If my goal is to become a physicist, say, does the fact that I'm not very intelligent count as an "orthogonal factor"?
No.
Did you mean to say "Yes" and get confused by the double negative? (That would be more consistent with the rest of your comment.)
If the answer is no, then this is one form of my claim of them trying to make everyone as equal as possible even at the cost of making everyone worse off.
If "they" believe that. If you know of a large number of people who believe this, I am not aware of them.
I never said they believed that, at most they alieve that. My claim is that is what you get if you try to steel man their position as based on terminal values rather than factual confusion.
Confused: There doesn't appear to be a double-negative.
If you're not very intelligent, that is relevant to your physicist aspirations. It is not orthogonal.
I do not understand how your description is a steel man. It may be an attempt to extrapolate instrumental values from a certain set of terminal values, but that doesn't help us in our matter-of-fact disagreement about the terminal values of the SJ cluster.
If you want to steel man social justice, substitute the entire works of John Rawls.
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.