Comment by mysterydip
7 days ago
Didn't this start with "Can someone tell me where your average every day human that’s walking around and has a regular job and kids and a mortgage would land on this leaderboard? That’s who we should be comparing against."
And the average person would do poorly. Not because they couldn't be trained to do it, but because they haven't.
It's obvious that the average person would do bad at the International Math Olympiad. Although I don't know why the qualifiers of "regular job and kids and a mortgage" are necessary, except as a weird classist signifier. I strongly suspect most people on HN, who consider themselves set apart from the average, with some also having a regular job, kids and a mortgage, would also not do well at the International Math Olympiad.
But that isn't the claim I'm objecting to. The claim I'm objecting to is "The average person is bad at literally almost everything," which is not an equivalent claim to "people who aren't trained at math would be bad at math at a competitive level," because it implicitly includes everything that a person is trained in and is expected to be qualified to do.
It was just bad, cynical hyperbole. And it's weird that people are defending it so aggressively.