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bogus comments on Elitism isn't necessary for refining rationality. - Less Wrong
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Comments (91)
I don't speak for all of Less Wrong here, but spending two years at Cambridge has already primed me to have an instinctive tribal urge to attack anyone who attacks elitism, because they tend to be Guardian comment section class warfare types, aka "the other side". It is a mindkill topic for me, so it's probably a mindkill topic for a lot of people here. It might even be a mindkill topic for you, I don't know. But it does mean you need to tread really carefully when you talk about it. There's a reason I need to consciously shrug off Guardian articles, and make myself not read through 10 pages of comments that will make me angry.
Guardian commenters are at least the more intelligent face of "the other side"; I understand there are many more people in both the US and the UK who share those views but are much less eloquent about them.
The way you use the word "smear" is telling my System 1 that you are on "the other side", which makes it hard to sympathise with you at all. In fact I can physically feel the indignant mindkill response rising in myself right now, so I'm going to stop talking, but I hope I've made my point.
There's no such thing as "the other side". There are a variety of arguments for anti-intellectualism, some of which may be more compelling than others.
I meant "the other side" in a blue vs green sense, hence the link. I didn't claim it was a well-defined political stance, merely that perceived membership of it provoked a reaction in my system 1 and that fact was probably worth pointing out.
ETA: While the first half of the article you linked was interesting and informative, the rest of it plus the comments was precisely a demonstration of the kind of rhetoric that happens when people are motivated by what I referred to as "mindkill". This time it's surrounding the word "intellectual" rather than "elitism", but my point still stands.