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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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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