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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It's imperfect, sure, but a good starting point if one seeks to compile such a hierarchy. Better than the Nobel Prize, at least, except for maybe physics. The politization of the Nobel Prize has long tainted it.
The prior art in mathematics is enormous. To make progress you have to assimilate all this difficult information, which in and of itself, is indicative of having very high with IQ. Whether or not the results are useful is another matter. Major findings are now on the margins, which I think raises the IQ barriers to entry.
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