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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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Re: all the "The Motte is not that smart" comments.

As an Australian, I semi-frequently see people say some variation of "Australia is a horribly racist country" in the MSM, social media, in person or elsewhere. While this is often just a leftwing shibboleth, it's said frequently enough even among moderate voices that it has become part of the cultural conciousness.

When I hear this, I often think to myself, "what the hell are you talking about? Australia is an incredibly unracist country by any comparison. It would be hard to find any country less racist than Australia - maybe a couple in Europe or something (although even that's changing very fast) or maybe New Zealand, but that's about it. China? Japan? Brazil? Saudi Arabia? Nigeria? Italy? All more horribly racist than Australia by any meaningful standard.

The real issue is that Australia is not horribly racist (by any relative standard) but that Australia, being a Western liberal democracy among other reasons, is hypersensitive to racism. Whenever any racist incident does occur (and they will always occur to some degree), it blasted accross the media as an example of how bad we all and how much we still have to improve, even if such incidents are relatively rare and unrepresentitive (I'm sure American and Canadian readers can relate). Ironically, it is precisely because Australia is so unracist that we percieve ourselves as racist.

I feel the same way about this bashful comments about the Motte being really not all that smart. Are you crazy? By any reasonable, necessarily relative standard, the Motte is full of very smart people writing interesting posts and comments on a wide range of topics from a very varied perspectives. This is matched by few other places on the internet. Even if people are wrong (and people are often wrong), they're still wrong in the right kind of way, the way that's illuminating like when you argue an absurd postition to its fullest extent just for the hell of it.

And yes, as per the original topic of this thread, the Motte could be more intelligent. Yes, there are hyper-geniuses doing their third PhD in astro-quantum-biomechanical-neuroscience engineering, or whatever else who are not on the Motte and probably don't use the internet all the much. But by any reasonable standard, the Motte is pretty smart. We just are hypersensitive to our own intellectual inferiority specifically because this is a community build around casual intellectualism and full of people smart enough to realise there are people smarter than them who are not the Motte.

I'd wager Australia as a whole is more racist (or at least less anti-racist) than... Portland, probably? Seattle? Failing that, Vermont? Uh, Martha’s Vineyard?

We aren't denying that this place runs circles around any regular forum; this is why we waste time here. It's expected that even higher-tier forums will be oddly specific, small-scale and hard to find or get into. What is interesting is exactly the link after which it'll be possible to say «...But that's about it» – and preferably that it be accessible to outsiders. I know a few, but they're of a type that I'm not at liberty to make publicly known.

Moreover I maintain that TheMotte isn't exceptional due to being very smart. IMO it's more that we frown down on intransigence, irrational refusal to respect valid counterarguments. Smartypants on Reddit or HN can be very smart, but they tend to be obstinate and irrational like a combative teenager; and many rationalists on ACX/LW are quokkas who have given up on generality to maintain civility.

They aren't impressed with us either.