I remember when the news about Jussie Smollet broke, the usual SJWs on Twitter erupted in a tweet storm like they always do. (I follow a lot of great programmers who have a wide array of opinions and ideologies outside of their technical expertise) As what many have come to accept as the truth came out, no one ever retracted.
These are smart people, some of which have very high feedback here on HN. It seems to me however that their highly tuned critical thinking skills take a backseat to a desire to be mad about the state of the world, with little regard or accountability to what their words can mean.
These are smart people, some of which have very high feedback here on HN.
All HN points mean is that more people on HN agree with you on a topic than disagree with you, or that you brought something the people here found interesting. They are in no way a proxy for smartness. There are some very intelligent and insightful posts by people with 10 HN points, and some completely dumb posts by people with around 16700 points.
> more people on HN agree with you on a topic than disagree with you
They don't even mean that. There's a (500?) karma threshold for being able to downvote, whereas anyone can upvote.