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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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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 have come to the solid conclusion that such people do not in fact, exists.

So you have concluded that people can't be ordered by intelligence? Because if they can, surely there will be some that will be "the smartest", regardless if they conform to some preconceived notion of "being the smartest".

No, of course, I didn't litterally mean that there isn't a smartest human on earth (although here I specifically mean maximal debiasing, not about other heterogeneous cognitive abilities), there is one by design, however my point was that human being is sadly not significantly above the other ones in the top. In fact they're quite mediocre and most must reach a deceiving plateau.

Yes, I more or less agree with that. I also think that IQ is just part of the story. It's probably a fundamental ingredient, but it's far from being enough to define an intellectually extraordinary person.

I find IQ tests deeply inept there must be a lesser known better set of tests.

The simple fact among many that we don't even test for the detection of cognitive biases and logical fallacies in ourselves and in others is remarkably degenerate.