"The divide is not between smart and stupid people, but between people who can inspect the systems around them and people who are forced to accept those systems on the basis of trust."

I mean... a smart person can not understand the system, true. But a sufficiently stupid person cannot understand the system. So, it is a divide between smart people who understand the system on the one hand and smart people who don't along with dumb people who can't on the other.

Are you commenting only for the sake of commenting?

This is not a very substantive addition; I'd say it's pedantic to say a divide that is "not [just] between smart and stupid people" does, in fact, divide smart and stupid people at SOME point.

Your other comment [1] is only slightly better, but I can't help but feel that you're presenting it as a contradiction where there is none. Yeah, us Americans are concerningly illiterate, but we're concerned in the first place because we all agree that we believe reading and writing is not a useless skill.

So ultimately, in both cases, the article is correct, and you're... also correct, but not actually adding anything to the conversation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48042684