Comment by username332211
7 months ago
Why does it make your skin crawl?
By a mathematical necessity, half the people can say “Yes, most people are stupider than me." without lying.
7 months ago
Why does it make your skin crawl?
By a mathematical necessity, half the people can say “Yes, most people are stupider than me." without lying.
It bothers me for a few reasons.
Journalists have spilt a lot of ink recently about arrogance in the tech community. They point out tech figures who mistakenly think their aptitude in one knowledge domain means they know better than experts in other domains.
That's one reason.
That's even worse. Journalists are infamous for writing articles and having opinions on things they know nothing about.
To produce plausible sounding statements on a complex topics without regard to their actual truth is almost a necessity for the opinion journalist (the predominant type of journalist of the modern era).
To be criticized for intellectual hubris by that class should be meaningless.
That wasn't an appeal to authority (as embodied, I guess, by journalists). I wanted to introduce the idea, without claiming it to be some novel insight of mine.
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I would argue that "most" implies more than a bare majority. Say, 75%?
majority != most