dspeyer comments on High Status and Stupidity: Why? - Less Wrong
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Another hypothesis: high status people attract crackpots and then develop mental habits to protect themselves. When you talk to a high status person under most circumstances, you're not talking to the person -- you're talking to the spam filter. It's built out of brain, but using a small fraction of attention, so it's not really sentient.
This predicts that if you can get past the spam filter (with the right introduction, or by saying or doing something unfakably interesting), the effect should go away. And quite suddenly.