You think the average person on LessWrong ranks with Spinoza and Leibniz? I disagree.

Wedrifid_2010 was not assigning a status ranking or even an evaluation of overall intellectual merit or potential. For that matter predicting expected voting patterns is a far different thing than assigning a ranking. People with excessive confidence in habitual thinking patterns that are wrong or obsolete will be downvoted into oblivion where the average person is not, even if the former is more intelligent or more intellectually impressive overall.

I also have little doubt that any of those three would be capable of recovering from their initial day or three of spiraling downvotes assuming they were willing to ignore their egos, do some heavy reading of the sequences and generally spend some time catching up on modern thought. But for as long as those individuals were writing similar material to that which identifies them they would be downvoted by lesswrong_2010. Possibly even by lesswrong_now too.