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Comment by sleepysysadmin | Hacker News Reader

Literally the opposite of my world view. With exceptions of things like bad motorcycle accidents without a helmet. Virtually everyone you meet is smart. It's just what are they smart in? Jeremy Clarkson officially knows far more about industrial farming than I do, but I know much more about IT in general. We both probably know nothing about aviation engineering.

When you start treating people as such, it becomes a very enjoyable game to learn more about people and find the periphery of your shared venn diagram of knowledge.

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I've got the same world view. I haven't actually met anyone truly stupid. At worst I've met people who have some sort of cognitive disorder or straight up brain damage from some sort of trauma.

However, I have met people who some people might call 'stupid'. So far it seems that what's actually going on is that those people were stuck in some sort of situation where they had to learn to act in a certain way to handle it. For example, if your parents are abusive narcissists, then you might end up having trouble dealing with the real world. It's not stupid, it's maladaptive. And it's what you needed to survive a bad situation.

Ya, absolutely agreed. This is the only way to have meaningful conversations and build relationships I think. Even if someone doesn't understand something, it could be random ignorance or not their specialty.

I think another way to put it, would be to assume that any given person knows more than you, or more than you think they might, and to approach every situation with humility.

I also share the same world view. With every person that I met, it was just a question of finding what area/subject they spend a lot of time doing. They will be more knowledgeable on it than you, and by accepting it and listen to their expertise you'll learn a lot about some subjects you didn't even know existed.

I don't think that's at all in conflict with the point of the article. Like you said, virtually everyone you meet has knowledge outside of your shared diagram, so it's not unreasonable to think some of that knowledge could be relatively commonplace.

If you extend that same humility to others (rather than unfairly assuming that you're just especially naive) then you're really coming to the same conclusion as the headline here in a more diplomatic way.

I really appreciate this world view. As far as mental models go, it pre-supposes with a curious intent.

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