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.
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.
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.
???
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.
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.
Somebody else will hopefully respond with a more detailed breakdown of the actual studies but IQ:
Is very predictive of success in things people care about
Cannot be trained
Is a very well studied and consistent measure
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.
It is somewhat difficult, yes! But humanity has climbed steeper cliffs than that. Dropping down to intuition why are there so many jewish Nobel Prize winners in math, physics? If it was really purely cultural, that means we're leaving hundreds of billions of dollars and staggering human achievement off the table by not spreading said culture. Which we are in plenty of other ways, we can't be perfect. but that seems too obvious and easy. (and there aren't that many jewish convert or adoptee winners). And - consider genetic drift, the founder effect, or the ubiquitous physical differences between population groups (no, they aren't fixed races) - skin color, hair, facial shape, height, eyes are obvious, but little things too - native americans have less facial hair, there's earwax, eyes, disease susceptibility, all sorts of subtle differences in body shape, different baseline blood levels, etc. Why wouldn't the pressures that produced those lead to intelligence differences too? Intelligence is so critical for human survival, it's depended on at all levels of human life, its effects on survival and reproduction are innumerable. What if - because it's selected so heavily, there isn't any room for "noise", and all human populations are so heavily pushed to be intelligent they stay at the same level, even while reproductively isolated? Well, do we see that in any other trait? In separate populations of wild species, one sees divergence and difference, even along axes with selection pressure in the same direction. This is the most stark among separate species, where pressures to be fast, get nutritious, not be eaten pushes them into entirely different niches - that isn't at all true of humans, but the same principle works.
But intelligence causes affluence too, richer people tend to have higher IQs than same-race middle class people, and you need intelligence to be a FAANG coder, and a bit less but still quite a bit to be a top lawyer or even actor. If that sounds too weasely the gap doesn't go away when we compare suburban african-americans or natives and suburban jews.
... and why is that, exactly?
I won't let that goddamn cancer diagnosis stop me from living my life. It's just a piece of paper!!!! You're right that IQ isn't an ultimate measure of intelligence, and it's much less interesting than "how intelligent and competent" someone is. But, as in the nobel example - or every single other area of human accomplishment - the same pattern persists. Why are there so many great jewish çomposers, conductors, musicians? Why are there so many of them in hollywood - even if they were evil subverters, that doesn't magically make them better at marketing or acting? Why are SA and Yud jewish?
Evolution doesn't merely proceed by advantages. It's not advantageous to have sickle-cell anemia, but it is to avoid malaria, so ... And it sure was advantageous to have light skin in europe, but tens of thousands of years passed between humans settling there and its development. And said development is contingent on random mutations, populations moving, and many other things - there's no reason lighter skin would develop at the same time or rate in separate populations. Same for intelligence!
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