How does having a high IQ means someone is out-of-touch?
Yes, people can argue that LW is a bunch of nerds, but I don’t think that’s much of a problem. If we get a newsarticles about how smart nerds think that unfriendly AI is a big risk for humanity, I don’t think the fact that those smart nerds think that they are high IQ is a problem.
It’s different for arguing criminality or for arguing being delusional because of drug use.
There is a stereotype—at least in the United States—of nerds believing that high intelligence entitles them to claim insight and moral purity beyond their actual abilities, and implicitly of their inevitable downfall and the triumph of good old-fashioned common sense. We risk pattern-matching to this stereotype in any case, thanks to bandying about unusual ethical considerations in academic language, but talking up our own intelligence doesn’t help at all.
It isn’t having high IQ, in other words, so much as talking about it.
We risk pattern-matching to this stereotype in any case
I can’t see how you could structure LW in a way that someone who wants to talk about LW as a bunch of nerds can’t do so.
You don’t need a statistic about the average IQ of LW to do so. Gathering the IQ data doesn’t bring up anything that wasn’t there before.
The basilisk episode is a lot more useful if you want to argue that LW is a group of out of touch nerds. See rationalwiki.
It makes it easy to portray LW as a bunch of out-of-touch nerds?
“I’m part of a community, you live in a bubble, he’s out of touch.”
How does having a high IQ means someone is out-of-touch?
Yes, people can argue that LW is a bunch of nerds, but I don’t think that’s much of a problem. If we get a newsarticles about how smart nerds think that unfriendly AI is a big risk for humanity, I don’t think the fact that those smart nerds think that they are high IQ is a problem.
It’s different for arguing criminality or for arguing being delusional because of drug use.
There is a stereotype—at least in the United States—of nerds believing that high intelligence entitles them to claim insight and moral purity beyond their actual abilities, and implicitly of their inevitable downfall and the triumph of good old-fashioned common sense. We risk pattern-matching to this stereotype in any case, thanks to bandying about unusual ethical considerations in academic language, but talking up our own intelligence doesn’t help at all.
It isn’t having high IQ, in other words, so much as talking about it.
I can’t see how you could structure LW in a way that someone who wants to talk about LW as a bunch of nerds can’t do so. You don’t need a statistic about the average IQ of LW to do so. Gathering the IQ data doesn’t bring up anything that wasn’t there before.
The basilisk episode is a lot more useful if you want to argue that LW is a group of out of touch nerds. See rationalwiki.