The most important fact about the broad rationality/postrationality community is that almost everyone in it is in the top 1% in intelligence. The biggest blind spot of this community is forgetting to account for this because it's awkward to speak about it.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pJJdcZgB6mPNWoSWr/2013-survey-results https://twitter.com/goblinodds/status/1379493380539871234

The gap between the average LessWrong reader (139) and the average college professor (115) is larger than the gap between the average professor and the average janitor (92).

I don't think it's virtuous for high IQ people to say that "everyone knows IQ is fake". 130+ drastically lowers the difficulty setting on life in ways you're often unaware of, like not being constantly targeted by scams, or being able to articulate your thoughts into tweets.

It's a *privilege*, and one that's IMHO best taken also as an *obligation*. At the very least, an obligation not to make yourself dumb on purpose, not to surrender your thinking faculties to a mob or an egregore that's dumber and less ethical.

Nitpicking why those numbers could be off (by how much? would it matter to the argument?) and then happily going back to imagining that this gap doesn't exist and that all people are just two blog posts away from understanding and sharing our beliefs is being dumb on purpose.

P.S.

It's good and fine for people 𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 the community to mock these numbers and treat them as a weird status claim (it's not, but whatevs). It's not good for people in the community who have much more evidence than just one survey number to be willfully blind to this.

A thread of Eigen poasting his monster IQ. https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1379941295544705024

None of the above is to imply that IQ is or should be a test for entry. No one checks your SAT at the door. If you enjoy reading our stuff, it's for you. If you'd enjoy writing, you should. But "enjoying this" selects for people who are significant outliers on some traits.