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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Been lurking for many years and this was the first thread that compelled me to create an account. I work in academia and frankly i find the high regard for that place here pretty funny. A decade or so ago, before i started studying mathematics I was extremely nervous. I though I'd be the dumbest kid there because the regard of academia was so high. Turns out that I can now count on one hand the amount of people I've met there who I regard as smarter than guys from the group i regularly play video games with. And they were not the ones "known" for being intelligent.
What these people, in academia do have, however, is drive, much more than sense. People who do things for the sake of having done them, people who build things for the sake of having built them, people who write papers for the sake of having written them, people who chase status because that was what they were born to do. Well perhaps they are smart, I mean they do succeed in generating status for themselves, some even publish things worth reading if you don't zoom out far enough. I mean a new theorem is a new theorem right? (spawling, unending complexity be damned (when are we dealing with that?)) But I would not classify them as intelligent, nor would I classify the discourse there as intelligent. But publishing a new machine learning model that will do an untold amount of damage is nothing to sneeze at. I mean you're winning right?
I believe that in order to have good discourse one needs to remove (bad) status from the equation, because otherwise that optimization will drown out everything else. This is in large part what clusters of academia has been. Give a bunch of rich and smart people maximum status, so they may discuss ideas without the worst status games. Unfortunately it never lasts, since optimal status-seekers, those pesky ones, are always one step behind, copying what works as fast as they can because copying is cheap. Doing their absolute best at pretending to interact with the real world. So the novel, intelligent discussion will always be in the places where even the high-class people aren't even aware exists, constantly moving (are we rediscovering something that ends with -ion). Because if they were aware, they would have driven out all the bright kids. Or sometimes they are even hidden in plain sight explaining complicated things simply upon unaware audiences.
Case study: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PGv4ixLllWo
In my opinion, I think TM is pretty good but with a somewhat high variance between posters. Especially for it's size and the fact that it's public. And it's funny how some of you keep degrading it, but perhaps that's why it's still good (even if I think it dipped when leaving reddit). If we convinced ourselves that writing here gave us status, suddently the internal incentive for truth and understanding (that atleast some here possess) would be replaced with something external (i.e winning).
You never notice the good old days when you're living them do you.
There was a quote from Anna Karenina that appeared on /r/slatestarcodex awhile back that made me cry. Most replies to it missed at least what I initially felt reading it.
"Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of great intelligence and education, noble in the highest sense of the word, and endowed with the ability to act for the common good. But, in the depths of his soul, the older he became and the more closely he got to know his brother, the more often it occurred to him that this ability to act for the common good, of which he felt himself completely deprived, was perhaps not a virtue but, on the contrary, a lack of something – not a lack of good, honest and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of life force, of what is known as heart, of that yearning which makes a man choose one out of all the countless paths in life presented to him and desire that one alone. The more he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergei Ivanovich and many other workers for the common good had not been brought to this love of the common good by the heart, but had reasoned in their minds that it was good to be concerned with it and were concerned with it only because of that. And Levin was confirmed in this surmise by observing that his brother took questions about the common good and the immortality of the soul no closer to heart than those about a game of chess or the clever construction of a new machine."
I'm not sure how to phrase my thoughts on it and upon closer inspection I'm not sure if it even matches the text accurately. But here goes two attempts:
Falling for motivated reasoning is very easy, and pretty much impossible to do if oneself has a stake in the outcome. Therefore the highest quality (if one counts all the variables...) a human may produce will tend to cluster around people being obsessed, but largely uncaring of the meta around it. This maps pretty closely to the bus ticket theory linked below and is hardly a novel idea, but I think it bears repeating. But perhaps this is not even true, because optimizing, in many ways, is pretty simple. You grind the information down into larger and larger chunks, until you can move them around in your head with the same difficulty as walking. Then improvements will arrive automatically with a brain that's big enough and a lot of time. That guy with a mathematics phd, welp.
In someways being good enough means you do not have to chase status, because you know, deep down, that if you tried, you'd win. Once you know that, challenging people without a handicap just feels cruel. Therefore you can spend your effort fixing real things instead, unburdened by the status anxiety of the other ones. Where can you find these people, you ask. Try looking at the way people talk. How many real words are they using? Are we sure the human species is not effectively bimodal at the age of 40?
I apologize for any incoherences, logical and sematic leaps, poor grammar, spelling, you name it (look I'm doing it!). I've never really written anything outside of science "TM" and this took an embarrassing amount of time to compose without becoming a complete schizopost (not a real word!).
But maybe I'm just reclassifying intelligence to define me. I've had a bad day/week/life (3!) and need to pat myself on the back.
Can you please clarify what you meant by this? What is a 'real word' in this line of thought?
Sorry for not replying, got lost in the real world with its real words.
The main idea is whether or not they are using sentences and thoughts that they themselves derived, or copied from other people. You can also look at whether or not the intention of the communication is to Win the Conversation, or communicate clearly in order to interface better with reality. Sometimes it can be very scary to notice how few people in certain communities actually create new thoughts. How many people are deciding what is true or not? One of the things that make us so adaptable to different environments is probably the fact that the main human algorithm running in groups doesn't interface with these environments directly.
The reason why I mentioned age is because I do not think most people start out this way as children, having worked with kids a lot, it constantly surprised me how much more real that the thoughts of children can be. They were almost always wrong (bcuz kidz r dum), but they usually contained a certain real insight that adults who play The Game lack. I'm not sure if it's a physical process of growing up (lack of neuroplasticity maybe?), or if it gets beaten out of people.
I really tried to explain it the best I could but I feel it's still not very clear. I do however not have more time so hopefully it us good enough.
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