This doesn’t make sense as a reply…

How is your opinion on perceived emotional expressiveness even relevant to the prior comment ?

Huh that is a really good point. There are way too many people with US/UK backgrounds to easily differentiate between the expert pretenders and the really substantial experts. It’s even getting harder to do so on LW for many topics as karma becomes less and less meaningful.

And I can’t imagine the secretary general’s office will have that much time to scrutinize each proposed candidate, so it might even be a positive thing overall.

This seems like an odd concern… if you take a walk around Stanford campus on a typical weekday you’ll almost certainly pass a few people much smarter than you likely were, or ever will ever be, at the same age, in every possible way I can think of. And that applies to nearly everyone on LW, yes even Yudowsky.

And clearly there’s no mass demotivation as plenty of smart people, but not literal super genius smart, continue walking around Stanford? (which after all must make up the bulk of the student population)

Honestly, this kind of response doesn’t make sense and is likely to produce the opposite effect, so I’ll try to put it as straightforwardly as possible. 

Maybe it works in a perfect ideal world where everyone who touched the text is 100% trustworthy, 100% of the time.

But in the real world where clearly that’s not the case… and everyone shown in the author list has had ulterior motives at least once in their past, there’s simply no way for a passing reader to be sure there weren’t also ulterior motives in this instance. 

Of course they can’t prove a negative either… but that’s the inherent nature of making claims without having completely solid proof.

Considering all groups to at least have an incipient potential of cult formation seems sensible?

It might not literally be a point of “cultishness” on a scale out of 10, but on a scale out of 100 that seems more sensible. It is true after all the risk can never be reduced to perfectly zero as long as the group exists. 

I can’t think of any exceptions either…

This seems a bit tautological… since roughly half the population is below average in virtue, and will engage in all sorts of bad behavior if they think they can get away with it. Partly because we define good and bad relative to the population average.

And for most of the rest, strong enough incentives can induce them to behave the same, it happens even on this very forum, so when combined that’s most people already.