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 think we have to draw a distinction between raw intelligence and application. Lots of people are really smart, but only apply their intelligence to one or two specific things. Think of a PhD particle physicist or something who understands super-complex topics and makes contributions to the field. I'd bet a lot of people in those types of positions never apply their intelligence outside their fields and their opinions on CW-adjacent topics are pretty much whatever the media they view tells them. Maybe they just never cared to, maybe they're shying away from anything that'll create conflict, who knows.
I don't think there's any real communities out there that are genuinely smarter than us and open for anyone to join and contribute. Maybe there's sort of a community in the sense of bloggers who read and respond to each other, but that doesn't form as tight-knit as a single forum or group on some app.
There may also be a thing where some of the really smart people have realized that you don't really move societal needles by writing effort-posts on nerdy subjects to people like us. It seems much more effective to use that intelligence to learn and practice the arts of persuasion and propaganda. How many people have chosen to do that instead and how smart are they really? We may never know.
Consider Robert Mercer, ex-CEO of Renaissance Technologies: if not genius level intelligence, certainly 1.5-2 sigma above average: PhD at UIUC, ACM Lifetime Achievement Award...
Wikipedia
Some of his opinions:
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Yes, there are a lot of people more intelligent than any of us out there. I find them whenever I do a deep research dive and end up on a forum for guys who build their own circuit boards or micro-turbine-integrated off-grid power generation.
Often suspect that we range from midwit politics-obsessives (hi, mein name ist bernd) to time-wasting borderline-geniuses who could easily be doing something more productive. And most of the highest level people who used to be part of the LW diaspora, like Gwern, have found their own niches in less generalist and more goal-oriented places.
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They assume that being smart means being able to distinguish between what is BS or not. Not necessarily. For example, people in early 2020 with high IQs predicting lockdowns and quartines would contain covid, because the mathematical model was convincing.
They also assume being smart means wanting to distinguish BS. People form their visible opinions for lots of reasons other than "a singleminded dedication to discovering an accurate epistemology". In fact I would say that is hardly anyone's real goal. Smart people possibly even less so than average people, since they are smart enough to see the advantages of other strategies.
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