We've banned this account for using HN for ideological battle. This site exists for intellectual curiosity, and one of those things destroys the other.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

“If you remove the smart people, IQ goes down”

[Citation Needed]

Nothing personal, but this kind of comment really grind my gears. When I read a claim like the one made in that comment, I take that as a lead and am grateful that someone brought light to that POV so I can explore more, e.g. freaking google it.

The [Citation Needed] approach would make all comments boringly long and harder to write, all conversations white-paper like, which isn't bad of course, but has its place.

How many times I felt lazy and just dropped my comment because I knew that the [Citation Needed] comments were bound to come, and while I have a good insight about the subject, I had no will to spend more energy on that nor any inclination for taking flak from lazier unconstructive commenters.

This was the first google result. California is 48th. And that of course includes all the smarties in silicon valley who I assume bring up the average.

https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/we-compared-average-iq-sc...

Wonder what the ranked order looks like for "% of population attending or employed by a university".

And the Asian immigrants. People from south of the border are bringing the average down hard.