The comment I replied to is an example of this.

Huh? "self selected to be above average in determination and smarts" is a far cry from "We're smarter than everybody else".

The person I replied to is a Haskell developer, talking about Haskell developers. A member of the community, talking about how smart people in the community are .

Yes, he believes that the average smartness across Haskell developers is greater than the average smartness across all developers (as do I). This is a fairly weak claim. He did not make the claim "we're smarter than everybody else", which is a very strong claim. That's your strawman.

Well, "self selected to be above average in determination and smarts" has to at least mean "we average smarter than everyone else", doesn't it?

"Smarter than average" and "smarter than everyone else" are not synonyms.

True, but...

jlarocco said two things: "There's really no evidence that people choosing Haskell are any smarter or more determined than anybody else" and "I'm mainly pointing this out because the Haskell community's "We're smarter than everybody" attitude is a big pet peeve of mine."

Note the phrases "smarter than everybody" and "not smarter than anybody else". Those are not nuanced statements, but I don't think they're intended to be absolutely exclusive statements.

Or to put it another way, if you interpret "smarter than everybody" as the claim that Haskell programmers are actually the smartest programmers, then grammatically, you also have to read "not smarter than anybody else" as the claim that Haskell programmers are as dumb as the dumbest programmers in existence - which I'm pretty sure was not jlarocco's actual claim.