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nazgulnarsil comments on The Illusion of Sameness - Less Wrong
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Comments (73)
I think elitism is valuable in that it helps prevent this error (amongst other reasons). I despise false humility from the highly intelligent in this pro egalitarian age.
Helps prevent what error? The error of expecting other people's beliefs to match your own? I don't see how elitism helps here. As I understand the story, it was "shocking" precisely because, before the event, there was no obvious reason to feel superior.
The obvious reason is that Elizabeth is highly intelligent, and the other people are random teachers in upstate New York. A highly intelligent elitist should expect to have superior ideas to those around em (see Joshua's post below for a discussion of whether or not intelligent people actually do tend to agree on politics, however).
(Edited to clarify my reference to Joshua's post.)
It isn't clear that there's a strong correlation between intelligence and correct viewpoints. See this subthread where that point was very strongly made with a lot of examples.
Ok, but if someone is one-in-a-thousand intelligent, and a Democrat, then it may be correct for them to take an elitist stance, but I don't think it is correct to infer that the other 999-in-a-thousand are Republicans. At least I hope not.
Nothing in my post said that.
Clarified. :)
I think I disagree, but I'm not sure what elitism means here.
Elitism might help prevent this error. But can it lead to other errors?
Yes. For any method of correcting an error, there's always a possibility of overcorrecting.