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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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People who write a lot on the internet for strangers have way too much time on their hands. I used to write longer comments and even some that made it into the contributions thread but now I don't feel like I have to do that anymore.

People smarter than us hang out with their friends and might pop in once in a while to write a comment about a topic that personally interests them. Successful people should confide with those that they trust and those that are useful to them, not strangers who happen to be on the same intellectual level.

I don't feel like I have to do that anymore.

You have the whole thing backwards. I can't speak for all motte users, but I would wager, myself and most of them write effort posts because they want to, not because they have to.

See: Bus Ticket Theory of Genius. Tldr; People with weird obsessions obsess over weird things because they like doing that, for nothing else. That obsession is a necessary component to be truly great at anything (among many other components).

Not saying TM motte users are geniuses but they obsess weirdly over the CW because they like it.

People smarter than us hang out with their friends

This is a naive sentiment about "people smarter than us". You are probably packing in a whole load of things into the definition of smart other than its only true definition... high IQ. "Smart people" come in all shapes and flavors. Some hang out with friends, some are CEO's, some don't have any friends because they are CEOs or spend all their lives in the server room or the lab, some are military dictators, some are stay-at-home moms, etc.

Successful people should confide with those that they trust and those that are useful to them, not strangers who happen to be on the same intellectual level.

???

Who is exactly confiding in the motte? Some are but they are a minority.

I use the motte because there are certain things I want to talk about at a certain level that I can't do anywhere else, not because I am looking for a community of people to confide in or whatever. What is there to even confide about in the motte?

I would be surprised if most users are not here for the exact same reason as me.

This is a naive sentiment about "people smarter than us". You are probably packing in a whole load of things into the definition of smart other than its only true definition... high IQ. "Smart people" come in all shapes and flavors. Some hang out with friends, some are CEO's, some don't have any friends because they are CEOs or spend all their lives in the server room or the lab, some are military dictators, some are stay-at-home moms, etc.

I don't see how IQ tests can test your smartness when they are relatively easy to do well on, and even if you don't do well on them initially you can basically get a perfect score by reviewing the patterns/ concepts that people are unfamiliar with. It's unseemly when you try to condense the beauty and potential of the human spirit down to a test metric.

I use the motte because there are certain things I want to talk about at a certain level that I can't do anywhere else, not because I am looking for a community of people to confide in or whatever. What is there to even confide about in the motte?

I think that he meant that you were confiding in the people on this forum to test your ideas.

Not sure if you know this but IQ and its validity has a very deep history as a widely held belief in this very forum we are on. Im not being sarcastic. In fact one can make an argument that the discussions of IQ and its intersections with HBD being a very contentious CW topic is what partially led to the creation of The Motte.

Anyways. IQ is ultimately a metric. But its the best metric of among all others as a proxy for g, the thing we are really trying to measure. Im not gonna reiterate the literature.

But, in a discussion about intelligence it would be rather obtuse to not mention the best proxy of it would it not? Its not a value judgement.

I had no idea. What does HBD mean though? Is this another kind of IQ test?

In my opinion I still don't think that an IQ test or any proxy of it would be a good idea. To me it seems like all an IQ test does is check if a student is thinking about things in a certain way - if they can quickly recognize patterns, and if they can really break apart a problem - in short, are they thinking in a particular way that would be useful to the needs of the institution? Are they thinking like an engineer or a mathematician? If a student does badly on an IQ test I don't think that it means they're stupid. Rather, I think that what this really means is a student has spent their time doing other things which don't necessitate the kind of thinking an IQ test checks for. They may consequently lack development in certain subsets of their minds relegated to do these very specific kinds of thinking, because our minds are constantly changing and adapting to the stressors we place on them like any other part of our bodies. This student may have spent their time cooking, painting landscapes, or just doing stupid kid things.

Of course, there's probably going to be outliers who are predisposed to this kind of thinking at an early age, maybe as a result of their upbringing, and/or the predisposition of their parents. But what if these outliers don't even want to pursue the avenues they'd do well in according to an IQ test? Wouldn't this test just give them and their parents a flawed conception of who they really are? On the other hand, wouldn't the effect be much worse on those students who do really badly on an IQ test? They'll go through their whole lives believing that they're stupid, and that there's something terribly insufficient in them which prevents them from doing what they want to do with their lives. I'd argue that we already instilled this sense of inferiority in kids with standardized tests. I've seen too many students who think that they're innately stupid or incompetent because they can't readily understand arithmetic, memorize historical trivia or whatever else the curriculum throws at them.

Somebody else will hopefully respond with a more detailed breakdown of the actual studies but IQ:

  1. Is very predictive of success in things people care about

  2. Cannot be trained

  3. Is a very well studied and consistent measure

  4. Varies a lot person to person and has at least a large genetic component

To the degree that some tests meant to measure IQ can be studied for is a flaw in those tests but the ones we have are pretty good at not being gamed.

HBD stands for "Human Bio Diversity" and is the recognition that populations of people vary genetically. Uncontroversially in situations like the Dutch being taller on average than the Spanish. Incredibly controversially in situations like American Jews having a higher IQ on average to American Natives. People here disagree wildly on whether it is true and what it would imply if it were. But we do allow its discussion which brings quite a bit of heat from the sort of people who find the idea dangerous. We originally started out as a weekly thread on slatestarcodex.com run by Scott who now blogs on astralcodexten.substack.com, but he was harassed by people who didn't like the discussion so he asked us to got to his subreddit, then our own subreddit and finally this shiny new offsite. Although it's not just HBD that got us targeted, it's the willingness to entertain dangerous ideas with HBD being the most usually cited example.

Even if IQ was trainable, that too would also be predictive of IQ. The result is harder IQ tests in which the ability to study just becomes another proxy for IQ