The Evaporative Cooling Effect

Last time this was posted <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665>, Eliezer linked to a related article worth reading as well: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/

I was hoping for some thermodynamics awesomeness.

Perhaps all this time spent worrying about getting into the inner sanctum would be better repurposed making cool shit? Making smalltalk with the Director of Design at Facebook isn't an end in itself.

This is one of the things which annoys me most about a certain strain of SF startup culture: too much worrying that there's a holier of holies you haven't managed to get into yet (Davos, seriously?) and not enough time nose down on change-the-world problems.

Facebook is not a community, it's a medium of communication. A sixth of all humanity is not a very useful group for social purposes.

Calling it a community with warrens doesn't seem like a useful description, to me.

Something I think the OP doesn't get is that this delineation into high and low quality people isn't useful anymore. It was, in a time when books had to be copied by hand and almost everyone was illiterate, and when long-standing reputations (built over centuries, carried through blood) mattered because information traveled at 20 miles per day (if that) but that ended a few centuries ago. Ideas and contributions matter a lot more.

For example, Davos and the Bilderberg Group are relics of a feudal era that humanity is evolving out of. They don't belong in this century.

In fact, one of the most disappointing things about getting rich for a lot of people is realizing that "rich people" actually aren't more interesting, more creative, more intelligent, or even more energetic than people in general. Few people will admit as much, but a lot of the desire behind social climbing is the belief that "better" people hang out behind those closed doors. And yet, in reality the people don't get worse or better as you climb. The average quality stays (perhaps remarkably) the same.

The problem isn't, "How do we keep the hoi polloi out?" The whole point of the internet is that you can't. It's, "How do we keep the average quality of contribution high?" It shouldn't matter if those contributions come from a European prince or an African peasant. It's a big world and there are a lot of mind-bogglingly stupid rich, expensively-educated people, and an equally large number of very intelligent poor people with no formal education.

To prove that "high quality" people can produce low-quality content, just look at Autoadmit or some of the Wall Street-oriented career websites. These are some of the most educated people in the world, and yet the quality of content is very low. Or look at fucking UrbanBaby, which represents the average IQ among the Manhattan upper class as 82 and a third.