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Notes -
Meritocracy doesn't mean "flawless and perfect meritocracy", it means 'merit' is a very important factor. Random chance, idiosyncratic contingency, structural flaws, etc can explain why genius_1 gets lots of blog views and genius_2 doesn't. Human society is incredibly complicated. Many factors matter - for one, everythingstudies and status451 post less than once per month, while scott posts a few times per week. Some people who have more insight than scott just don't post, so we can't hear them at all! So the existence of smart people who are less popular than slightly less smart people, even in an honest meritocracy, isn't surprising at all! That said, quickly skimming Status 451, he's a significantly less skilled writer than scott and yud.
maybe they're favored by 'the rich and other entertainers' for the same reason they're favored by large groups of people - because they're smart and write well?
"put in front of you" in the sense that they're downstream of very complex and shaped processes, and "put in front of you" in the sense that the elite are intentionally putting controlled opposition intellectuals in front of you to hide the dark truth, are different!
scott clearly and reasonably believes in a somewhat-strong form of HBD, and often hints at it. another person popular among the 'rich' and 'other entertainers' is moldbug (apparently glenn greenwald was introduced to moldbug by an unnamed billionaire) , who says a number of not-allowed things. Yet another person popular among 'other entertainers' (he's sometimes retweeted by people like jack posobiec and cernovich, relatively-mainstream right wing media figures) is BAP, whose regularly retweets literal nazi propaganda (not using this to condemn, just illustrate evidence against your point)! So I'm not sure this theory works.
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