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gog  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   6433 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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You can see in a few of these examples how people can have a lot of knowledge in a particular subject, but not actually be all that smart. For coding, I've hung out on tech forums where people have plenty of technical coding knowledge, but are so wrapped up in their particular worldview that they spurt total nonsense on the adjacent topic of encryption policy. For philosophy, check out the badphilosophy subreddit. Some great technical knowledge hanging out there; "smart"? Ehhhhhh...... And even AskHistorians is pretty subject to the "woke mind virus".

This is all to say, those communities are great if you engage them looking for specific things very squarely within their technical specialties.

I think you may be right in some regard regarding coding. Some of these people seem to be bad at understanding context and need things spelled out literally. I have gotten into debates with people who may otherwise be ‘smart’ but cannot tell the difference between ‘because of’ vs. ‘in spite of’. The midwit phenomena vox day wrote about is real in many of these STEM subjects, sadly.

That doesn't make them unintelligent, just wrong outside their field. Plenty of nobel prizewinners hold normal and dumb political opinions, or dumb ideas about adjacent fields.

Not being unintelligent is not the same as being intelligent. That still admits the possibility of being average or only slightly above average . It's a gradient.

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