alt Hacker News> It is valuable to ask questions about why things are the way they are in order to understand the fundamentals of it vs we should change these things because I am 'smarter than you' and I don't understand why things are done this way (which I called dumb, and not smart).
But you expressed doubt of stated (and frankly not even remotely subjective) experience, so if we dropped you in an organisation your immediate response to anything you don't understand is "That doesn't match my mental model, so I doubt it actually happened", followed by either everyone giving up or you insisting everyone persuade you of absolutely every last detail of everything. It's enormously tedious, and the reason it comes across as arrogant is the demands put on everyone else to explain everything to you because you clearly see everyone else as incapable of the same level of insights that you are, all the while you are telling people what they experience is them being mistaken.
Just look at the way you questioned whether or not I could tell if someone is actually smart or not. It's just plain insulting. And it's not just me, it's everyone that has this same experience which forms the basis of the stereotype.
You seem to be imputing a lot of intent into my comment and then extending that to value judgements about smartness etc. I don't know what any of this has to do with what GP was saying. Yeah, there's a balance between questioning everything and questioning nothing, but there are a lot of bureaucratic things that happen in organizations and its generally a good thing to question certain things that don't have clear explanations, isn't there?
The doubt was simply about whether or not what GP is saying is smart behaviour to exhibit - Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people. is the same behaviour that you are saying you've experienced ( i.e you are talking about different things).
I'm not even questioning if you can tell if someone is smart or not - its just obvious that forcing decisions based off things that are not understood is not a smart thing to do - which..we all agree on -, and neither I nor GP were saying people should do this?
Maybe I could've phrased it better but my whole point was GP says X, you are saying Y. I think there is a distinction between X and Y and I doubt that the people GP is talking about are the same people you are talking about (hence, smart as you put it vs smart as GP put it).