There was likely a midwit-meme effect going on at the philosophy meetup, where, in order to distinguish themselves from the stereotypical sports-bar-goers, the attendees were forming their beliefs in ways that would never occur to a true "normie." You might have a better experience interacting with "common people" in a setting where they aren't self-selected for trying to demonstrate sophistication.
a lot of commenters are telling me that despite being the tiniest baby tree frog i should hit up a sports bar instead.
a few things
- the reason I found myself at the philosophy meetup is because I am bad at most forms of normie social interaction and I have no clue how to break into a conversation anywhere else.
- I agree that public philosophy meetups attract midwits, but I do think it's genuinely problematic if one cannot interact with university educated midwits without turning evil
- I also think there's less countersignalling at the meetup than most people are assuming; it was actually quite granolaish in nature and people were trying to earnestly resolve questions around evolving social norms and applying their own life experiences in order to do so. people were vulnerable and forthright. they just also sucked ass at reasoning
Maybe you should try an anime convention or Comic-Con instead? (Assuming you have any interest in geeky entertainment topics...)
But yeah, having an experience akin to being a world class musician listening to a middle school band and cringing at how bad they sounded must not have been pleasant.
not a bad instinct, the only non-rationalist non-work convention i went to last year was dashcon 2, and that was great. still suffered some amount of psychic damage from the requisite amount of code switching and ambient poor epistemic hygiene, but there was enough novelty on offer to make up for it, and i ended up finding some really interesting folks to hang out with :)
it's not a pure solution in that what i'd like to do is to increase the % of people i feel like i can talk to, and so being like "oh yeah and at this several hundred person convention i found one or two people i click with" is like... sort of consolation prize shaped?
I think most people have trouble finding people at conventions they can click with, at least for longer than a few minutes, simply because of how hectic and overwhelming things can get...
I enjoyed reading this post. But I feel like you are making a mistake by being too manichaean about this. You talk as if your soul is split in two, with an evil "edgelord" half battling a good "raised by tumblr SJW" half. You think of yourself as fighting a doomed rearguard battle to defend the tumblr SJW values of "equality and social justice" against an encroaching army of elitist, misanthropic sentiment.
To me this feels bizarre -- you're writing your "bottom line" first (ie that tumblr SJW ethics and tumblr SJW like... tone of how it's acceptable to talk about people... are correct) (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line), then putting yourself into contortions (imagining two inner personalities, using "arguments as soldiers", etc) to maintain your belief in this bottom line.
It feels kind of like a socialist learning more about economics and being like "no!! if I start believing that markets and price signals are often the best way to distribute scarce resources, i'll become the same kind of callous, selfish evildoer I've sworn to destroy!!". Wheras instead they should probably just keep learning about economics, and remain a good person by combining their new economics knowledge with their preexisting moral ideas about making the world a better and fairer place for everyone (perhaps by becoming a georgist, an Abundance dem, a pigouvian-taxation guy, or whatever).
If I were you, I would simply accept that it's possible to be very elitist (believing that some people are smarter than others, better than others, even more morally valuable than others) without necessarily transforming into an evil "edgelord" misanthrope. I myself am pretty elitist in various ways, am sort of introverted and arrogant similar to how you describe yourself, etc -- but I still consider myself to really love humanity, I work for effective altruist organizations, I often enjoy hanging out with normies, etc. In fact one of the things I find inspiring about EA is its emphasis that being a good person isn't about having your heartstrings pulled all the time and being really emotionally empathetic (i'm just not a very emotional kind of guy, and previously I thought this somehow made me a bad person!), rather it's about working hard to improve the world, taking ideas seriously, actually acting on your moral beliefs, etc.
Then, instead of fighting a cartoony battle to stop yourself from believing in elitism and thereby becoming elitist "edgelord" (which, you imagine, would turn you evil and be a betrayal of all that is good), you could just neutrally explore what's actually true about the external world (how much do people vary in their abilities? are you just being self-servingly arrogant, or mistakenly shy and insular, to think there's no value in hanging out with normies, or is this actually correct? is "elite persuasion" generally a better way of influencing politics than mass activism? etc etc) without weirdly tying the outcome to a sense of whether you yourself are good or evil.
For some examples of people who are elitist in various ways but who still seem to have much empathy and goodness, and you want further examples beyond "practically the entire EA & rationalist community", you can consider the philosophies of Richard Hannania and Matthew Yglesias as described here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean
Sorry if some of this comment was harsh, it kind of paints an exaggerated picture for dramatic/pedagogical effect and for brevity. The theme of the post is grumpy misanthropy so I figured this would be acceptable! :P
thank you for your comment! i agree that it would be bad to write the bottom line first when it comes to epistemics. that's essentially what i tried to do with the cope and that evidently didn't work.
however, i do feel like there is a misrepresentation of what is actually going on in the post somewhat, which i am happy to take the blame for as an artifact of my writing being unclear. your comment frames this as an epistemic problem, but i am not fighting a cartoony battle to stop myself from believing in elitism, that ship has long sailed.
i'm trying to figure out what to do about the contempt. it turns out that when i am around people i find intellectually unserious, i deny them personhood and i act in an incredibly shitty way. my worldview says this is bad and i am sure you agree; my nervous system becomes suffused with hatred and does it anyway.
this feels like a different breed of problem.
It's interesting that you say you're bad at normie conversation and socializing, and yet, once you decided you couldn't take the people at that meetup seriously, you became the life of the party!
it turns out that when i am around people i find intellectually unserious, i deny them personhood and i act in an incredibly shitty way.
Dogs are intellectually unserious, yet many people love them, and "talk" to them on their level.
(But me, I don't like dogs and keep away from them.)
Most people interested in philosophy are in the valley of bad x for philosophy and are trying to climb out the other side. Unfortunately the people they talk to about it tend to also be in the valley.
We have an intense desire to feel superior. Those blessed with intellect should have some noblesse oblige. To despise those who lack your genetic and mimetic gifts lacks grace. It is their very inferiority that provides you with the pleasure of feeling superior. Schopenhauer decries the Malthusian ocean he floated atop of, the people that let him live his life of the mind. What a dick.
so, i broadly agree with this, which is why i tried to leave the walled garden in the first place. the question i am trying to answer now is, what happens when trying to do this makes you worse?
to whatever extent i feel pleasurable superiority, it's not really enough to remotely make up for the fact that i feel like i genuinely cannot connect with most people in the ways that i would like to.
1Can empathize with a lot here, but strikes me:
If you go to what is quasi the incarnation of the place where low IQ makes us fail - PHILOSOPHY group - no wonder you end up appalled :-). Maybe next time you go to a pub or anywhere else and despite even lower IQ persons, they may be more insightful or interesting as their discussions are ones that benefit from a broader spectrum of things than sheer core IQ.
1Nicely written and self-aware, thanks for sharing. I recommend getting drunk at a bar! (Not a sports bar. You wouldn't have much to talk about. I recommend taking a mixed-gender group of friends and deliberately mingling with other such groups, trying your best to Get To Know Folks.) You were doing the sandcastle thing.
okay, i have questions. i go to nice cocktail places with friends sometimes and i have never seen people mingle with other groups, or attempt to really do so myself, except with particularly chatty bartenders.
- what sort of bars are good for this?
- do you just tell your friends that you are going to a bar with the deliberate intention of mingling with other groups at the bar? are most people game for that? how many friends should you take?
- at the bar, how do you know which groups of people are open to talking to another group and which groups are not?
- isn't it awkward if it turns out you don't like the other group?
- isn't it awkward if you are just making the rounds, speaking to one group after another?
- how do you even talk and get to know people when the music is so loud?
love how game you are. and admittedly it differs regionally, but this can / should / does work. you haven't seen people mingle with others because (i'm guessing) it's hard to tell when "two groups are mingling" in a way that's distinct from a single group hanging out. (also in fact people do this MUCH less than they used to, but they're not much less open to it.)
i recommend college or post-college bars, followed by mixed-gender dive bars. or basement shows / unofficial bars. cocktail places are probably bad for this, they are real into Adult Alienation TM. fanciness is generally a barrier. the minglability can be roughly sussed out from the alcohol:
punch (caution!!) > seltzers and cheap beer > craft beers, whiskeys, and applebees-tier cocktails > cocktails > wine
but ensure that the bar has quiet and also has loud. that's the most important part. the presence of darts, pool, or food also helps give "handles" for conversation.
as for whom to bring and who is game for this... hard to say. varies by friends. the cost of asking is zero, though. (if you have friends who make the cost of asking nonzero, you have exhausting friends!) but yeah, if you have rat-y, great books-y friends, tell them "i am explicitly gonna go try to talk to folks at bars, as i think i'm missing something about the world. we'll get smashing drunk. it'll be great." and if they are not into that... well, try alone, i guess? also get some more adventuresome friends!
similarly, the cost of asking people who Aren't About It is zero. such folks are, in bars and high drunkenness, really rare! most folks are friendly! (in my experience, which is Virginia, NJ and NYC.) Do not underestimate the lubricant effect of alcohol. but also, if you don't like the other group, it is SO EASY to take advantage of noise, getting something from the bar, etc., to detach.
if you're just making the rounds, speaking to one group after another... this is unlikely, but also, NOBODY IS WATCHING. it is so hard to keep tabs on strangers in a bar, even if you're trying!
and how do you talk and get to know people when the music is so loud---go somewhere loud-ish---such that folks are forced to speak up and perhaps articulate more---but not somewhere that's so loud it's "clearly for dancing." (it is possible to have incredibly compressed shouted conversations, but they're not very rewarding most of the time.)
GENERAL PRINCIPLES: men are easier to approach than women. people afford you more social latitude if you're drunk and if they're drunk. to a first approximation, nobody is paying attention to you unless you talk to them. and everyone loves to talk about themselves.
if you live in NYC, New Haven, or Princeton, hit me up and i am happy to take you. EDIT: nvm I see you're Toronting atm. I cannot speak to Canadians' dispositions, but surely the politeness helps!
thank you for going into so much detail, i appreciate it! will triangulate some bars that fit this profile and try to organize a pub crawl or something 🫡
2I think the meta-point is that these are great questions, and are reasons that going to a bar and chatting people up is actually a high skill activity with a fairly high bar (ahem) to clear. Most activities attended by most people most of the time are either gated behind such skill checks or invitation only. A recurring philosophy meetup carefully engineered to have no such bar is actually a super specific and rare thing. If you kept considering events, and then rejecting them based on the sorts of questions listed here (i.e. they seemed intimidating or hard) until you came across an event which raised no such issues, that seems like it should lead rather reliably to out of distribution results.
yeah, i might acclimatize to worse waters faster if i i'm not in the habit of rolling my own weekly rationality meetups which are precisely the social environment that i enjoy most.
but as mentioned in a prev comment, if the end result of that is me turning evil when i try to interact with normal folks, that seems worth trying to address.
(uh, flagging that i'm not entirely following the thesis of your comment, but i'm responding to the last line of it.)
And most people, including intelligent, educated ones, simply don't value holding true beliefs, not intrinsically. They might care about it in the way they care about reducing third world poverty rates or factory farming; they'll pay lip service but they'll hardly sacrifice anything about their current lifestyles to have more of it.
Except that they do likely value true beliefs at least on a subset of questions. For example, were you to encounter an engineer or another person who engages with easily verifiable questions, verification of questions related to the person's area of expertise would be useful in order to, say, prevent a friend from making a high-stakes mistake or to lower a rival's status for making such a mistake. Hard-to-verify questions like politics, management or philosophy had rationalists describe problems causing the humans to fail to learn behaving rationally.
I think that your confusions could be reframed as follows. The humans aren't born awakened to reasoning in rational ways, they reach the state by, for example, reading Yudkowsky's texts, practicing to think rationally, etc. However, most people can be awakened to reason in these ways during making important decisions (e.g. this might happen naturally in their expertise areas) and do vibes-based reasoning in other contexts. On the other hand, there exist antipatterns like the ones which you describe above (e.g. filtering conjectures for being harmful to minorities) and which could deserve being hunted down.
You mention a few; fwiw some additional things that occasionally increase my empathy to whom I consider of lower abstract intelligence:
- On a large scale from 0 to max imaginable intelligence (whatever that would be), (i) how super dumb am I generally, even if I consider myself to be rather intelligent compared to many; (ii) how super dumb am I with quite some regularity on even the most simple practical things I had not been thinking about before.
- Fuzzy cloud of half-answers to these types of questions: How many people are intelligent but not really kind? I have the impression many. How many are lovely even if not super IQ-smart? I think quite many (well 'lovely' is a subjective feeling but some I know I judge definitely like that). How systematically do intelligent people use their superiority for negative-sum outsmarting-games that destroy society rather than to improve it? Is it even so so obvious society would be better if we had more smart people? Maybe empirically that's on net a clear enough yes still, but in the end, that's still not an entirely trivial question, also if we think how in a few years humans may have disappeared because of the most ingenious ones among us.
- Dumb but lovely cat?: Intuitively I don't like the cat of our family less just because he is absolutely low-IQ - even when compared to random other cats I think. Also this doesn't proof anything, but I think somehow this reminder does help me remember that the better of myself is less judgemental.
- Abstract thinking intelligence and other practical intelligences when dealing with the basic physical world, are not always going 1:1 according to my experience. Some people who could not easily articulate or debunk philosophical arguments are in my experience actually quite smart in many somewhat mundane things that I'm not sure all higher IQ persons are; so as high-IQers one should feel even more lucky to be living in the era that rewards just that particular type of smartness.
There's severe evaporative cooling any group that allows randos to show up and participate, which doesn't make them bad events, but means they are not really a representative slice of the population. On the topic of famous philosophers, this is a topic where Marx said it better than I ever could: "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."
In London where I live, philosophy meet-up groups are much better than this. A broader mix of people - few have philosophy degrees, few know any formal philosophy, some have no university degree, very many recent immigrants, though admittedly almost everyone is middle class. Always good conversations, with decent reasoning, including people taking contrary and controversial stances, but always respectfully discussed and never any heatedness or apparent wokeness. Discussions in groups of 4-6 people work best. (The main bad dynamic is if you get someone who talks too much and dominates a conversation.)
Half joking: Weak edgelord who can't edgelord them into better reasoning yet. What, have you given up the challenge? When will you become able to make anyone reason clearly merely by standing in front of them and saying a few well placed words? see also
I regularly go to low key meetups at the bar and can ask leading questions in ways that can guide people in weird tribal or wishful thinking reasoning patterns to think more carefully. I've tuned my way of communicating over a long period to be able to get through to someone who doesn't want to move from their views. You've got me thinking about how to compress it for sharing, I have a big ol pile of carefully social intuitions, pedagogy habits, fragments of therapy skill, active listening.
A book recommendations, since apparently you can read books, something I'm pretty bad at: several people have described the skills from "escaping the rabbit hole (mick west)" and those are something I rely on heavily when talking to people I think are very wrong. The short version is, active listening, ask them questions, give them respect for trying but don't assume they're right, just keep asking them to clarify basically. I would have other book recs if I remembered which other books describe relevant things.
edit: guessed strong downvote was due to image, so I removed it
So, are you turning into Linus Van Pelt, who said that he loved humanity - it was people he couldn't stand?
When I'm talking in person, I'm much, much worse at expressing myself precisely and handling sophisticated ideas - and objecting to stupid ones - than when I have all the time in the world to write something and post it online. :/
So, I broadly agree with all of this.
But also, I think you might find the people at the sports bar less contemptible. Most people are not trying to play an intellectual game or pretending to play an intellectual game. They're just hanging out, and doing human social things, and having fun. Their "beliefs" are mostly just not very relevant to anything, including themselves, most of the time.
Personally, I happen to also find a lot of that kind of lame, but also a lot of it has value on its own terms.
1There's a legitimate frame, or standard, by which it is good. It's part of what's cool and interesting or meaningful in the world.
(This is in contrast to some activities (like the poor epistemic practices described in this post), for which there is also a frame by which they're evaluated as good—but that I contest that frame.)
Regarding traits you love – maybe you are looking for something like intellectual humility? I think it can naturally follow from kindness and cooperativeness, but is often necessary for me to respect an intelligent person.
It also seems like a core principle of this community, where as some say, "we gain status by pointing out where others haven't been careful or skeptical enough in their thinking."
I sometimes worry that my ability to perceive social status isn't calibrated well. I wonder if you might be experiencing that? They may have been patting you on the back for your cool questions rather than your jokes, but you completely missed it.
Also, there might be some selection effects on who shows up to philosophy meetups, such that their net total epistemics are worse than a randomly selected sample of people from the general population. To spitball a low confidence explanation - maybe they're high in openmindedness, but haven't developed an epistemic toolkit suited for dealing with that? So they do worse than more average closed-minded people in forming good beliefs? But honestly, I don't like thinking this way very much. It's not very charitable, and I wouldn't want to say that to the faces of people I'm judging this way.
I guess if it were me, I would worry that maybe I was Just Wrong and I failed to engage with the social reality correctly? Like there was a layer or signal that I completely missed? A while back I read an essay about how neurotypical people differ from ASD people about their relationship to the Truth, and it's stuck with me. It could be just that: they relate to Truth differently.
It seems that your goal is essentially to find compassion for those with a different value set than yours, and that the confounding element is that other value structures (e.g., truth vs. utility vs. tradition, etc.) often don't support each other. Is that on target?
It's worth recognizing that any set of guiding principles is essentially arbitrary if you inspect them deeply enough. What Schopenhauer calls apathy and hedonism, another might call "the human experience." While I value the ability to introspect and think abstractly, I take issue with Schopenhauer's disdain for 'dumb' entertainment: if my longing for higher understanding leaves me, and only me, miserable, is that really a moral victory? Depends on what your morals are. This is reflected in your writing that people "simply don't [intrinsically] value holding true beliefs." I would argue that this is because many truths are existentially painful, so much so that it requires much active cognitive effort to overcome our psychological disposition and place value on these truths.
In your writing, your own disdain for others makes you uncomfortable. If I were in your place, I would try to figure out why the uncomfortable feeling occurs, why the disdain occurs (beyond 'they don't think hard enough,' and into 'why do I value this over that'), and see if there's an internally consistent framework that squares the two.
I am trying to write an anecdote as an example, but am struggling to make it coherent. So, let me know if this resonates and I'll try a bit harder :^ )
I don't know if your experience is similar to mine, but it might be:
When people say things that are stupid, it feels a bit like a personal attack on me and my existence. This made me pretty mad and defensive (truthfully it sometimes still does, but less so). But I realized that the problem is neither their lacking intelligence / our shared values nor my elitism, but contempt as a defense mechanism. "Their words can't hurt me if I fundamentally dont respect them."
Catching myself in these moments of me getting mad and reexamining to (re)realize that im not actually actively threatend helped a lot to handle such situations with grace and conspicuosly improved me respecting them as human beings as well.
I was going to write a post called "Deep Misanthropy" earlier this year, about roughly this phenomenon. After some thought I concluded that "You dislike x% of other people." Is a consistent way the the world can be for all values of x between 0 and 100, inclusive.
All I can say is:
2
For the past year I've been sinking into the Great Books via the Penguin Great Ideas series, because I wanted to be conversant in the Great Conversation. I am occasionally frustrated by this endeavour, but overall, it's been fun! I'm learning a lot about my civilization and the various curmudgeons who shaped it.
But one dismaying side effect is that it's also been quite empowering for my inner 13 year old edgelord. Did you know that before we invented woke, you were just allowed to be openly contemptuous of people?
Here's Schopenhauer on the common man:
And Freud on why he's skeptical about this "universal love" thing:
After being raised by SJW tumblr, reading this was unbelievably exhilarating. My inner edgelord wanted it to be injected directly into her veins. I hold a lot of affection for my inner edgelord, don't get me wrong. But I am also often kind of mortified by her and would like her to be holding the reins like 5% of the time vis a vis my intellectual development, when it's currently more like 20% of the time? Social justice and egalitarianism are values that are dear to (the other 80% of) me, and as I read more of these texts I felt my heart hardening in a misanthropic and elitist direction that was ego-dystonic.
So a few months into reading Freud and Schopenhauer and Tolstoy and Nietzsche, I decided that I should... probably... do something about that? I pondered how to proceed. I assessed my intellectual life, where I was organizing weekly rationality meetups, almost exclusively socializing with people who either had university degrees or were putting out certified bangers on tumblr, and literally reading my way through the great books. And then I had probably the dumbest thought I've had in all of 2025: "maybe getting more in touch with the common man would fix me, since surely that would prove Schopenhauer wrong."
So I went to a couple of casual philosophy events based in Toronto, ran by a group I had passing familiarity with. These are low-barrier events for everyday people to engage with philosophical questions, and... okay, admittedly there were some real clown emoji things about this:
But you know what? I was also very aware how much of a delicate baby I am when it comes to community cultures that I find tolerable. I am like one of those tree frog species that lives exclusively within a backyard-sized patch in the amazon rainforest, and I will be killed by like, the subtle change in microbiota if I step a toe outside it. There is nothing to be gained by yeeting me directly into a sports bar, is what I'm saying. Because of the microbiota.
So I go to the philosophy meetup, which is meant to be accessible to the community at large, but in practice... yeah, it's of course not a random sample, it's the kind of people that you expect that show up: grad students who are ambiguously queer, urbane retirees in summer knits and pearls and designer sunglasses, Iranian Uber drivers with PhDs from back home, twitter reply guys. Which is!!! I mean!!! You cannot exactly describe this group of people as bottom of the barrel, intellect-wise, yeah?
Which makes it all the more horrifying how utterly rancid the level of discourse was, at the meetup. I can't fault the organizers for this; they were doing the thing they said they were going to do, which is to create a space where everyone felt comfortable contributing to the discussion, regardless of how much background they had in philosophy.
This is a wonderful mission and I am genuinely very glad that there are organizers who are facilitating this sort of event. This just, incidentally, happened to create a space that plunged this delicate baby tree frog into a spiritual Antarctica, as I was forced to come to terms the gigantic inferential chasm between the rationalist communities' intellectual norms and the way that the not-even-that-common-men did things.
There was a feeling of quiet, growing horror as I realized that people were capable of press-ganging literally any word into acting like a thought terminating cliche. If norms rot away that's just entropy (which is natural and thus good); if things are "subjective" and not "objective" we just have to let it stand (my timid request to define these terms when we were discussing social conventions, of all things, was summarily ignored); one group I was in hummed appreciatively at the claim that a hypothetical was "hurtful" but not "harmful" and I wondered if I had died and gone to hell without realizing.
I had forgotten how stress testing for claims' counterexamples or edge cases was "playing the devil's advocate", a deeply anti-social action one did not take in polite society without a whole fucking ritual of contrition and apology. No one was running any claims that they were making through the least convenient world filter; people were just making all sorts of claims with their mouths, which I was slowly starting to understand were connected to their asses instead of their brain stems, and to my dismay I felt my free speech absolutism also beginning to circle the drain.
I started thinking: I wasn't asking for full academic rigor, but if none of the other people at that discussion group were at all interested in being critical about the thoughts that were passing through their own brain in any way[1], then that's... like... sort of contemptible, isn't it?
By the way, if at this point you're like "wow, Jenn's sort of being an elitist bitch here", well, yeah. This was sort of the entire problem that I was here bunglingly trying to solve. But instead of getting fixed, over the course of two hours that night, I Got Worse. I completely stopped seeing the other participants as people with anything potentially useful to teach me, and instead started seeing them as NPCs to manipulate for fun. For the second half of the night, I locked in on a one-player mini-game where I attempted to say the most controversial thing I can that would elicit laughter instead of weird looks. I generated a lot of the first and very little of the second, because I am good at this game. And to my disgust, while I felt my status diminish bit by bit when I was trying to establish better discourse norms, it began to rise sharply as I made people laugh. Many people came up to me afterwards to tell me how much they enjoyed my contributions. They were referring to my edgy jokes, of course, and not anything that happened while I still held any amount of respect for them.
I thanked them and made light conversation and had a beer with the organizers afterwards where we talked shop about community building. Then I went home and bawled my eyes out because Schopenhauer was right, and I didn't want him to be, but I turned evil and degraded when I tried to socialize with the common men[2], so what the fuck do I do now?
It became clear to me that whatever my issue is, more contact with people outside the community is not the answer; each interaction would only lead to a greater sense of alienation and contempt for people outside the walled garden, which was the opposite of what I wanted.
What a fucked up cosmic joke?? I attempted to fix a flaw I saw in myself, and somehow this led me to a strange door where I had to sacrifice either my intellectual integrity or my sense of egalitarianism to pass through. That's not the way this usually goes in books![3]
For a while, I tried to square the circle with some abstruse cope. I thought my way into the problem, perhaps I can think my way out of it?
First, I thought about my own positionality and luck. I fell into the community I have now by happenstance (counting my contrarian temperament and wordcel nature as happenstance), and this community is deliberate in rewarding rigorous thinking. And after you marinate in this community for a bit, you will just absorb the epistemic norms and wisdom without much effort on your part, so it's not like I did anything special.
So instead of feeling contempt, perhaps I can instead feel a sense of sorrow: no, the other people are not inferior, and it is not their fault that they were not brought up or brought into communities like this. If the people who showed up to that discussion didn't have years of experience engaging with ideas in a more rigorous way, of course they are going to bad at it. This sort of thing takes practice, and I am lucky to be in a community that cultivated it in me.
Second, I "remembered" the reason that I loved my species. Why, of course intelligence was never a part of it; it was that the best of us are brave and kind, and the way we cooperate in the face of disaster. Sure, some humans are incredibly clever, and that was certainly a good trait to have. But I tried to make myself believe it was certainly not a core reason that I liked my species. My mind helpfully recalled takes I've consistently held to "prove" to myself that this has always been the case. For example, I had a conversation with some other rationalists some years ago where I argued that since intelligence is a symmetric weapon, if we could genetically engineer humans to increase one trait across the population, it should be kindness or cooperativeness instead of IQ. So I'm consistent! Nothing to see here. And obviously, one can like their species for one reason, and have a differing set of preferences for what traits one would like in their friends and their extended social circle.
Third, I tried to take an outside view of what was happening, and tried to find the humour in it. Imagine if I was some sort of world champion sandcastle builder, and one lovely summer day I decided to go build some sandcastles on a random beach for fun. Then imagine that I was driven to tears and deep existential despair, because the noob ass sandcastles the toddlers were making around me were just so fucking trash tier and I couldn't bear it. Of course that sandcastle champion would definitely deserve to be clowned on.
Sadly, those conclusions fell apart when I tried to write this essay for the first time, which required me to examine them in any amount of detail to get them down on paper. Intelligence is important to me and it's important for the lightcone, and while comparing it to other positive traits is useful to some extent, to try to trivialize it into nothingness or to pretend that it is an unmarked one of many is dishonest.
And most people, including intelligent, educated ones, simply don't value holding true beliefs, not intrinsically. They might care about it in the way they care about reducing third world poverty rates or factory farming; they'll pay lip service but they'll hardly sacrifice anything about their current lifestyles to have more of it. It's possible that you, the person reading this, do not value holding true beliefs intrinsically, and you see it as silly and quixotic that I would sacrifice things to have more of it. I can accept this. But I think we would both agree that to paper this over as a training gap would insult both your intelligence and mine.
Of course it was all cope; that's what happens when you grasp for conclusions to lessen the amount of pain you are in; you become unusually suspect to motivated reasoning.
So instead I am just sort of... here. The world didn't end just because I couldn't resolve the contradiction, and it's just going to hang out with me for a while. I like people on some days and dislike them on others. I read Virginia Woolf and am slammed with ardent anti-imperialist feelings and then I read J. S. Mill and I calm down a bit. I run my own little meetups in that little backyard-sized patch of rainforest, occasionally collaborating with people in patches that are not too far away. I try to get better at asking people questions in the intersection of what is interesting to me and what makes them feel seen and valued as individuals.
Maybe I'll resolve this at some point, but I don't think it makes sense to rush it. Difficult things take time.
This was not precisely true. Some were definitely running all their thoughts through a filter of "were these claims potentially problematic or exclusionary to minority groups?" This is a fine filter, I just wish there were other filters being used too.
Actually, it was worse than that. I was trying to prove to myself that the dead white aristocrats weren't correct about their peasant stock, but I felt backed into a corner by coming into contact with other members of the petit bourgeois 🤡
Well, at least not for protagonists, but I suppose I can't rule out the possibility that I'm here as some sort of scintillatingly flawed side character that's going to get their thematically appropriate comeuppance in like 7 chapters' time.