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gog  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   5593 thread views

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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I think we have to draw a distinction between raw intelligence and application. Lots of people are really smart, but only apply their intelligence to one or two specific things. Think of a PhD particle physicist or something who understands super-complex topics and makes contributions to the field. I'd bet a lot of people in those types of positions never apply their intelligence outside their fields and their opinions on CW-adjacent topics are pretty much whatever the media they view tells them. Maybe they just never cared to, maybe they're shying away from anything that'll create conflict, who knows.

I don't think there's any real communities out there that are genuinely smarter than us and open for anyone to join and contribute. Maybe there's sort of a community in the sense of bloggers who read and respond to each other, but that doesn't form as tight-knit as a single forum or group on some app.

There may also be a thing where some of the really smart people have realized that you don't really move societal needles by writing effort-posts on nerdy subjects to people like us. It seems much more effective to use that intelligence to learn and practice the arts of persuasion and propaganda. How many people have chosen to do that instead and how smart are they really? We may never know.

Consider Robert Mercer, ex-CEO of Renaissance Technologies: if not genius level intelligence, certainly 1.5-2 sigma above average: PhD at UIUC, ACM Lifetime Achievement Award...

Mercer played a key role in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union by donating data analytics services to Nigel Farage.He has also been a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News, the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for president. He is the principal benefactor of the Make America Number 1 super PAC.

Wikipedia

Some of his opinions:

Mercer has said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark federal statute arising from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, was a major mistake. In 2017, David Magerman, a former Renaissance employee, alleged in a lawsuit that Mercer had said that African Americans were economically better off before the civil rights movement, that white racists no longer existed in the United States, and that the only racists remaining were black racists. Wikipedia

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