I've also learned that intelligent people are a dime a dozen. There's no barrier to intelligence--you're just born smart, and fully half of people are born with above-median intelligence--so the relative value of intelligence is limited. Knowledge, on the other hand, is hard to come by: even if you're extremely well-informed on one subject, there are hundreds of subjects upon which you are completely uninformed. Intelligence can help you become informed if you apply it to learning, but as often as not, intelligent people just use their intelligence to skate by without having to learn things. I know that for a lot of my early schooling, I didn't apply myself to learning because I could get away without work due to my intelligence. This didn't pay off, and in my mid-twenties I had to really learn how to learn.
Nowadays I would rather be informed than intelligent.
EDIT: Note that in the "fixed vs. growth mindset" theory, "knowledge" is just the growth version of intelligence--I'm making a distinction between intelligence and knowledge, but that's not necessarily the terminology other people use.
The problem happens when people assume that if someone isn't technical, that they aren't intelligent. There are plenty of very intelligent people who can't write a line of code. One of the smartest guys I know is a roofer.
And there are all sorts of caveats here. "Being technical" optimizes for a narrow type of intelligence: bearded sysadmins with no social skills exist in real life. And the opposite is true too: lots of technical people who are socially adept exist too.
HN specifically prohibits remarking on this when it happens; the guidelines say: 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."' I understand that the intent of this is to create a polite environment, but the end result is one where uninformed opinions are welcomed.
It's even to the point that some people will proudly proclaim that they didn't read the thing they're responding to, often paired with a complaint that the linked content is too long, or that it didn't account for some gotcha (which it accounts for, just not in the first few paragraphs).
To be clear: you may be informed on a topic, but if you don't read what you're responding to, you aren't informed on what you're responding to. And over time, people whose only source of "information" is uninformed comments are going to be uninformed on topics as well, while believing that they are informed.
> It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed.
But neither community consensus nor gut feeling have anything to do with truth. Primary sources, scientific observation, and to a lesser degree, logic and expert opinion--those are what we should be trusting.