When someone is smarter than you, you cannot tell if they’re one level above you or fifty because you literally cannot comprehend their reasoning.
I take issue with this claim, as I believe it to be vastly oversimplified. You can often, if not always, still comprehend their reasoning with additional effort on your behalf. By analogy, a device capable of performing 10 FLOPS can check the calculation of a device that can perform 10 GFLOPS by taking an additional 10^9 factor of time. Even in cases of extreme differences in ability, I think there can be simple methodologies for evaluating at levels above your own, though admitted it can quickly become infeasible for sufficiently large differences. That said, in my experience I think that I’ve been able to evaluate up to probably 2-3 std deviations of g above my own. That said, I admittedly haven’t taken the effort/social cost of asking these individuals their IQ as a proxy to semireliably validate my predictions.
What is the correct amount of self praise? Do you have reasons to believe Isusr has made an incorrect evaluation regarding their aptitude? Do you believe that even if the evaluation is correct that the post is still harmful?
I find it quite reasonable that the LessWrong community could benefit from more praise, self or otherwise. I don’t have strong signals as to the aptitude of Isusr other than having read some fraction of their posts.
I worry your response comes as an automatic social defense mechanism as opposed to reflecting “real” beliefs and would like to understand what many upvoters find the issue to be.