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gog  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   5599 thread views

Where are the people smarter than us hanging out?

In Paul Fussell’s book on class (I think), he says that people are really worried about differentiating themselves from the class immediately below them, but largely ignorant of the customs and sometimes even existence of the classes above them. When I found SSC, and then The Motte, and stuff like TLP, I was astonished to find a tier of the internet I had had no idea even existed. The quality of discourse here is . . . usually . . . of the kind that “high brow” (by internet standards) websites THINK they are having, but when you see the best stuff here you realize that those clowns are just flattering themselves. My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now? Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere?

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Math , programming, and physics communities. It's pretty cut and dry what is right or wrong in those subjects. You cannot 'fake' knowing physics or coding like you can with other subjects. Those are probably top tier in terms of IQ. And below that it's probably philosophy, ask historians, and various rationalist subs.

Philosophers are actually really high, and have programmers beat, they are in the highest tier with maths and physics aswell.

https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-64811

4chan's /sci/ and /lit/ could theoretically be smarter than the rationalist bubble when you take the median, on average they would definitly be lower because next to the gigabrains logically dissecting Kant and contrasting him with Hegel you have culture war retards who never read a book in their lifes.

This is also reflected in GRE scores. IIRC, philosophy grad students have GREs on a par with mathematicians (maybe a bit lower?), above CS (and econ), and below physics, and the only humanities subject with higher scores is classics.

Data:

https://dailynous.com/value-of-philosophy/charts-and-graphs/

Philosophers on average do best at the verbal/writing tests by a large margin, even ahead of other humanities subjects, but then also do well in mathematical tests, when compared with other humanities subjects like English and History.

don’t need to care (or just don’t care) about money

I'd say it's more a question of not emphasising money as a goal rather than not caring or needing to care about it. Philosophers don't have some special problem with getting well-paid jobs. It's just that there are better options if you are looking to earn a lot of money.

You can see in a few of these examples how people can have a lot of knowledge in a particular subject, but not actually be all that smart. For coding, I've hung out on tech forums where people have plenty of technical coding knowledge, but are so wrapped up in their particular worldview that they spurt total nonsense on the adjacent topic of encryption policy. For philosophy, check out the badphilosophy subreddit. Some great technical knowledge hanging out there; "smart"? Ehhhhhh...... And even AskHistorians is pretty subject to the "woke mind virus".

This is all to say, those communities are great if you engage them looking for specific things very squarely within their technical specialties.

I think you may be right in some regard regarding coding. Some of these people seem to be bad at understanding context and need things spelled out literally. I have gotten into debates with people who may otherwise be ‘smart’ but cannot tell the difference between ‘because of’ vs. ‘in spite of’. The midwit phenomena vox day wrote about is real in many of these STEM subjects, sadly.

That doesn't make them unintelligent, just wrong outside their field. Plenty of nobel prizewinners hold normal and dumb political opinions, or dumb ideas about adjacent fields.

Not being unintelligent is not the same as being intelligent. That still admits the possibility of being average or only slightly above average . It's a gradient.

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