EU CRA (Cyber Resilience Act)

Posted Jan 5, 2026 16:09 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: EU CRA (Cyber Resilience Act) by poruid
Parent article: Kroah-Hartman: Linux kernel security work

And while it's a hobby horse of mine, assuming that a lawyer understands the law - even in his own specialty! - is a dangerous thing to do. As a doctor mate of mine once said - "50% of people are below average intelligence, so what does that say about doctors?". The same could be said about lawyers - and once you assume that all your hot-shots are in high powered jobs, what does that say about your average high street doctor or lawyer!!!

Mix a high intelligence, and a good grasp of the detail, and you don't need to be a professional to outperform your typical high-street practitioner.

Mind you, you also need my attitude to electrics - as an okay amateur sparky, my FIRST response to any job is "if I don't understand it, get a professional involved". You can then assess the professional's competence ...

Cheers,
Wol

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EU CRA (Cyber Resilience Act)

Posted Jan 5, 2026 16:39 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> As a doctor mate of mine once said - "50% of people are below average intelligence, so what does that say about doctors?".

My gripe with this is that they're actually talking about the median. It also assumes doctors are uniformly sampled across the "intelligence spectrum" (as measured by, presumably, IQ) and all the faults with that.

I don't think anyone would say "50% of people at IAS in the 1930's and 1940's were below average intelligence" without also having a footnote of "but all are sampled from the top 1% of the world population". And the internal rankings would certainly differ from those on the outside (cf. Einstein and him ranking Gödel as above himself, IIRC).

EU CRA (Cyber Resilience Act)

Posted Jan 5, 2026 17:37 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I don't know that intelligence *should* be a factor in sampling people to become doctors (other than filtering out the subnormal). Certainly in my case intelligence seems to have been a DEselection criteria. I got grades A, B, B, your typical offer iirc was about C, D, D, and your successful candidate typically achieved B, C, C. Certainly I think only ONE of my successful fellow candidates from school got a higher grade.

Absent reliable information one way or the other, I'm happy to assume reasonably random selection (although of course I've missed the fact that school leavers rig the criteria somewhat. That said, so do English Public Schools in the opposite direction, where a lot of people who get good grades come over as "rich and stupid".

However you play it though, my experience of legal work leaves me inclined to put the two letters "in" in front of your average lawyer's competence.

Cheers,
Wol