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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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.
Not who you are asking but I will provide a response to your last paragraph. And all your other concerns will probably be responded to by others anyways because the validity of IQ is an extremely popular opinion here on the Motte. Whilst blankslatism is extremely unpopular. I am surprised you posted here for so long without noticing as much.
No. Because.
If we want to make people smarter. We would need a working definition of smartness and a solid way to measure it to know if our interventions are working. This absolutely cannot be ignored. We would also need to know the mechanisms behind it let that be environmental, genetic or whatever to actually address the problem. In short, we can't just look away from it.
You can do things with what you learn. If what you learn is true, then you have a better predictive model of the world than someone who thinks otherwise. The purpose of discussing things is not only to improve something but to understand it as well. You can't understand something and its nth-order effects by.. ignoring it. Just knowing that IQ is group stratified has made my personal model of the World orders of magnitude better are being able to predict things.
So what? "Interesting people" is a very subjective term and it's best kept out of supposedly objective discussions.
That's literally what a probability is for. Some things are likely, some things are not.
If you are 5'7" tall. You might dream of playing in the NBA but it wouldn't be a lie to tell you that you are overwhelmingly not likely to achieve that dream and that your time and effort is better spent elsewhere.
Why shouldn't we apply the same level of sober pragmatism to matters of intellectual interest? It is exceedingly unlikely that someone with an 85 IQ can obtain a Ph.D. in Physics. If someone with 85 IQ tells me about his theoretical physics dreams, I would be feeding into his delusions if I told him anything other than it's unlikely.
Yes, it sucks for them. It sucks for everyone. But the truth sometimes sucks.
Thousands of people do this every day. As they get rejected from their programs of choice or get an F grade in calculus. They get told they are not good enough and that's the end of it. 50% of engineering students drop out.
The truth is worth whatever it is worth regardless of how much it hurts to accept it. The fact that it is hard to accept it isn't a very good reason to not seek it out.
writing coherent responses is somewhat difficult and takes some amount of time. There are enough politics forums in existence I could spend 16 hours a day researching and writing posts on various topics. Even that understates it, I could spend 16 hours a day writing just about race and IQ across dozens of different internet forums and still not be able to respond to everyone interested. One might, ofc, want to do other things in life in addition to discussing race and Iq. If your last paragraph warrants 5 paragraphs in response, each other paragraph would ... and then you'd respond with 5 paragraphs each, and it blows up.
why do physics and math professors consistently score 140+ on iq tests?
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