I think the central claim is true in some fields and not particularly true in others. But one variation of the claim that interests me is, if we consider memeticity relative to public opinions/awareness, then I agree with this more strongly, where the opinions of median researchers are disproportionately more popular than more correct opinions. In some sense, I think the “most correct opinions” are basically never the most popular to the public, though perhaps I wouldn’t invoke the median researcher problem to explain this edge case, but a more specific hypothesis instead.
I mostly disagree with the final paragraph about LW. To me it seems that 1) opinions on LW are quite diverse 2) LW opinions are quite plausibly worse than average in some fields, e.g. mental health, and 3) there’s very little evidence to suggest that high intelligence leads to correct/rational opinions in the context of complicated beliefs about the world; people with high IQ are just as susceptible to converging on “easily disprovable” opinions, often they’re just better at deceiving themselves and others using rationalization.
I think the central claim is true in some fields and not particularly true in others. But one variation of the claim that interests me is, if we consider memeticity relative to public opinions/awareness, then I agree with this more strongly, where the opinions of median researchers are disproportionately more popular than more correct opinions. In some sense, I think the “most correct opinions” are basically never the most popular to the public, though perhaps I wouldn’t invoke the median researcher problem to explain this edge case, but a more specific hypothesis instead.
I mostly disagree with the final paragraph about LW. To me it seems that 1) opinions on LW are quite diverse 2) LW opinions are quite plausibly worse than average in some fields, e.g. mental health, and 3) there’s very little evidence to suggest that high intelligence leads to correct/rational opinions in the context of complicated beliefs about the world; people with high IQ are just as susceptible to converging on “easily disprovable” opinions, often they’re just better at deceiving themselves and others using rationalization.