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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

The people who enforce rules like this don't have the IQ to grasp the concept that rules could have a bug.

It's not necessarily about IQ. I'm a US citizen (white, male, professional, no criminal record or questionable associations). For years, every time I would enter the US I would get detained and questioned by immigration officials. Once, while waiting for an immigration officer at a passport check, I noticed that she had paused and looked like there was a problem. I asked what the problem was, and she said "the computer said your face doesn't match your passport photo". I was standing right there, holding my passport, and anyone with eyes could see that I was the same person. I pleaded with her, and offered her two other forms of ID, but she refused to override the computer system and I was detained and questioned. It wasn't that she had a low IQ, it was that she didn't want to accept the consequences if her judgment call was wrong, much safer to just go with what the computer system says and not have a liability.

The next time I entered the US, it was Christmas Eve, and I flew straight to my hometown to spend time with family. Of course, they detained me. I asked what the issue was, and they said that the computer didn't match my passport photo. I told them that this keeps happening to me, and they looked a little closer and said "in the computer system where a photo of your face should be, we have a photo of a boarding pass". I asked them how to fix it, they said it wasn't possible but suggested that I get a new passport. I never got a new passport, but after that day, I never had trouble entering the US again, so I imagine that one of the officers felt some compassion for me and managed to get the bug in the system fixed for me.

I do think that maybe that officer had a bit of a higher EQ than most.

The people who enforce rules like that know that their bosses will fire them if they don’t, and I doubt that they’re paid so much that finding another job wouldn’t be a personal terror.

Politicians and pundits love to rail against government inefficiency or bureaucracy but that’s an intentional tactic to absolve the politicians who created the problem. If the law says there’s a penalty after 52 weeks, the DMV employee can’t override it unless they’re very specifically authorized to do so.

liquidise says the DMV recorded they received the check on time.

If that is true, and the records show what can only be explained by a clerical error - there is always a procedure to fix clerical errors. If liquidise wrote to his senator and the senator took up the cause, I guarantee the error could be corrected by an orderly and legal procedure.

Of course, whether that procedure is known to front-line workers, and whether they can do it fast enough to achieve their call processing time targets is another matter.

It is more a matter of time, energy and patience to find the person actually authorized to fix the clerical error.

Oh, no doubt. My point is that you don’t rail against someone doing their job, you follow that process for getting it corrected. Like if Verizon messes up my bill, being a jerk to the call center worker won’t do much but finding a contact who actually has the ability to authorize a change does.

> The people who enforce rules like that know that their bosses will fire them if they don’t, and I doubt that they’re paid so much that finding another job wouldn’t be a personal terror.

It's very difficult to fire a government employee. This is because of "due process" requirements that apply specifically to the government taking something from you (in this case, a job). The due process requirements are fairly burdensome and drawn out, so often the inept employee is just shuffled off to another office or put somewhere that he has minimal impact on others.

You’re overstating the difficulty: you have to show cause and demonstrate fairness, but in the scenario we’re talking about that’s very straightforward: show that a clerk had been trained on the rules, didn’t follow them, and didn’t improve when warned.

" ... had been trained on the rules, yet interpreted them compassionately according to sober interpretation of their intent, and didn't improve when warned ... "

It’s less IQ and more that they’re neither the ones writing the rules nor are they empowered to fix the situation.

Actually, I'd like to make it clear I'm including the makers also.

Robocat's law: people that think others have low IQ, tend to have low IQs.

Not quite Dunning-Kruger which might have been a statistical mistake.

Disclosure: former maker.

I suspect it is because lower IQ people struggle to recognise higher IQ in others.

Smartest guy I know said the smartest guy he knew delivered pies. Smart people are cryptic.

Robocat's perverse corollary: when you look for smartness in people you can always find it: usually in an unfamiliar area.

Assuming that it's a statistically useful, predictive principle, you'd still have to gather a documented history of me consistently underestimating people's IQs in order to suspect that mine might be low on that basis.

Statistical sampling: a typically academic smart reply.

I believe smartness is an ability to intuitively see patterns that others do not obviously see. Our writing is full of signals and some people are adept at reading a lot into a simple comment. I'm not suggesting I'm any good at it, and unfortunately there are also a lot of people who think they're good but are not.

Mentioning "IQ" at all is a huge flag: often used by people that are academically successful but that is a poor measure of how smart someone is.

While my comment was written in a cheeky style, I am actually writing about my own experience as a reasonably smart person dealing with my own lack of wisdom over the years.

Don't worry: I don't actually suspect you have a low IQ.

Yes, completely off-topic, I shouldn't bite I know!

It has nothing to do with IQ, and everything with turning people into cogs in a machine. Following the rules, no matter how inane, is safe. Making a judgment call to break the rules exposes one to risk, and people who will review it later will likely be in the same conundrum themselves (i.e. it's always safer for them to conclude that breaking the rules was not justified), all the way to the top.

This is also why the larger and the more hierarchical any organization is, the more sociopathic it is as a whole, even if its bureaucracy is ran by people who aren't.

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