Comment by Planktonne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Planktonne | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The issue with this stance is that it folds under immediate scrutiny. It posits that there are intellectually-capable elites and dull, leaden-eyed masses, and uses literacy levels as evidence of that.

Except the people our society views as intellectual elites can't read that well. Every tech billionaire demonstrates a fatal lack of meaningful literacy, and everyone who shares your opinion disqualifies themselves. It's a running joke [1].

Either our elites aren't that elite, and we should ignore their vicious misanthropy, or they are, but their evidence is faulty (and so we should ignore their vicious misanthropy). More succinctly, Preacher points out that the people with the strongest superiority complexes tend to be the worst examples of the relevant trait [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/guckwf/life_imi...

Intellectual and economic accomplishment aren't exactly parallel vectors, but you can't expect me to believe they're orthogonal. A mediocre tech CEO is going to run intellectual circles around some random guy you pick out of the DMV ticket queue.

And, yes, some people are smarter than others. Some people are a lot smarter than others. Also, smart people are rare. Very smart people are very rare. These are basic facts of life that continue to exist whether or not you believe in them. Ignore them at your own risk.

> A mediocre tech CEO is going to run intellectual circles around some random guy you pick out of the DMV ticket queue.

There is literally no reason to believe this; having money is no proxy for intelligence, and tech CEOs specifically--the ones who fell hook line and sinker for craze after craze after craze--really aren't a solid argument here. We can be confident that a randomly selected person is unlikely to believe that an LLM loves them, or that there will be settlements on Mars in two years, or that they can live forever with blood transfusions. We cannot say the same of tech CEOs.

More importantly, we don't have to use money as a proxy at all here--we started with literature understanding, and at that we know the tech CEOs are not running circles around anybody. Here's just one example of Musk not understanding art [1].

I'd agree that highly intelligent people are rare, but I don't think that's as important as another fact: none of the actually highly intelligent people share your opinion. The belief that everyone without money is a dull-eyed serf is exclusively the province of cranks.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/jun/19/elon...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com