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Comment by ljoshua | Hacker News Reader

    "...but they aren't ALL hateful."

In fact, I would venture to say that an extremely FEW are hateful. There has been too much caricaturing on both sides. I am fairly certain that 95%+ of people on both sides of the issue are actually very caring, intelligent people (and yes, even on the pro-Prop 8 side like myself) who do not treat each other differently.

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You are right. I put the emphasis there not to condemn them, but it seems like a majority of comments equate pro-Prop 8 with hating homosexuals. I actually agree that few people out there are hateful.

It tends to be the 5% on either side that makes the rest of us look bad.

> I am fairly certain that 95%+ of people on both sides of the issue are actually very caring, intelligent people

I would be very surprised if on this, or any other, divisive political issue, 95% of the people on any side (much less both sides) were "very caring, intelligent people", or even "above average" in either (much less both) the "caring" or "intelligent" domains.

That's almost as ridiculous and cartoonish a characterization is saying that they are all hateful and mindless.

I guess I try to give people the benefit of the doubt rather than classify them negatively. True, maybe it's not that high, but one can hope. :)

It should be patently obvious that 95% of people are not "above average", and that when considering two independent attributes, it is a statistical impossibility that 95% of people are above average in one of the two.

A class of twenty students is given a test. One student scores 90 and the other nineteen score 100.

95% of the class scores "above average".

Not sure why you're downvoted when you're completely correct. Kind of odd we have supposedly technical people on here who confuse median and mean.

I had another comment today to attract a few surprising downvotes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7535793 Perhaps everyone's still a bit grouchy over the Mozilla thing? :-(

Holy math fail batman! You are completely wrong. Learn to distinguish between mean and median before you try to lecture us on 6th grade math.

Most humans are caring, intelligent beings. That statement has nothing to do with mathematical concept of an average.

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