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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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TM - The Motte

You are probably not selecting the smartest people on generalist online forums. You are selecting people who have online discussions, to begin with, then you further stratify those people into more groups based on discussion quality, and so on. You are also somewhat biased towards the discourse norms that are the most pleasant to you. Not to mention community vision, TM wants to talk, Sneerclub wants to sneer, not the same objective.

Mottes Strengths
  • The Motte in my experience does seem to be the strongest generalist contender of all online forums I have come across. Not in terms of sheer intelligence; but discourse norms, clarity of thought/argument, good faith, generality, and breadth of topics.

  • Discourse norms. Deserves repetition.

Mottes Weaknesses
  • Depth is the most apparent weakness of TM, I do sometimes have my Gell Mann Amnesia broken when I read about something I know a fair bit about.

  • Another weakness of TM is that I think a lot of people here are your typical "nerds", some of the things you see being said are only things that someone who never stepped foot outside of a classroom or lives in an extremely affluent bubble would say. Intelligent people with a working-class or non-academic background are obviously underrepresented. This is a weakness because if you are going to discuss the CW, you will end up discussing the real world and most of the people in it, it would serve you well knowing how THEY think.

  • Strong American tunnel vision as well on part of some of the posters (a lot of things don't make sense if you are only aware of the American talking points; see Urban planning, political correctness/ wokeism, the political spectrum, and its dimensions).

  • It is kind of ironic that for a community of programmers, TM settled for a fork of rDrama. This might be a passion issue but raises some questions nonetheless. TM isn't hackernews but TM isn't /r/redscarepod either. This point is probably not worth thinking much about, I am sure the alternatives/tradeoffs were considered. Ultimately it's an optics thing.

  • Skews older. Culture is moving too fast to not have enough smart young people taking part in the CULTURE war discussions. I am surprised at the number of people who don't use social media in this blog or have no idea of the current memespace developments even though social media is the defining feature of our times culture. Yes, I am aware that the discourse norms are discriminating against them heavily.

Passion Issue

One of my smartest friends (restricting anecdotes to peers because I know of their habits, can't really tell you if my Math Professor uses Reddit) is doing a Ph.D. in CS at a top university in Canada and had 8 relatively well-cited publications by the time he was done with his master's. He does not discuss any abstract topics, let alone highly contentious CW ones at a high level, his opinions are normie opinions at best. Likewise for all the other "smart" people I know.

I am yet to meet anyone who holds opinions that are as well-defended and coherent as those you would find on the motte. So there is a strong confounder of "people who actually put in the effort to think and form opinions on a certain set of topics, and then write about them to strangers online!" that you need to be aware of when making that judgment. That tendency might correlate with intelligence, but I wouldn't posit that correlation is strong. Intelligence is more of a precondition than a corollary.

So be sure you know exactly WHAT you are looking for.

I guess I’m just asking “what is the next tier of discourse above this one.”

The next tier of discourse is gated off, because it requires a very high level depth in a field to engage in that of discourse.

  • After-work research-lab dinners with a little bit of alcohol and out of earshot of your PI

  • long-form podcasts (think some of the stuff Razib/Huberman do...less so Rogan/Lex)

  • (pre-covid) certain meetups in areas of very-very high academic + economic activity (Basically Berkeley, Boston & Palo Alto)

  • (post-covid) very closed off private discord groups

If your question is, where do where the smart kids of smart millionaires hang out, then the unfortunate answer is in exclusive frats of ivy league universities. The quality of discourse is low, but damn does a shit ton of money flow through the naïve hands of these 20yr old brats.

After-work research-lab dinners with a little bit of alcohol and out of earshot of your PI

Nope. I attend a lot of them and none of them come close to a good discussion on TM.

there aren’t secret super elite conversations that are way more advanced or complex than ones we have here out there

I beg to differ I think the motte can be disrupted, I intend to write a blog about it.