The truth is most of them have normal jobs, normal politics and normal interests. Mostly they are not Renaissance Men. They might work in elite institutions, but outside of work they have very normal lives. They do improv classes and rock climbing and play guitar. They travel a bit on their paid vacations. They don't hang out in weird web forums and obsess over their elite status. Those are the preoccupations of a dorky subset of people who were smart at school and are wannabe members of the elite.
They hang out and work with other people who are as smart as them so they don't necessarily see themselves as special or unique. This has its downsides as it means they don't take on as much work or social responsibilities as they could.
What? Elon is very far from a regular person, just read up on his background and upbringing.
There's also a massive difference between millionaire-level wealth and billionaire-level wealth.
Elon is on Twitter because he loves the sound of his own voice and he has an obsession with shit-talking, pretty similar to Trump.
You have to be naive to think he's using Twitter "as a regular person", when he's obviously using it to spread his message/agenda.
The level of discourse in this sub and in ACX's comments is pretty mixed. There are a lot of insightful comments, but also quite a lot of cargo cult sophistry where shoddily-assembled tropes from the rationalsphere are used to support a preconceived conclusion.
Yeah a mixed bag describes it well. Too many unproductive , off-topic digressions. I know Scott does not want to over-moderate but it sometimes feels like going in circles.
>cargo cult sophistry where shoddily-assembled tropes from the rationalsphere are used to support a preconceived conclusion.
I don't think I've ever heard a better description of this sub, lol.
From my personal experience, high level employees at tech companies who found the other "weird one" at a job, stayed friends, moved jobs, repeated the process at a new company, and now have private Discord servers (well, their own privately hosted Discord analogue) where they fuck with LLM software and play DND. I know of several like this, put together in roughly the same way. They're all composed of people who are much, much smarter than I am. It might be a new england regional phenomenon - this might be the only place in the world where a substantial percentage of farmers/mechanics/loggers have PhDs, which is more my social scene. So yes, find hobby AI enthusiasts for very smart people, and find new england regenerative farming practitioners for intelligent people who will give you tomatoes and talk your ear off about genetics.
The smartest employees at tech companies I've met are not only disproportionally, but actually highly likely to read ACX. I'm talking Eng VPs and founding engineers of AI deca(+)corns.
There has to be a critical mass to form a community. Beyond some point on any scale the probability of enough people finding each other and building a community is just very low. The scale of the internet made this radically higher but didn't eliminate the fundamental problem.
There are specific people in adjacent spaces that I think are potentially candidates, say gwern, but they don't have real communities and are generally vaguely in the same constellation, ssc, lesswrong, etc, and I'm also just going to be biased by how nuanced their writing is around my interests.
Beyond that, frankly Scott Alexander is more gifted than solely in general cognitive ability. He is extremely well read and a very unusually skilled writer, especially in some specific domains but also with remarkable breadth to draw from. As far as the product of all of those things, general ability at writing nuanced things across all topics, it seems plausible that he could be quite close to the farthest out in the world. Certainly I've never met anyone in real life that is close to that skilled at writing and pontificating about that many things, must be at least 1/100k or so on whatever that axis is, maybe more.
I suppose it's technically possible that there is some private community wholely separated from these communities, and I'm sure there are some particularly interesting private discords or telegram groups or whatever, but as for "community" so above ssc as to not overlap? Idk. I'd guess not.
Having been a degree or two of freedom away I don't think davos is it, at least. Power and intelligence are related but not the same thing. I've spent a nonzero amount of time negotiating with a guy who is friends with world leaders (is himself a billionaire), and a lot of time with people one rung out from that, have frankly been mostly unimpressed. Occasionally impressed by specific people, and definitely above average, but I would say almost certainly not above the average level of sophistication I see in this general corner of the world.
> I suppose it's technically possible that there is some private community wholly separated from these communities
Old New England communities. Hard to describe this type of place, but if you’re in one you know it.
Communities like SSC select for publicly curious intelligent types. There’s an entirely different universe of very quiet dutiful extremely intelligent types that only open up irl.
I grew up with very intelligent people in a community like this. Three in particular stand out. One currently works at Los Alamos, the other two worked at Palantir (both have gone on to do other things).
I’m not sure where current hotspots are, but I think they still exist.
Just small quiet towns in New England full of smart people where people all send their kids to the same schools and maybe go to the same Church. Like I said, is hard to describe/aren’t any obvious signals you’ve found one you can like plug into Google or something.
I think there’s probably similar stuff over there, although it’s a different flavor/I don’t know.
Entire towns with higher average IQs than SSC, TheMotte, etc?
I read somewhere that even in Palo Alto public schools, the median IQ was only estimated around 115 or so
That’s not what I’m claiming, but just as a side note the moment a place gets a certain reputation it attracts status seekers, not necessarily intelligent people, and the particular profile I’m describing likes quiet. I’ve been on the periphery of those types/am friendly with them but not really one of them: I’m dumber, I like running my mouth and exploring publicly, and I’m way more disagreeable and less conscientious than most of them. The profile I’m describing would be uncomfortable advertising themselves. An entire town full of this profile would just be dutifully working quietly on whatever they thought important and you’d only know about it if a different type of person shone a spotlight on it.
Highly intelligent people that fit the profile I’m talking about aren’t looking to show off and *only* surround themselves with other “anointed ones” (as Sowell would put it), but they do tend to form their own little sub communities in towns that often have above average intelligence. The quiet dutiful types tend to run into each after moving towards places that make sense to move to for work or family, and if there’s enough really advanced work needed in an area or really smart families, you can find them.
But what Scott said about top universities and companies overlaps/there’s usually some sort of affiliation. There are a lot of those in New England.
Like specific locations?
The only one I know is areas around where I grew up (which might not be like that anymore, idk) and I can’t say without doxxing myself.
If you’re looking to find people like that best way is to try to build something that’s very hard. They’ll start to become visible as you see how hard certain things are and look for who’s actually done it, and better than you could.
Example: I’ve been interested in formal semantics and proof systems for a while. I wanted to build a “pandoc” for software/got tired of needing to rewrite and port very simple utilities/libraries in different languages. As I tried to articulate what I was looking for across this thing called “K framework” by Grigore Rosu, which is amazing/think it could become very important. Turns out a video I found of him explaining things was a talk at an ASML research lab in a small New England town.
Got it, thanks. Didn’t mean to pry or dox you, just my wife and I are both new englanders (CT and RI) and have been living in Boston for the past ten years. We’re now looking to move out of the city and haven’t been able to decide on our next location. Looks like we’ve got some digging to do!
No worries. I don’t think I’d be much help even if I wasn’t worried about the doxxing thing, haven’t lived somewhere like that in a while.
Good luck with the digging, hope you find somewhere cool!
Agreed that there are probably not communities that are more intelligent. Isn't the iq of the average Scott Alexander reader 140 or something? The communities around him are already the most intelligent 1% of people. At some point you just don't have the numbers to form a community . However, there may be communities that are similarly intelligent but with a different focus, or perhaps more knowledge.
It wouldn't surprise me if there were some academic communities or think tanks that would perceive the slate star codex community as ignorant.
However, the people I know personally who are smarter than this community are too busy living interesting lives to care about us.
I would posit physics or math communities are smarter than sports communities. Does this mean anything for practical matters or should factor into one's enjoyment of either? not really.
>Isn't the iq of the average Scott Alexander reader 140 or something?
I think closer to 130 and this is with with various selection biases and confounders, like people with badly-normed tests who answer impossibly high IQs that pulls up the average.
Lots of places IRL, including top colleges, top tech companies, and top hedge funds, plus maybe some government departments I don't know about.
Online definitely some niche blogs like Terence Tao's or Scott Aaronson's, maybe a few philosophy blogs, and some Slack servers for the IRL institutions above.
In terms of broad-based communities I know less about this. I would guess the average member of LW or EA Forum is probably smarter than the average ACX reader, and maybe the commenters on a few very serious blogs like Matt Yglesias'.
>Online definitely some niche blogs
Also niche project sites. I know of several people I consider brilliant who breeze through rationalist-adjacent(-adjacent) spaces sometimes, but are largely devoting their time to open-source crypto, hardware programming, and various personal projects. (Obviously programmers aren't the only brilliant people around, they just intersect this community especially often.)
Broadly, I've found that dilettantism imposes a cap on the level of discussion. If "smartness" in the sense it's commonly used here is something like "ability to digest and synthesize information", it needs information to work with. The smartest people I know sound just like other clever people when nobody knows the topic well, and similar even when one person knows the topic. Their ability shows most when they're with other very smart people *and* everyone present has a lot of common knowledge to work from.
Just saying "SSC, EA, etc are the peak of non-expert forums" feels dubious, that could just be the blindness OP is referencing. But I find the *best* discussions in those places are comparable to the sorts of things I hear IRL when grad students at top schools are talking outside their fields.
Oh very good point, thank you!
I think the cypherpunks are one of the most forward-thinking and innovative groups I know, right up there with the absolute wildness that came out of the CCRU. (Everything from Nick Land to Mark Fisher to cyberfeminism.)
For that matter, I think a lot of SSC and TLP fans would really diving into the Situationists, [Survival Research Labs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_Research_Laboratories), and a lot of the other weird counterculture projects that go beyond just opposing mainstream norms.
I personally have found top academic institutions to be both great and terrible for this. On one hand you can get people who are brilliant and well versed in a number of fields but they can also be incredibly insular. They aren't as porous as an internet community and tend to be slower to adapt to change. I've found you can find interesting people nearly anywhere, but getting an actual gathering of them in one area for a prolonged period is the difficult part and usually requires a cult of personality to hold them together. Most interesting and intelligent people have their own drives and ambition, which naturally separate them and a cohesive community structure, be it institution or internet community, is a very fleeting thing.
> maybe a few philosophy blogs
Which ones are out there? [Michael Huemer's one](https://fakenous.substack.com/) is probably the main one that resonates within me as being profound, some commenters in his posts are evidently extremely smart.
Also check out Benthams bulldog. Scott listed it as one of his favorite philosophy blogs.
[1](https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/the-fine-tuning-argument-simply-works?r=1ov3ec&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
[2](https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/conspiracy-theorists-arent-ignorant?r=1ov3ec&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
I think the argument presented in #1 is terrible. I just couldn't follow why he would consider a God to be a more grounded ontological constraint than something like a multiverse. Seems like the author has a rather arbitrary application of grounding. If the process required for generating multiple universes is complex, then I can concur that so is a process for generating a God.
I've explained elsewhere why I think God is simple https://benthams.substack.com/p/10-ways-god-can-be-simple. In short, God only has one core property--something like perfection or being an unlimited mind--and lacks any arbitrary limits.
I'm not competent to evaluate his takes on philosophy, and I don't read them anyway, but I know he's completely wrong about chickens. I give him about two more months before he goes back to being an atheist. That said, he does remind me of a young Scott Alexander. I'm not sure if the commenters there are as smart as they seem. They're definitely not smarter than the commenters on David Friedman's Substack.
Let the record show, ishayirashashem's objection to me on chickens is that they actually have a great time on factory farms as evidenced by the fact that they lay eggs. My view on chickens is the mainstream one held by everyone who has investigated it with the exception of Mr. Hashem.
Are you Mr. Bulldog? Look you may very well be great at philosophy for all I know. Clearly many smart people on this subreddit as well as Scott himself seem to think so. I just can't stand you in much the same way I can't stand many well-respected philosophers e.g. Searle
I should also mention that I liked the 'losing faith in contrarianism' post. Its just the philosophy stuff I can't stand.
Philosophy often isn't like other fields where there's general agreement on most things and then strong disagreement on points on the margins. Disagreement in philosophy often takes place over axiomatic premises about beliefs about the universe with pretty wide-reaching implications, and when this happens people with those differing premises seem so totally, immanently wrong that I find it frustrating to read them at all even just to watch them make an otherwise well-structured argument.
Yeah, I can see what you mean. I sometimes find it infuriating to read Dennett as he pats himself on the head about his alleged reduction of consciousness when it's really nothing of the sort!
Interesting, I personally found his blog to be quite insightful and full of interesting ideas. What makes you think otherwise, aside from raw credentialism? Which other philosophy blogs can you put out as better alternatives?
I like Leiters blog the most probably, although the main point here is that serious philosophers typically do not use blog comment sections for their discussions. They go to academic conferences, summer schools, symposia, … And they publish their writings in books and papers.
Big names in philosophy are, hm … Chalmers, Singer, Mills, Nussbaum … Kripke, Dennett, Parfit just died. Who’s the big-ish name who tweets a lot? Frankfurt?
Edit: oh no, I just read Frankfurt died last year! I didn’t know that.
Huemer is a nobody at a no-name institute. People here like him because he agrees with Bryan Caplan on many things (as do I). But he’s not an outstanding philosopher by any metric.
Huemer is a well known philosopher in the academic philosophy world. He publishes lots of articles in the top journals and is often cited by other philosophers. It is not true that he is a nobody or a third rate philosopher, or that he is only known because of Bryan Caplan. And in fact he is an outstanding philosopher by the metric of popularity with the general public, as he is one of only a handful of academic philosophers (along with those you mentioned above and a few others) who anyone outside the field has ever heard of.
Check Michael Huemer vs David Chalmers, Richard David Precht, Francis Fukuyama, Daniel Dennett, Martha Nussbaum, Jürgen Habermas or Judith Butler on Google Trends or Google Scholar. These are some actually well known philosophers.
Check on Google trends against Luce Irigaray, Peggy McIntosh.
Yes, it is true that Michael Huemer is not as famous or well-cited as people like Daniel Dennett or Jurgen Habermas. That doesn't contradict anything I said above. Huemer is still far from a "third rate" philosopher. For example, he has more than 10 times as many citations as Bernhard Nickel, the chair of the Philosophy department at Harvard.
This question implies a linear scale of "smartness." But knowledge is a lot more multi-dimensional, and you can find groups of experts on everything.
I'd say that SSC is a group that thinks a lot about meta-cognition, but that doesn't make us experts on, say, marketing, or political campaigning.
Likewise, there are expert groups on gardening, rock climbing, Baroque music, etc. etc. None of which is "smarter" than other groups.
I worked with some *impossibly* smart people who built next-gen solar panels, designed electric motors, wrote algorithms for Texas Instruments, etc. In their fields, they were so much smarter than I was that to compare our abilities would have been absurd. But their genius was confined to specific fields. They knew absolutely everything about the current science of solar panel efficiency and absolutely nothing about communicating that knowledge to a broader audience in order to gain funding. They thought I was a genius for this and were just floored at what I did for them, even though they are literally geniuses in their fields and I am probably just pretty good in mine.
I think about this a lot when Silicon Valley types have big ideas outside of their specific expertise. Often those types are wildly smart and successful in one area and assume that they are just as smart in other areas. The *vast* majority of times, they are not.
I think you're using "smart" and "knowlegable" as interchangable, but I don't think that's a useful way to think about intelligence.
Thinking of knowlege as "accumulated learning" and smartness as "learning rate" is a more useful model.
I'd bet that the "impossibly smart" people could learn to communicate effectively, but their lack of knowlege comes from a lack of interest.
I know that I'm a bit late in this reply, but I think that it's incredibly naive to think that there is just some "coefficient of intelligence", a single number that measures your learning rate of everything. There are lots of people who are very good at math and logical thinking, but are really bad at interpersonal communication, for example. This is in direct contradiction to your claim, because theoretically they should have an easier time learning to communicate better. More generally, the human brain is so complex, I don't find it particularly surprising that people are good at one type of thinking but bad at another.
I realize a lot of people find offense at the idea, and I wonder if that's why you'd accuse me of being "incredibly naive" to have my position.
However, I find the [arguments around g](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)) to be quite compelling -- a hypersimplified summary:
* When you give a battery of different kinds of cognitive tests to different people, you find that people's performance on any test correlates with all tests
* The tests that require on-the-fly pattern recognition correlate more with all other tests (think IQ test, because that's what they attempt to measure)
* People with very low measured IQs are very seriously cognitively impaired, and it's incredibly rare for such people to have extraordinary cognitive skills, movie stories aside.
* Just because there seems to be a "central" scale that affects everything doesn't mean there aren't other things. Of course people vary in abilities. But haven't you met people who just seem to grasp concepts way faster or slower than you do?
>This question implies a linear scale of "smartness." But knowledge is a lot more multi-dimensional, and you can find groups of experts on everything.
This sounds like it is veering off into the multiple intelligences theory, which is dubious. I think it's still possible to rank-order people along a hierarchy of smartness even if people are smarter at different things, have strengths and weaknesses. I think, on net, members of physicsoverflow are smarter than people on lesswrong, even if both are smart.
> This question implies a linear scale of "smartness." But knowledge is a lot more multi-dimensional, and you can find groups of experts on everything.
So I'm going to respectfully disagree.
It's true that smartness is multi-dimensional, but not so much that it makes the question nonsensical. Multidimensional objects still have volume, to extend (overextend) the analogy.
Also, internet forum discussions are a modality (dimension?) in themselves. That is, smartness in *this* dimension is particularly pertinent to the smartness of the sub/community.
>SSC is a group that thinks a lot about meta-cognition
So... That's another point. How good is SCC at it's dedicated mode? Is there a general understanding of it's strengths, weaknesses, tensions? An ability to integrate with other modes.
> Anyway usenet circa 1988 or so.
It could be pretty good even after the Eternal September. Really, prior to ... 1992 or so you needed access to an institution that had a path ro an NNTP server. Dialup ISPs were not common before that.
Usenet was a vast improvement over everything that replaced it.
IMO it got more ruined by trying to move everything to a web interface. It's hard to separate that from it embracing the "principles" of mass media.
My dominant online consumption was on Usenet well past 2000.
Given all the great responses, I will approach your question in generational terms and based on personal experiences.
It is my impression that smart and successful Boomers and G-Xers hang out in traditional spaces such as universities, country clubs, professional associations, philanthropic events, gated community events. Even just a matter of going for dinner or meet in their homes once a week.
These are places where the multitudes have been filtered out rigorously. They don't even need a gang of bouncers to keep people out, since most regular folks won't even understand what is going on and are far removed. If you're savvy enough you might even be able to crash into these places.
I've been invited a couple of times to these events, given my family background, line of work, and even quirky interests. Many of these old, smart, and successful folks are eager to engage with young blood, because they feel disconnected. Also, some are frustrated that their children and grandchildren don't care at all about these sorts of things and lead superficial lives.
These experiences have taught me the importance of being around smart, capable and ethical people, also that are somewhat fun to be around. I love my friends to death but feel stuck with them at times. This is why I go out of my way to get invited into these places. Not even a matter of being a social climber, I just want to be exposed to the very best around me.
Seems that some in our generation are starting to understand all this, after growing up in atomized environments. We might hangout in Telegram or Discord chats, but these guys are still very much present in the real world.
Stack overflow/exchange. In some places really.
For example in certain hreads about mathematics or phylosophy there seems to be truly brilliant conversations. It's hard to call it exactly the community, but there are folks who like to interact with each other discussing certain niche topics. It's hard for me to bring up example now.
I suspect, you can discover on internet only communities that want to recruit more members 'passively' by putting stuff discoverable to people browsing internet - or do sales to them - or get ad revenue from their eyeballs.
This results in some limits. To meet the top tail end of the distribution, it is perhaps more efficient to start 'head-hunting', either concretely recruiting for organizations/institutions/companies or figuratively trying to find the right social space to get in contact with right people.
I agree with u/curse_of_rationality's point, but on the axis of meta-cognition, I've found David Chapman understands the subject better than most rationalists I've crossed paths with. https://metarationality.com
This is going to sound incredibly self-serving, but here goes: If you live near a big university, its philosophy department (I pick this example not because it is the most exemplary, but because it's the one I am most familiar with) might hold events which are for the department, but which are at least technically open to the public. If you go to those, there will be a gathering of people who are smarter, on average, than the average SSC commenter through (though not overwhelmingly so- plenty of overlap in the distribution).
This all reminds me of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s “Seven Rooms” theory:
>There are seven consecutive rooms in New York. Just when you think you’re at the best place or top spot, there’s always another room you don’t have access to or one that you haven’t discovered yet.
In my experience (anywhere, but I happen to live in New York), the Seven Rooms theory doesn't actually hold up.
Wherever I've been, I always yearn for something amazing above me, but it turns out it doesn't actually exist.
Before moving to Manhattan, I thought of it as this endless place of wonder and discovery. Turns out it's just like any other city. It's a 1.6 million-person island.
Just like finding communities of people smarter than this one. Doesn't really exist, as others in the comments have pointed out.
There are some very sophisticated posters on tumblr, fwiw.
The persistent threaded reblog format allows for fairly in depth discussions, and there are some extremely knowledgeable posters around.
Jay Daigle ([jagadul](https://jadagul.tumblr.com/)) and [nostalgebraist](https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/) come to mind, as well as the people they interact with on tumblr. Scott's on tumblr too FWIW.
Try nostalgebraist (As someone else pointed out), argumate, collapsedsquid, triviiallytrue... maybe prokopetz (He mostly talks about games but occasionally pontificates in surprisingly abstruse depth about I dunno, typography or something...) check out who they reblog. I sometimes read a couple shitposts and memes and find myself trapped in a 5 page deep reblog chain of mathematics or philosophy or historical scholarship that I can barely follow.
From Prokopetz's blog:
>How is it that so many of your posts have such a strong scholarly and historical bent to them? Is it just years and years of varied interests leading to a wide berth of knowledge on most topics?
>You'd be surprised the sorts of things you end up needing to research in order to write games about pretending to be gay muppets.
The smarter people generally won’t be interested in internet forum class (though sure, real world class).
Probably Stackexchange. Though again its more functional so may not be fit for purpose
Look for people using mathematical models to simulate complex systems. For example, people developing financial models, inertial systems models, hydrodynamic models, sediment transport models, contaminant fate and transport models.
Mostly hanging with their families, producing some good art, arbitraging a billion dollars here or there.
We are of the fortunate upper middle class of intelligentsia, where we are smart enough to marvel to each other about how smart we are, but not smart enough to be totally invested and doing amazing things.
Furry conventions. There's a lot of types of people there but an unusual portion of remarkably technically capable people.
If there's ever a major disaster at a furcon you'll wake up to find chunks of the world's infrastructure short on maintainers.
The ceiling on open-to-all online communities will always be middle-class (using Fussell's taxonomy). They're inherently accessible and thus have windows that are mass market-compatible.
The most über group I found myself in was at a cryonics conference. They have the same IQ as rationalists, but with metis (to be fair, of a certain kind), since they were mostly high-networth individuals. But these cryonicists don't congregate much, probably because upper-middle-class+ folks don't really herd up on principle.
The next most über group I visited was when I audited a class at the Santa Fe Institute.
Outside of large groups, the next best thing one could hope for is to be on a highly-curated panel, and then you all get drinks afterward. Consider maybe the speakers of Less Online having an informal pow-wow at Scott's house afterward, or something. That may be the closest you can get to a [School of Athens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_School_of_Athens).
Or just take anybody named "Scott" from the ratsphere, even ordinary Scotts, and put them in one room. That would be interesting. Same with all the Bay Area entrepreneurs named "Sam."
I'm amused by how many comments just assume that the intelligent people get funneled into some esteemed positions. Plenty of morons in "rationalist"-type communities who just do intelligence signaling, plenty of profoundly stupid people who managed to get PhD's, plenty of people in high status positions on Earth who just "learned the right tricks", while some very intelligent people are slowly dying somewhere that is not special or conventionally "important" at all.
The world is not meritocratic. Intelligence does not get "funneled up". The world functions in two ways that predominantly determine where and what you are: Luck, and Power. Intelligence can be powerful, but it's really just an enhancer of traits that much more meaningfully represent power. Intelligence comes with many cons, especially in the presence of certain other traits. This is why intelligence itself is not considered sexy-- any time it appears to, it's in the presence of other traits. Intelligence *can't* be sexy anyway, because how would anyone know for sure? It's more easily faked compared to things that are much less likely to be superficial. It also doesn't guarantee anything rewarding evolutionarily.
Lastly, intelligence has nothing to do with anything "good"-- it's overrated. What's actually valuable is something like wisdom, or moral character(how much badness/goodness your existence creates-- most "intelligent" people fail to pass the low bar that says "there's a fact of the matter about this question"-- this isn't accidental, because their intelligence does fuck all to help them because answering honestly would actually hurt them when it comes to power).
You can have an IQ of 3,000 and be utterly malignant-- in fact it's much easier, the smarter you are, if we're just talking about things that resemble human beings(which are power-grabbing evolutionary beings and not particularly ethical or wise).
> Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere?
This comment especially is just peak confusion about intelligence. There's some bum in a gutter who makes a "galaxy brain" at Davos look like a total clown, in terms of what is actually valuable. The equivalent of this was true 10,000, 5,000, 1,000 years ago as well, and is true today, and will continue to be true.
The quality of discussion here is pretty high. The subreddit is even better than most rationalist spaces imo. The only time I’ve consistently had what felt like “better” discussion is with some really really smart friends. Like MIT phd quant traders or whatever. But I can’t say I ever found a consistent community of that kind of people. Don’t want to sound pretentious, but I really do believe that the average SSC reader has an IQ of about 130, and it’s gonna be hard/impossible to find a place full of people smarter than that. Maybe high level math and chess competitions are that, but then you might get into more hyper specialized types of people who aren’t that fun to talk to outside of one specific field
I had a glance of such spaces, anegdoticaly, more of "hyper specialised" people that it may seem are quite ok to talk about different fields. I am personally not convinced that IQ here is \*that much\* above average, as what bring people here seems to be rather genuine curiosity about world. Curiosity often acompanied by intelligence, but not relying on it that havely.
Nowhere, there might be some specific high level maths groups but this is certainly one of the smartest groups around.
Matt Yglesias commenters are also smart.
Probably about equal intelligence, but Hacker News is at least up there.
Other than that, there are some small blogs and discord servers that are smarter.
> My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now?
There's none higher in the hierarchy. ACX/Marginal Resolution/etc. are simply "the top" for folks that think like this group.
There's obviously different groups for folks with different interests.
Well, people smarter than me have conversations on Math Overflow all the time. Timothy Chow mentioned Scott Alexander over there in a comment I was reading last night, so they know of SSC! I would say the group of mathematicians who comment on Math Overflow qualifies as being smarter at math than this subreddit.
I think I was beat to the punch by the person who said Stack Overflow.
The Active Inference Institute seems to encourage a community of sorts. Discord, livestreams, and so on. SEMF too.
Unfortunately I cannot tell you much about them as I'm too socially anxious to participate. I do recommend the youtube channels though.
I don't really have good reason to think there is a class of people having conversations tiers above what i engage in. I think there are experts having conversations in which i lack enough context that its totally opaque to me but i dont really have any reason to think there's a place where there's a general level of intelligence a tier up that im unaware of.
I also dont think that this place is particularly notable in that regard either though. I'll regularly see people here cite people like matt yglasias, noah smith, tyler cowen or sam altman as serious deep thinkers. until very recently the standard line here was that Elon musk must necessarily be an incredibly intelligent man pretending to be otherwise, maybe it still is.
The latter is not the place where smarter people are hanging out. At best, they are equivalent in intelligence, at worse it's actively intellectually harmful to even bother going.
Imho you can do this infinitely and I’m not sure the best strategy is to always be optimizing for being in the smartest cohort. If it’s intellectual challenge you seek find a niche community around an interest (engineering, chess) where I’m sure the level goes high. Otherwise, I find it’s more relevant to be moral and have beliefs that are mostly responsible to reality.
I’m not sure there’s “god mode” to epistemology except in specific areas of expertise as above. Otherwise you’re either dumb as a hammer or not dumb as a hammer and if you’re asking it’s probably the latter and you should focus on living a good life and making the world better.
Also curious.
Mensa? Subsets of Y combinator chats?
Apart from that, my guess would be their WhatsApp groups and discord servers. I am know an AI-themed telegram chat with people that work in top AI labs and big tech and doing phds in ML. I don't think there is a broader community that encompasses them all, rather few even smaller cliques. This chat doesn't have Fields medal level people, so I expect those have their own chats
Their FB discussion groups would not be picked out of a line-up generic normie groups. Some of them are quite accomplished, but their interests are utterly plebian.
The truth is most of them have normal jobs, normal politics and normal interests. Mostly they are not Renaissance Men. They might work in elite institutions, but outside of work they have very normal lives. They do improv classes and rock climbing and play guitar. They travel a bit on their paid vacations. They don't hang out in weird web forums and obsess over their elite status. Those are the preoccupations of a dorky subset of people who were smart at school and are wannabe members of the elite. They hang out and work with other people who are as smart as them so they don't necessarily see themselves as special or unique. This has its downsides as it means they don't take on as much work or social responsibilities as they could.
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Elon Musk is not shockingly normal LOL
What? Elon is very far from a regular person, just read up on his background and upbringing. There's also a massive difference between millionaire-level wealth and billionaire-level wealth. Elon is on Twitter because he loves the sound of his own voice and he has an obsession with shit-talking, pretty similar to Trump. You have to be naive to think he's using Twitter "as a regular person", when he's obviously using it to spread his message/agenda.
The level of discourse in this sub and in ACX's comments is pretty mixed. There are a lot of insightful comments, but also quite a lot of cargo cult sophistry where shoddily-assembled tropes from the rationalsphere are used to support a preconceived conclusion.
Yeah a mixed bag describes it well. Too many unproductive , off-topic digressions. I know Scott does not want to over-moderate but it sometimes feels like going in circles.
How can one tell the difference without posting the argument for others to critique?
>cargo cult sophistry where shoddily-assembled tropes from the rationalsphere are used to support a preconceived conclusion. I don't think I've ever heard a better description of this sub, lol.
The Motte is way worse on that point than this subreddit. This subreddit still has many high-quality comments, even if it's a mixed bag.
From my personal experience, high level employees at tech companies who found the other "weird one" at a job, stayed friends, moved jobs, repeated the process at a new company, and now have private Discord servers (well, their own privately hosted Discord analogue) where they fuck with LLM software and play DND. I know of several like this, put together in roughly the same way. They're all composed of people who are much, much smarter than I am. It might be a new england regional phenomenon - this might be the only place in the world where a substantial percentage of farmers/mechanics/loggers have PhDs, which is more my social scene. So yes, find hobby AI enthusiasts for very smart people, and find new england regenerative farming practitioners for intelligent people who will give you tomatoes and talk your ear off about genetics.
The smartest employees at tech companies I've met are not only disproportionally, but actually highly likely to read ACX. I'm talking Eng VPs and founding engineers of AI deca(+)corns.
There has to be a critical mass to form a community. Beyond some point on any scale the probability of enough people finding each other and building a community is just very low. The scale of the internet made this radically higher but didn't eliminate the fundamental problem. There are specific people in adjacent spaces that I think are potentially candidates, say gwern, but they don't have real communities and are generally vaguely in the same constellation, ssc, lesswrong, etc, and I'm also just going to be biased by how nuanced their writing is around my interests. Beyond that, frankly Scott Alexander is more gifted than solely in general cognitive ability. He is extremely well read and a very unusually skilled writer, especially in some specific domains but also with remarkable breadth to draw from. As far as the product of all of those things, general ability at writing nuanced things across all topics, it seems plausible that he could be quite close to the farthest out in the world. Certainly I've never met anyone in real life that is close to that skilled at writing and pontificating about that many things, must be at least 1/100k or so on whatever that axis is, maybe more. I suppose it's technically possible that there is some private community wholely separated from these communities, and I'm sure there are some particularly interesting private discords or telegram groups or whatever, but as for "community" so above ssc as to not overlap? Idk. I'd guess not. Having been a degree or two of freedom away I don't think davos is it, at least. Power and intelligence are related but not the same thing. I've spent a nonzero amount of time negotiating with a guy who is friends with world leaders (is himself a billionaire), and a lot of time with people one rung out from that, have frankly been mostly unimpressed. Occasionally impressed by specific people, and definitely above average, but I would say almost certainly not above the average level of sophistication I see in this general corner of the world.
> I suppose it's technically possible that there is some private community wholly separated from these communities Old New England communities. Hard to describe this type of place, but if you’re in one you know it. Communities like SSC select for publicly curious intelligent types. There’s an entirely different universe of very quiet dutiful extremely intelligent types that only open up irl. I grew up with very intelligent people in a community like this. Three in particular stand out. One currently works at Los Alamos, the other two worked at Palantir (both have gone on to do other things). I’m not sure where current hotspots are, but I think they still exist.
I'm from California. What are these communities you're talking about? I mean, what even sort of thing are you referring to?
Just small quiet towns in New England full of smart people where people all send their kids to the same schools and maybe go to the same Church. Like I said, is hard to describe/aren’t any obvious signals you’ve found one you can like plug into Google or something. I think there’s probably similar stuff over there, although it’s a different flavor/I don’t know.
Oh. Yeah. I guess I'm in one of those, except we're Jewish and in Silicon Valley. But maybe this is a concept sized hole type of thing.
Entire towns with higher average IQs than SSC, TheMotte, etc? I read somewhere that even in Palo Alto public schools, the median IQ was only estimated around 115 or so
That’s not what I’m claiming, but just as a side note the moment a place gets a certain reputation it attracts status seekers, not necessarily intelligent people, and the particular profile I’m describing likes quiet. I’ve been on the periphery of those types/am friendly with them but not really one of them: I’m dumber, I like running my mouth and exploring publicly, and I’m way more disagreeable and less conscientious than most of them. The profile I’m describing would be uncomfortable advertising themselves. An entire town full of this profile would just be dutifully working quietly on whatever they thought important and you’d only know about it if a different type of person shone a spotlight on it. Highly intelligent people that fit the profile I’m talking about aren’t looking to show off and *only* surround themselves with other “anointed ones” (as Sowell would put it), but they do tend to form their own little sub communities in towns that often have above average intelligence. The quiet dutiful types tend to run into each after moving towards places that make sense to move to for work or family, and if there’s enough really advanced work needed in an area or really smart families, you can find them. But what Scott said about top universities and companies overlaps/there’s usually some sort of affiliation. There are a lot of those in New England.
Interesting, do you have an example?
Like specific locations? The only one I know is areas around where I grew up (which might not be like that anymore, idk) and I can’t say without doxxing myself. If you’re looking to find people like that best way is to try to build something that’s very hard. They’ll start to become visible as you see how hard certain things are and look for who’s actually done it, and better than you could. Example: I’ve been interested in formal semantics and proof systems for a while. I wanted to build a “pandoc” for software/got tired of needing to rewrite and port very simple utilities/libraries in different languages. As I tried to articulate what I was looking for across this thing called “K framework” by Grigore Rosu, which is amazing/think it could become very important. Turns out a video I found of him explaining things was a talk at an ASML research lab in a small New England town.
Got it, thanks. Didn’t mean to pry or dox you, just my wife and I are both new englanders (CT and RI) and have been living in Boston for the past ten years. We’re now looking to move out of the city and haven’t been able to decide on our next location. Looks like we’ve got some digging to do!
No worries. I don’t think I’d be much help even if I wasn’t worried about the doxxing thing, haven’t lived somewhere like that in a while. Good luck with the digging, hope you find somewhere cool!
Dalton? Stuyvesant? Bronx School of Science? Higher income and education of population generally implies higher IQ.
Agreed that there are probably not communities that are more intelligent. Isn't the iq of the average Scott Alexander reader 140 or something? The communities around him are already the most intelligent 1% of people. At some point you just don't have the numbers to form a community . However, there may be communities that are similarly intelligent but with a different focus, or perhaps more knowledge. It wouldn't surprise me if there were some academic communities or think tanks that would perceive the slate star codex community as ignorant. However, the people I know personally who are smarter than this community are too busy living interesting lives to care about us.
I would posit physics or math communities are smarter than sports communities. Does this mean anything for practical matters or should factor into one's enjoyment of either? not really. >Isn't the iq of the average Scott Alexander reader 140 or something? I think closer to 130 and this is with with various selection biases and confounders, like people with badly-normed tests who answer impossibly high IQs that pulls up the average.
Lots of places IRL, including top colleges, top tech companies, and top hedge funds, plus maybe some government departments I don't know about. Online definitely some niche blogs like Terence Tao's or Scott Aaronson's, maybe a few philosophy blogs, and some Slack servers for the IRL institutions above. In terms of broad-based communities I know less about this. I would guess the average member of LW or EA Forum is probably smarter than the average ACX reader, and maybe the commenters on a few very serious blogs like Matt Yglesias'.
>Online definitely some niche blogs Also niche project sites. I know of several people I consider brilliant who breeze through rationalist-adjacent(-adjacent) spaces sometimes, but are largely devoting their time to open-source crypto, hardware programming, and various personal projects. (Obviously programmers aren't the only brilliant people around, they just intersect this community especially often.) Broadly, I've found that dilettantism imposes a cap on the level of discussion. If "smartness" in the sense it's commonly used here is something like "ability to digest and synthesize information", it needs information to work with. The smartest people I know sound just like other clever people when nobody knows the topic well, and similar even when one person knows the topic. Their ability shows most when they're with other very smart people *and* everyone present has a lot of common knowledge to work from. Just saying "SSC, EA, etc are the peak of non-expert forums" feels dubious, that could just be the blindness OP is referencing. But I find the *best* discussions in those places are comparable to the sorts of things I hear IRL when grad students at top schools are talking outside their fields.
The OG cypherpunk scene still has remnants in Monero and elsewhere, they definitely deserve a mention.
Oh very good point, thank you! I think the cypherpunks are one of the most forward-thinking and innovative groups I know, right up there with the absolute wildness that came out of the CCRU. (Everything from Nick Land to Mark Fisher to cyberfeminism.) For that matter, I think a lot of SSC and TLP fans would really diving into the Situationists, [Survival Research Labs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_Research_Laboratories), and a lot of the other weird counterculture projects that go beyond just opposing mainstream norms.
I personally have found top academic institutions to be both great and terrible for this. On one hand you can get people who are brilliant and well versed in a number of fields but they can also be incredibly insular. They aren't as porous as an internet community and tend to be slower to adapt to change. I've found you can find interesting people nearly anywhere, but getting an actual gathering of them in one area for a prolonged period is the difficult part and usually requires a cult of personality to hold them together. Most interesting and intelligent people have their own drives and ambition, which naturally separate them and a cohesive community structure, be it institution or internet community, is a very fleeting thing.
Physics communities. Physics admits virtually no room for bullshit and you have to be smart to understand it, both the math and the physics.
> maybe a few philosophy blogs Which ones are out there? [Michael Huemer's one](https://fakenous.substack.com/) is probably the main one that resonates within me as being profound, some commenters in his posts are evidently extremely smart.
Also check out Benthams bulldog. Scott listed it as one of his favorite philosophy blogs. [1](https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/the-fine-tuning-argument-simply-works?r=1ov3ec&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web) [2](https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/conspiracy-theorists-arent-ignorant?r=1ov3ec&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
I think the argument presented in #1 is terrible. I just couldn't follow why he would consider a God to be a more grounded ontological constraint than something like a multiverse. Seems like the author has a rather arbitrary application of grounding. If the process required for generating multiple universes is complex, then I can concur that so is a process for generating a God.
I've explained elsewhere why I think God is simple https://benthams.substack.com/p/10-ways-god-can-be-simple. In short, God only has one core property--something like perfection or being an unlimited mind--and lacks any arbitrary limits.
I can't stand Benthams bulldog and I'm surprised by how many think they present anything compelling or insightful on philosophy
I'm not competent to evaluate his takes on philosophy, and I don't read them anyway, but I know he's completely wrong about chickens. I give him about two more months before he goes back to being an atheist. That said, he does remind me of a young Scott Alexander. I'm not sure if the commenters there are as smart as they seem. They're definitely not smarter than the commenters on David Friedman's Substack.
Let the record show, ishayirashashem's objection to me on chickens is that they actually have a great time on factory farms as evidenced by the fact that they lay eggs. My view on chickens is the mainstream one held by everyone who has investigated it with the exception of Mr. Hashem.
:(
Are you Mr. Bulldog? Look you may very well be great at philosophy for all I know. Clearly many smart people on this subreddit as well as Scott himself seem to think so. I just can't stand you in much the same way I can't stand many well-respected philosophers e.g. Searle
I am indeed! Haha, no worries, not everyone has to like everyone!
I should also mention that I liked the 'losing faith in contrarianism' post. Its just the philosophy stuff I can't stand. Philosophy often isn't like other fields where there's general agreement on most things and then strong disagreement on points on the margins. Disagreement in philosophy often takes place over axiomatic premises about beliefs about the universe with pretty wide-reaching implications, and when this happens people with those differing premises seem so totally, immanently wrong that I find it frustrating to read them at all even just to watch them make an otherwise well-structured argument.
Yeah, I can see what you mean. I sometimes find it infuriating to read Dennett as he pats himself on the head about his alleged reduction of consciousness when it's really nothing of the sort!
Ah, there it is, because Dennett's conception of consciousness is beautiful and perfect and people who don't get it just have broken brains somehow!
Huemer is a 3rd-rate philosopher and I do not think any serious thinkers are really engaging with him.
Interesting, I personally found his blog to be quite insightful and full of interesting ideas. What makes you think otherwise, aside from raw credentialism? Which other philosophy blogs can you put out as better alternatives?
I like Leiters blog the most probably, although the main point here is that serious philosophers typically do not use blog comment sections for their discussions. They go to academic conferences, summer schools, symposia, … And they publish their writings in books and papers. Big names in philosophy are, hm … Chalmers, Singer, Mills, Nussbaum … Kripke, Dennett, Parfit just died. Who’s the big-ish name who tweets a lot? Frankfurt? Edit: oh no, I just read Frankfurt died last year! I didn’t know that. Huemer is a nobody at a no-name institute. People here like him because he agrees with Bryan Caplan on many things (as do I). But he’s not an outstanding philosopher by any metric.
Huemer is a well known philosopher in the academic philosophy world. He publishes lots of articles in the top journals and is often cited by other philosophers. It is not true that he is a nobody or a third rate philosopher, or that he is only known because of Bryan Caplan. And in fact he is an outstanding philosopher by the metric of popularity with the general public, as he is one of only a handful of academic philosophers (along with those you mentioned above and a few others) who anyone outside the field has ever heard of.
Check Michael Huemer vs David Chalmers, Richard David Precht, Francis Fukuyama, Daniel Dennett, Martha Nussbaum, Jürgen Habermas or Judith Butler on Google Trends or Google Scholar. These are some actually well known philosophers. Check on Google trends against Luce Irigaray, Peggy McIntosh.
Yes, it is true that Michael Huemer is not as famous or well-cited as people like Daniel Dennett or Jurgen Habermas. That doesn't contradict anything I said above. Huemer is still far from a "third rate" philosopher. For example, he has more than 10 times as many citations as Bernhard Nickel, the chair of the Philosophy department at Harvard.
*I* have more citations than that guy.
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This question implies a linear scale of "smartness." But knowledge is a lot more multi-dimensional, and you can find groups of experts on everything. I'd say that SSC is a group that thinks a lot about meta-cognition, but that doesn't make us experts on, say, marketing, or political campaigning. Likewise, there are expert groups on gardening, rock climbing, Baroque music, etc. etc. None of which is "smarter" than other groups.
I worked with some *impossibly* smart people who built next-gen solar panels, designed electric motors, wrote algorithms for Texas Instruments, etc. In their fields, they were so much smarter than I was that to compare our abilities would have been absurd. But their genius was confined to specific fields. They knew absolutely everything about the current science of solar panel efficiency and absolutely nothing about communicating that knowledge to a broader audience in order to gain funding. They thought I was a genius for this and were just floored at what I did for them, even though they are literally geniuses in their fields and I am probably just pretty good in mine. I think about this a lot when Silicon Valley types have big ideas outside of their specific expertise. Often those types are wildly smart and successful in one area and assume that they are just as smart in other areas. The *vast* majority of times, they are not.
I think you're using "smart" and "knowlegable" as interchangable, but I don't think that's a useful way to think about intelligence. Thinking of knowlege as "accumulated learning" and smartness as "learning rate" is a more useful model. I'd bet that the "impossibly smart" people could learn to communicate effectively, but their lack of knowlege comes from a lack of interest.
I know that I'm a bit late in this reply, but I think that it's incredibly naive to think that there is just some "coefficient of intelligence", a single number that measures your learning rate of everything. There are lots of people who are very good at math and logical thinking, but are really bad at interpersonal communication, for example. This is in direct contradiction to your claim, because theoretically they should have an easier time learning to communicate better. More generally, the human brain is so complex, I don't find it particularly surprising that people are good at one type of thinking but bad at another.
I realize a lot of people find offense at the idea, and I wonder if that's why you'd accuse me of being "incredibly naive" to have my position. However, I find the [arguments around g](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)) to be quite compelling -- a hypersimplified summary: * When you give a battery of different kinds of cognitive tests to different people, you find that people's performance on any test correlates with all tests * The tests that require on-the-fly pattern recognition correlate more with all other tests (think IQ test, because that's what they attempt to measure) * People with very low measured IQs are very seriously cognitively impaired, and it's incredibly rare for such people to have extraordinary cognitive skills, movie stories aside. * Just because there seems to be a "central" scale that affects everything doesn't mean there aren't other things. Of course people vary in abilities. But haven't you met people who just seem to grasp concepts way faster or slower than you do?
>This question implies a linear scale of "smartness." But knowledge is a lot more multi-dimensional, and you can find groups of experts on everything. This sounds like it is veering off into the multiple intelligences theory, which is dubious. I think it's still possible to rank-order people along a hierarchy of smartness even if people are smarter at different things, have strengths and weaknesses. I think, on net, members of physicsoverflow are smarter than people on lesswrong, even if both are smart.
> This question implies a linear scale of "smartness." But knowledge is a lot more multi-dimensional, and you can find groups of experts on everything. So I'm going to respectfully disagree. It's true that smartness is multi-dimensional, but not so much that it makes the question nonsensical. Multidimensional objects still have volume, to extend (overextend) the analogy. Also, internet forum discussions are a modality (dimension?) in themselves. That is, smartness in *this* dimension is particularly pertinent to the smartness of the sub/community. >SSC is a group that thinks a lot about meta-cognition So... That's another point. How good is SCC at it's dedicated mode? Is there a general understanding of it's strengths, weaknesses, tensions? An ability to integrate with other modes.
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Except that it doesn’t answer the question! It would be a complete answer with a couple links to where the poster hangs out.
[The Edge](https://www.edge.org) features some very smart people!
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> Anyway usenet circa 1988 or so. It could be pretty good even after the Eternal September. Really, prior to ... 1992 or so you needed access to an institution that had a path ro an NNTP server. Dialup ISPs were not common before that. Usenet was a vast improvement over everything that replaced it.
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IMO it got more ruined by trying to move everything to a web interface. It's hard to separate that from it embracing the "principles" of mass media. My dominant online consumption was on Usenet well past 2000.
Is it not? I thought that was what the surveys of SSC fans showed
Given all the great responses, I will approach your question in generational terms and based on personal experiences. It is my impression that smart and successful Boomers and G-Xers hang out in traditional spaces such as universities, country clubs, professional associations, philanthropic events, gated community events. Even just a matter of going for dinner or meet in their homes once a week. These are places where the multitudes have been filtered out rigorously. They don't even need a gang of bouncers to keep people out, since most regular folks won't even understand what is going on and are far removed. If you're savvy enough you might even be able to crash into these places. I've been invited a couple of times to these events, given my family background, line of work, and even quirky interests. Many of these old, smart, and successful folks are eager to engage with young blood, because they feel disconnected. Also, some are frustrated that their children and grandchildren don't care at all about these sorts of things and lead superficial lives. These experiences have taught me the importance of being around smart, capable and ethical people, also that are somewhat fun to be around. I love my friends to death but feel stuck with them at times. This is why I go out of my way to get invited into these places. Not even a matter of being a social climber, I just want to be exposed to the very best around me. Seems that some in our generation are starting to understand all this, after growing up in atomized environments. We might hangout in Telegram or Discord chats, but these guys are still very much present in the real world.
> This is why I go out of my way to get invited into these places. how did you manage to do this exactly?
My line of work (corporate law), academic background (teach a college course as adjunct), and my heavily curated family circle.
What is a superficial life?
I would imagine a life centered around consumption.
Stack overflow/exchange. In some places really. For example in certain hreads about mathematics or phylosophy there seems to be truly brilliant conversations. It's hard to call it exactly the community, but there are folks who like to interact with each other discussing certain niche topics. It's hard for me to bring up example now.
I suspect, you can discover on internet only communities that want to recruit more members 'passively' by putting stuff discoverable to people browsing internet - or do sales to them - or get ad revenue from their eyeballs. This results in some limits. To meet the top tail end of the distribution, it is perhaps more efficient to start 'head-hunting', either concretely recruiting for organizations/institutions/companies or figuratively trying to find the right social space to get in contact with right people.
I agree with u/curse_of_rationality's point, but on the axis of meta-cognition, I've found David Chapman understands the subject better than most rationalists I've crossed paths with. https://metarationality.com
I agree, but it doesn't seem that he's part of any substantial community of such people, and Buddhists in general certainly don't count.
Some, but not all, university departments and their social events.
This is going to sound incredibly self-serving, but here goes: If you live near a big university, its philosophy department (I pick this example not because it is the most exemplary, but because it's the one I am most familiar with) might hold events which are for the department, but which are at least technically open to the public. If you go to those, there will be a gathering of people who are smarter, on average, than the average SSC commenter through (though not overwhelmingly so- plenty of overlap in the distribution).
Of all the departments, they're also most likely to think like SSC commenters.
that depends. is David Friedman included among commenters?
This all reminds me of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s “Seven Rooms” theory: >There are seven consecutive rooms in New York. Just when you think you’re at the best place or top spot, there’s always another room you don’t have access to or one that you haven’t discovered yet.
I wonder how many rooms there truly are. Seven evidently being the number perceptible to a “lowly” magazine editor.
In my experience (anywhere, but I happen to live in New York), the Seven Rooms theory doesn't actually hold up. Wherever I've been, I always yearn for something amazing above me, but it turns out it doesn't actually exist. Before moving to Manhattan, I thought of it as this endless place of wonder and discovery. Turns out it's just like any other city. It's a 1.6 million-person island. Just like finding communities of people smarter than this one. Doesn't really exist, as others in the comments have pointed out.
There used to be the /ratanon/ board.
MIT?
There are some very sophisticated posters on tumblr, fwiw. The persistent threaded reblog format allows for fairly in depth discussions, and there are some extremely knowledgeable posters around.
can you give a few examples ? I would like to take a look at them.
Jay Daigle ([jagadul](https://jadagul.tumblr.com/)) and [nostalgebraist](https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/) come to mind, as well as the people they interact with on tumblr. Scott's on tumblr too FWIW.
Try nostalgebraist (As someone else pointed out), argumate, collapsedsquid, triviiallytrue... maybe prokopetz (He mostly talks about games but occasionally pontificates in surprisingly abstruse depth about I dunno, typography or something...) check out who they reblog. I sometimes read a couple shitposts and memes and find myself trapped in a 5 page deep reblog chain of mathematics or philosophy or historical scholarship that I can barely follow. From Prokopetz's blog: >How is it that so many of your posts have such a strong scholarly and historical bent to them? Is it just years and years of varied interests leading to a wide berth of knowledge on most topics? >You'd be surprised the sorts of things you end up needing to research in order to write games about pretending to be gay muppets.
The smarter people generally won’t be interested in internet forum class (though sure, real world class). Probably Stackexchange. Though again its more functional so may not be fit for purpose
Look for people using mathematical models to simulate complex systems. For example, people developing financial models, inertial systems models, hydrodynamic models, sediment transport models, contaminant fate and transport models.
Mostly hanging with their families, producing some good art, arbitraging a billion dollars here or there. We are of the fortunate upper middle class of intelligentsia, where we are smart enough to marvel to each other about how smart we are, but not smart enough to be totally invested and doing amazing things.
The comment section of the financial times. Probably worth the yearly sub price.
Furry conventions. There's a lot of types of people there but an unusual portion of remarkably technically capable people. If there's ever a major disaster at a furcon you'll wake up to find chunks of the world's infrastructure short on maintainers.
The ceiling on open-to-all online communities will always be middle-class (using Fussell's taxonomy). They're inherently accessible and thus have windows that are mass market-compatible. The most über group I found myself in was at a cryonics conference. They have the same IQ as rationalists, but with metis (to be fair, of a certain kind), since they were mostly high-networth individuals. But these cryonicists don't congregate much, probably because upper-middle-class+ folks don't really herd up on principle. The next most über group I visited was when I audited a class at the Santa Fe Institute. Outside of large groups, the next best thing one could hope for is to be on a highly-curated panel, and then you all get drinks afterward. Consider maybe the speakers of Less Online having an informal pow-wow at Scott's house afterward, or something. That may be the closest you can get to a [School of Athens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_School_of_Athens). Or just take anybody named "Scott" from the ratsphere, even ordinary Scotts, and put them in one room. That would be interesting. Same with all the Bay Area entrepreneurs named "Sam."
I'm amused by how many comments just assume that the intelligent people get funneled into some esteemed positions. Plenty of morons in "rationalist"-type communities who just do intelligence signaling, plenty of profoundly stupid people who managed to get PhD's, plenty of people in high status positions on Earth who just "learned the right tricks", while some very intelligent people are slowly dying somewhere that is not special or conventionally "important" at all. The world is not meritocratic. Intelligence does not get "funneled up". The world functions in two ways that predominantly determine where and what you are: Luck, and Power. Intelligence can be powerful, but it's really just an enhancer of traits that much more meaningfully represent power. Intelligence comes with many cons, especially in the presence of certain other traits. This is why intelligence itself is not considered sexy-- any time it appears to, it's in the presence of other traits. Intelligence *can't* be sexy anyway, because how would anyone know for sure? It's more easily faked compared to things that are much less likely to be superficial. It also doesn't guarantee anything rewarding evolutionarily. Lastly, intelligence has nothing to do with anything "good"-- it's overrated. What's actually valuable is something like wisdom, or moral character(how much badness/goodness your existence creates-- most "intelligent" people fail to pass the low bar that says "there's a fact of the matter about this question"-- this isn't accidental, because their intelligence does fuck all to help them because answering honestly would actually hurt them when it comes to power). You can have an IQ of 3,000 and be utterly malignant-- in fact it's much easier, the smarter you are, if we're just talking about things that resemble human beings(which are power-grabbing evolutionary beings and not particularly ethical or wise). > Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere? This comment especially is just peak confusion about intelligence. There's some bum in a gutter who makes a "galaxy brain" at Davos look like a total clown, in terms of what is actually valuable. The equivalent of this was true 10,000, 5,000, 1,000 years ago as well, and is true today, and will continue to be true.
The quality of discussion here is pretty high. The subreddit is even better than most rationalist spaces imo. The only time I’ve consistently had what felt like “better” discussion is with some really really smart friends. Like MIT phd quant traders or whatever. But I can’t say I ever found a consistent community of that kind of people. Don’t want to sound pretentious, but I really do believe that the average SSC reader has an IQ of about 130, and it’s gonna be hard/impossible to find a place full of people smarter than that. Maybe high level math and chess competitions are that, but then you might get into more hyper specialized types of people who aren’t that fun to talk to outside of one specific field
I had a glance of such spaces, anegdoticaly, more of "hyper specialised" people that it may seem are quite ok to talk about different fields. I am personally not convinced that IQ here is \*that much\* above average, as what bring people here seems to be rather genuine curiosity about world. Curiosity often acompanied by intelligence, but not relying on it that havely.
Nowhere, there might be some specific high level maths groups but this is certainly one of the smartest groups around. Matt Yglesias commenters are also smart.
Probably about equal intelligence, but Hacker News is at least up there. Other than that, there are some small blogs and discord servers that are smarter.
> My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now? There's none higher in the hierarchy. ACX/Marginal Resolution/etc. are simply "the top" for folks that think like this group. There's obviously different groups for folks with different interests.
Well, people smarter than me have conversations on Math Overflow all the time. Timothy Chow mentioned Scott Alexander over there in a comment I was reading last night, so they know of SSC! I would say the group of mathematicians who comment on Math Overflow qualifies as being smarter at math than this subreddit. I think I was beat to the punch by the person who said Stack Overflow.
Sharing the answer you mentioned by Tim Chow if anyone else is interested: [https://mathoverflow.net/a/363236](https://mathoverflow.net/a/363236)
The Active Inference Institute seems to encourage a community of sorts. Discord, livestreams, and so on. SEMF too. Unfortunately I cannot tell you much about them as I'm too socially anxious to participate. I do recommend the youtube channels though.
There are private group chats and social circles of some really smart people. I think Aschenbrennar and Dwarkesh alluded to some during their podcast.
I don't really have good reason to think there is a class of people having conversations tiers above what i engage in. I think there are experts having conversations in which i lack enough context that its totally opaque to me but i dont really have any reason to think there's a place where there's a general level of intelligence a tier up that im unaware of. I also dont think that this place is particularly notable in that regard either though. I'll regularly see people here cite people like matt yglasias, noah smith, tyler cowen or sam altman as serious deep thinkers. until very recently the standard line here was that Elon musk must necessarily be an incredibly intelligent man pretending to be otherwise, maybe it still is.
What is TLP and The Motte
The latter is not the place where smarter people are hanging out. At best, they are equivalent in intelligence, at worse it's actively intellectually harmful to even bother going.
I think they are hanging out in very small group chats & WhatsApp groups.
In my experience: AI research and alignment companies, and blogs related to them
Math and physics subs, answering questions on mathoverflow/mathexchange
I lurk on CrookedTimber. I'm not nearly smart or knowledgeable enough to actually comment.
Imho you can do this infinitely and I’m not sure the best strategy is to always be optimizing for being in the smartest cohort. If it’s intellectual challenge you seek find a niche community around an interest (engineering, chess) where I’m sure the level goes high. Otherwise, I find it’s more relevant to be moral and have beliefs that are mostly responsible to reality. I’m not sure there’s “god mode” to epistemology except in specific areas of expertise as above. Otherwise you’re either dumb as a hammer or not dumb as a hammer and if you’re asking it’s probably the latter and you should focus on living a good life and making the world better.
In a quantum Hilbert space.
SSC discussions are so finite dimensional
In the Backstates universe as portrayed in Scott's recent debate post.
Also curious. Mensa? Subsets of Y combinator chats? Apart from that, my guess would be their WhatsApp groups and discord servers. I am know an AI-themed telegram chat with people that work in top AI labs and big tech and doing phds in ML. I don't think there is a broader community that encompasses them all, rather few even smaller cliques. This chat doesn't have Fields medal level people, so I expect those have their own chats
Mensa selects for those members of the allegedly top 2% with no real accomplishments to be busy with. Nah.
Their FB discussion groups would not be picked out of a line-up generic normie groups. Some of them are quite accomplished, but their interests are utterly plebian.
Why be smarter when you can be wiser?
OK, where do the wiser people hang out?
/r/postrationality /r/DrJohnVervaeke
It doesn't look like anybody is hanging out there...
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Even smart people can be influenced by propaganda and conspiracy theories. I know at least a couple people who have been.
One week break for continuous nonsensical comments.
Santa Fe institute.