Re:How the Idea of a ‘Normal’ Person Got Invented
by filoeleven on Thursday February 25, 2016 @10:33AM
(#11175062)
As often happens, there is a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/
The hover text is especially applicable: "Saying 'what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time."
Re:How the Idea of a ‘Normal’ Person Got Invented
by StavrosK on Thursday February 25, 2016 @08:22AM
(#11174177)
I'm going to completely break the etiquette of the link you provided and go "Well, actually... it's 'borne'".
Other than that, great comment, and thank you for that link.
Re:How the Idea of a ‘Normal’ Person Got Invented
by BWStearns on Thursday February 25, 2016 @08:35AM
(#11174268)
>> Unless the downvotee was born with an inherently sound understanding
This part? I meant "was born" as made the jump from being a fetus to being a baby, not "borne" in the sense of being carried, although I guess that works in a bit more poetic sense.
(Also thanks for the comment either way, always happy for feedback and corrections)
The downvotee could clearly imagine this being unintuitive if he were inclined to be so creative. The entire comment evals to "I inherently grasped statistical thinking from birth, what's wrong with you that you didn't?"
To borrow from a Hacker School post a long time ago: it's feigning surprise[0] at the ignorance of others. If you're on HN you probably work in an environment where learning is a non-optional part of your every day. Getting to the point where not knowing things isn't a blow to your self-esteem can be a pretty big professional hurdle for people.
Unless the downvotee was born with an inherently sound understanding of statistical thinking and also has some trouble empathizing with other humans then his comment was just going out of his way to tell a fellow human that their moment of learning and realization was remedial.
[0] https://www.recurse.com/manual#sub-sec-social-rules
Edit: After explaining it and rereading the downvotee I decided to downvote as well. The clincher was following up with the implication that the original poster was not only remedial but poorly educated.