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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30713 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Can you describe - in a detailed manner - what it is like to be a person with 1) social IQ 1 SD above the mean, and in a bubble of same and 2) social IQ 1 SD below the mean, and in the same bubble? Are there "high-social-IQ" strategies that people are using that the socially impaired can't quite pull off? Social isolation is a kind of poverty trap and has the same dynamics.

I have no idea how to measure social IQ, EQ or whatever it's called.

I doubt social IQ bubbles even existed before the internet, various incel forums are probably the closest thing to one. Monasteries, maybe? High EQ monks would climb the hierarchy, becoming priors, abbots, hegumens and bishops, while the rest of the brethren would be content to toil and pray.

Hmm. Incel forums are one example. IRL...hmm. For low social IQ, engineering departments, maybe, although that's complicated by the fact that Aspies can socialize and network OK enough among themselves but flounder when interacting with normies. I've heard tales of technical departments with lots of sperg-engineers, a smaller number of half-sperg liasons, and then a bunch of normies using the sperg-engineers' products. Maybe MIT, half-jokingly described as the largest sheltered workshop for autists in the US, has some of these bubbles.

For high social-EQ bubbles? I'm pretty sure you can find lots of them in DC...lots of bushleague politician types and strivers looking to become more connected.

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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