In reality I doubt the average HN user is above the 75th percentile
If this were true, I would have lost whatever little faith in humanity I had left. But I very much doubt it, being good at some "hackery" thing is completely orthogonal to being intelligent/smart in any normal meaning of the word.
The important point, though, is that "dichotomy" not the same as "contradiction". The contradiction between your estimate of the high intelligence of HN commenters and the, let's say, less-than-intelligent ideas sometimes expressed here can be explained by noticing that being somewhat smart doesn't make someone immune to having stupid ideas.
What, after all, is the minimal IQ beyond which one will never make a mistake?
I'd argue 0, in that a being completely incapable of even attempting thought would be unable to have an incorrect thought. But that's a bit of a reductio ad absurdum
Edit: As a clarification, while I still tend toward a preference for representative democracy, I now acknowledge that it is possible for a fruitful and productive society to flourish in systems that some may label as an "oppressive dictatorship".
And indeed what we see is that oppressive dictatorships never have high quality people running them. They're always overrun with corruption, absurd ideas, forged statistics, pseudo-intellectual waffle (see: the books and political thinking created by the leaders of the USSR) and to the extent they may seem more intelligent or erudite than the working classes it's only because they craft their image so carefully.
You say you now acknowledge it's possible for a "fruitful and productive society to flourish" in an oppressive dictatorship, but what on earth are you thinking of here? Surely not China, which has thrown millions of its own citizens into concentration camps, trashed its environment, routinely seems to report false GDP numbers, relies on capital controls to keep the rich Chinese from leaving, is famous throughout the world for IP theft, has practically disconnected itself from the global internet and has radically misallocated resources in many well documented ways? That fruitful and productive society?
One of the things I'll give the US is as crappy as the leaders get, the system still remains cohesive rather than suffering a bloody coup every four years.
Completely agree. I'm just speaking from an American perspective. There are plenty of other countries that are similarly stable (perhaps even moreso thanks to having more than two diametrically opposed parties).
The "general agreement to operate within the framework" bit was what I was getting at with "good people". I'm not sure how stable it would be against a concerted effort to disrupt/distort it. But I haven't looked into its governance in much depth, either, thus my original question.
Pretty much every system in the world has that feature. Heck, that's a standard of quality so low North Korea’s government passes with honors.
It's hard to admit that dichotomy, because when we realize that the top 1% or .01% can still be so ignorant, we also gradually realize that we are all probably in for a lot of trouble moving forward, particularly if and when resource wars become a bit more widespread than they are now.