throwaway353453
throwaway353453 on Hacker News
Americans are too averse to being a little elitist, it cuts against the culture too much. I assume that's why the author was afraid of raising the bar to anything reasonable. For this specific point, perhaps a better bar would be the name of the theorist associated with the idea of separation of powers. Minimal, but sufficiently exclusionary to assume some basic familiarity with the canon.
More broadly re elitism, it's fine not to rate someone's opinions if that person is not particularly intellectual or well versed in the area in question, so long as you remember to value them as a human being. Too many people fall into the trap of either thinking that all views are equal (they are not), or that not all people are equal (they are).
On the other hand, no matter what I say here it will be misused and misconstrued, since it is in the nature of tribal sports like politics that you're already reading this through [your side]-tinted spectacles. Not much I can do about this. It's a useful shibboleth for other fields though.
Virtually everyone has an opinion about language, for example, and virtually no one has any training in linguistics. This one is so bad it's genuinely not worth engaging almost anyone about language if you fall into the second group, or you'll suffer through absolute hogwash about how language X has 'more words' than language Y, or language Z is 'more objectively beautiful', or how not following some pedant's preferred stylistic rule is 'ungrammatical', or how only the exact forms prescribed by some government are 'correct', etc. It's fine to be somewhat elitist. I want to talk about Indo-European s-mobile, and there are probably fewer than 100 people on the face of the planet capable of having that conversation. Instead, I'm stuck nodding and smiling at a taxi driver explaining to me that Turkish is God's own language or someone on HN explaining that Hangeul is akshually a geometrically perfect writing system. Such is life.