidelines and is likely to keep your comment grayed out.

I thought the rest of your comment was interesting, FWIW.

Personally, I gravitate towards grayed-out comments. I think that they tend to be likely to be on one or another extreme side of the intellectual bell curve. Basically, they end up grayed out because either they are too dumb or too smart for the average Hacker News user. So if I manage to run an effective mental filter to discard grayed-out comments that are on the low side of the intellectual gray curve, then gravitating towards grayed-out comments makes it more likely that I am exposed to content that is in the highest intellectual range of Hacker News comments as a whole.

Or the ones you most agree with, which for most people are approximately the same as the 'highest intellectual range' ones.

But since this is how like to you read HN, you really should know about the 'showdead' option in your profile. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

Thanks for the tip about "showdead". I totally agree that there's a big danger, if one follows the strategy I described, of personal bias making one confuse "intelligent" with "what I want to be true" or with "what I enjoy because it is contrarian". However, I am aware of this danger and work to mitigate it in various ways. Also, I should mention that I don't think that grayed-out comments are 0.5 likely to be highly intelligent - I'd say it's more like about 0.1 or 0.2. Overall, I think that the benefit of prioritizing grayed-out comments, to me, has been worth it so far.

How do you succeed as top dog in this era?

What are you even talking about?

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