[gaius]

we literally only just now managed to build a technological society because we only just got smart enough to do it. We are by definition at the absolute minimum level of intelligence that's able to do that, otherwise we'd have done it sooner.

I don't think that's true - you could get a bunch of contemporary humans and drop them on a pre-industrialized planet and tell them to bootstrap a technological civilization yet they'd probably all have died of old age before scratching the surface. Locating the raw materials and iteratively building more and more sophisticated artefacts simply takes time, no matter how smart you potentially are.

[simonh]

> you could get a bunch of contemporary humans and drop them on a pre-industrialized planet and tell them to bootstrap a technological civilization yet they'd probably all have died of old age before scratching the surfac

You're not selling me on the idea that these people are particularly bright, on a cosmic scale.

[gaius]

My point is that "soonness" is not just a matter of intelligence; no matter how smart you are it still takes time.

Let's take your typical HN'er who probably thinks of themselves as very smart indeed and put them in this scenario. Then they will quickly learn that in order to make Angular.js, you must first locate a supply of clean drinking water and make a fire and last the first night...