Now, there's nothing wrong with having preferences, and acting on them, but you're neither the only, nor the most important consumer on the market. You can't legitimately argue that everybody who doesn't share your preferences for LW-style rationalist characters should not be catered to.
Except I'm not doing that. My preferences are simply one route among many away from the way things are done in TBBT. I advocate against this type of comedy. And not on the grounds of taste; on the grounds of morality. Humour that is based on mocking and deriding and ridiculing, on objectification and dehumanization, is wrong and evil, because it makes us comfortable with hatred, because it takes joy in the pain of others, ,because it's about raising yourself by lowering those around you, because it is a form of vicarious violence and cruelty. It is even worse if it's in the service of aggressive mediocrity and anit-intellectualism.
If you need to express it in terms of existential threat, I'd say that at the end of that path lays a paperclip-maximized Earth. But that's only the final stop in an utterly awful trajectory.
Oh, and by the way, all else being equal, the fact that something takes more work than the alternatives has never an argument in favor of that something.
Problem is, all else is seldom equal; if you achieve a result of the same quality with much more work, that makes you inefficient, and perhaps even an idiot. Usually, more effort correlates with either more quality, more quantity, or both, and something that takes more skill and competence to achieve is more highly valued than something that doesn't. It's a heuristic--sometimes it fails, but it tends to give good results quickly.
As for the adjecives you listed, I'll agree that "interesting" simply means "interests me and those like me", and is thus subjective (it becomes objective when you make a survey of how many people turn out to be "interested"). "Lazy" is a value judgment; it means I evaluate that the creators have done less effort than they could have. Depending on the art form, there are objective criteria for determining that. "Mean" and "cruel" are perfectly objective; from someone's behaviour and the available circumstantial evidence, you extrapolate whether they "take joy in inflicting pain"; You can be right or wrong in your extrapolation, you can misinterpret the evidence, but the statement is objective.
And the evidence is damning. This show's creators make fun of nerds for being nerds. It systematically paints them as people to look down upon, either because they're being pitiful or because they're being despicable. It invites us to laugh at their misfortunes and their miseries and possibly their mental illnesses. If you have a moral code that emphasizes empathy, understanding, love, and tolerance, and rejects cruelty, sadism, and contempt, you will find this show wrong. If you don't, then we don't share the same morality, and it becomes an entirely different discussion.
Methinks you're focusing too much of your energy against something that is really not all that bad. If your real issue with the show is that it doesn't portray your pet group in as favorable a light that you think it deserves, it might serve your interest more to attack a target that is actually at the root of the problem. Like the ubiquity of promotion of values along the lines of "money, sex and status", with absolutely no thought given to intelligence and personal development, for example. Or internet bullying and hatefests. You know, pick you...
This is my first attempt at starting a casual conversation on LW where people don't have to worry about winning or losing points, and can just relax and have social fun together.
So, Big Bang Theory. That series got me wondering. It seems to be about "geeks", and not the basement-dwelling variety either; they're highly successful and accomplished professionals, each in their own field. One of them has been an astronaut, even. And yet, everything they ever accomplish amounts to absolutely nothing in terms of social recognition or even in terms of personal happiness. And the thing is, it doesn't even get better for their "normal" counterparts, who are just as miserable and petty.
Consider, then; how would being rationalists would affect the characters on this show? The writing of the show relies a lot on laughing at people rather than with them; would rationalist characters subvert that? And how would that rationalist outlook express itself given their personalities? (After all, notice how amazingly different from each other Yudkowsky, Hanson, and Alicorn are, just to name a few; they emphasize rather different things, and take different approaches to both truth-testing and problem-solving).
Note: this discussion does not need to be about rationalism. It can be a casual, normal discussion about the series. Relax and enjoy yourselves.
But the reason I brought up that series is that its characters are excellent examples of high intelligence hampered by immense irrationality. The apex of this is represented by Dr. Sheldon Cooper, who is, essentially, a complete fundamentalist over every single thing in his life; he applies this attitude to everything, right down to people's favorite flavor of pudding: Raj is "axiomatically wrong" to prefer tapioca, because the best pudding is chocolate. Period. This attitude makes him a far, far worse scientist than he thinks, as he refuses to even consider any criticism of his methods or results.