Disclosing one’s sexual orientation won’t be (mis)construed as a status grab in the same way as disclosing one’s (real or imagined) intellectual superiority. Perceived arguments from authority must be handled with supreme care, otherwise they invariably set the stage for a primate hierarchy contest. Minute details in phrasing can make all the difference: “I could engage with people much smarter than you, yet I choose to help you, since you probably need my help and my advice” versus “I made the following experiences, hopefully someone [impersonal, not triggering status comparisons] can benefit from them”. sigh, hoo-mans … I could laugh at them all day if I wasn’t one of them.
I’m happy to read your posts, but then I may be less picky about my cognitive diet than others. I mean, the alternative would be watching Hell’s Kitchen. You do beat Gordon Ramsay on the relevant metrics, by a large amount.
Then again, maybe I’m just a bit jealous of your idealism.
Then again, maybe I’m just a bit jealous of your idealism.
That’s the thing – it’s not zero sum! Other LWers can become thousands of times more intellectually sophisticated than they are. Some of them may have substantially more potential in principle than I have. Similarly for idealism.
We should have a culture of positive sum cooperation, where people are happy to have someone more who’s much more knowledgable around because they can benefit from it, rather than thinking in terms of “if they’re around than they have more status, so I have lower status, so it’s bad for me if they signal intellectual superiority.” If people had consistently adopted such attitudes throughout history, we would still be in the dark ages.
Disclosing one’s sexual orientation won’t be (mis)construed as a status grab in the same way as disclosing one’s (real or imagined) intellectual superiority. Perceived arguments from authority must be handled with supreme care, otherwise they invariably set the stage for a primate hierarchy contest. Minute details in phrasing can make all the difference: “I could engage with people much smarter than you, yet I choose to help you, since you probably need my help and my advice” versus “I made the following experiences, hopefully someone [impersonal, not triggering status comparisons] can benefit from them”. sigh, hoo-mans … I could laugh at them all day if I wasn’t one of them.
I’m happy to read your posts, but then I may be less picky about my cognitive diet than others. I mean, the alternative would be watching Hell’s Kitchen. You do beat Gordon Ramsay on the relevant metrics, by a large amount.
Then again, maybe I’m just a bit jealous of your idealism.
That’s the thing – it’s not zero sum! Other LWers can become thousands of times more intellectually sophisticated than they are. Some of them may have substantially more potential in principle than I have. Similarly for idealism.
We should have a culture of positive sum cooperation, where people are happy to have someone more who’s much more knowledgable around because they can benefit from it, rather than thinking in terms of “if they’re around than they have more status, so I have lower status, so it’s bad for me if they signal intellectual superiority.” If people had consistently adopted such attitudes throughout history, we would still be in the dark ages.