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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   30157 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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I specifically avoided mentioning places like MIT and FAANGs on one hand and NYT and various DC-adjacent think centers because they are high-IQ bubbles first and foremost.

They might be high-IQ bubbles...but MIT is not known for being full of socially astute individuals. Unlike DC. MIT's probably where you can find people long on IQ and short on EQ. DC's where you can find people with lots of both. Average IQ, low EQ - probably some kind of solitary tradesman or truck driver? Some kind of very concrete job, maybe where there's a shortage.

MIT isn't full of socially astute individuals, but it's not short of them either. Essentially, MIT filters for high-IQ (though to be more precise, its filter is a high baseline requirement for math aptitude and prior education--if you're not ready for a hardcore dive into calculus when you show up, you're in the wrong place).

There isn't much of a filter for social competence. You'll get stereotypical nerds who have issues with interpersonal obliviousness or maturity, but you'll also get cheerful, outgoing cheerleader-types who happen to like tutoring statistics and casually nailing at least a standard deviation above class average on their upper-division chemical engineering exams.

Yeah. It is unusually tolerant of socially incompetent individuals, but does not screen out the socially competent.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I am saying MIT is not a typical community of low-EQ individuals because it's a community of high-IQ individuals. As you've said, duller low-EQ individuals were more likely to pick a solitary job and thus drift apart instead of drifting together before the Internet became mainstream and they realized they weren't the only one who hated that "people don't mean what they say and don't say what they mean".

Yeah. I don't know if they wound up in fandom or science fiction or shit like that a couple generations ago...the eccentric truck driver with a bunch of sci-fi books in his truck who never married.

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