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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Notes -
I have long been in a quest of finding the smartest people on earth.
I have come to the solid conclusion that such people do not in fact, exists.
Or if they do, they are not present on online forums and their only observable content on the internet would be via their academic papers.
But even so, academic papers are for the major part very rarely brilliant/maximally salient/exhaustive.
Scott Alexander, Yudkowsky and other "superstars" are extremely flawed human beings that have both a deficit of fluid intelligence and an extreme deficit of crystallized intelligence. If they appear sometimes markedly above the average "rationalist", it doesn't change the fact they are extremely deficient compared to what a Homo logicus can achieve.
I have many key data points that proves that the ideal human being has not manifested yet on this earth and most importantly no non-crazy human being has manifested on this earth.
As I am the human that has collected the most signals towards maximal saliency/bypassing natural crazyness, I believe to be the least intellectually dysfunctional human being of this timeline, a finding I should bring a demonstration for in a future blog.
I would hope the smartest individual in this timeline wouldn't be wasting valuable time justifying their intelligence to lesser wits.
Solving actual problems seems a better use of their time.
Contrary to popular belief, time isn't a scarce resource, what is however very scarce, is the amount of time we maximally meaningfully allocate.
Being the least irrational mind on earth is mostly contingent/hortogonal to being a "functional" human being.
In fact maximizing someone's rationality necessarily ultimately leads to a strong dissonance between your thoughts and your actions.
Having a maximal impact on the world is not something I can easily achieve via the use of my physical body. It is much more efficient to design solutions in the realm of ideas than to implement them physically.
In fact to maximally alter the world, one must either communicate his ideas/world's actionable roadmap via the internet and/or accumulate power including via external recognition.
So in fact defending the case that I could informatively disrupt this world should be one of my top priorities and in an ideal world the rationalist/effective altruist diaspora would leverage it and share to me funding, visibility and other kinds of effectors to reality.
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