Found it, at least where I heard it, but not the original. It is from Daniel Kokotajlo’s appearance on “Win-Win,” linked below. Go to minute 36. It is all third-hand tweet recollection. What he has to say about Leopold Aschenbrenner intentionally trying to concoct a self-fulfilling prophesy is actually pretty interesting, at minute 32 ish.
I think the piece is better with it edited out, just the same.
“I turned evil and degraded when I tried to socialize with the common men”[2]
I don’t think that this sentence can be thought of as true, honest, or even candid. If I am to believe that your goal was to have discourse, perhaps even intelligent, with common men, then you would have had to put yourself in a conversation space that at least came close to how you described. Instead you put yourself into a group of elites, as defined by you, and expected them to stand in as a proxy for common men. You never believed the premise, and even admitted as much, so why should the reader?
The best answer that I can come up with on my own is that this is all self-effacing satire. If so, I’ll give you a middle B grade. You got me, took you seriously, well done. But the way you have chosen to make the joke on you, in actuality just makes the joke ever more so on the—as yet un-met—common man.
Still, I can sympathize and empathize. There are dum-dums all around us. There are immoral goons, amoral asses and folks who are just plain rude. Just makes it that much more wonderful when I find someone who isn’t.
If you turned evil and degraded, that’s on you, don’t blame it on the absent common man. When you run the experiment again with an actual common man present, let us know if your results differ. Then try it again. My data-set for meeting decent and intelligent people—common or otherwise—is pretty robust. Replicate!