I think the core issue is cooperation. Eliezer's why our kind cant cooperate provides a perspective.
Making intelligence high status means having public role models who are intellectuals. We can't really agree on role models.
Sport fans can agree that Tiger Woods is awesome even if the don't like golf.
Agreeing that an extremely smart charismatic figure like Julian Assange is awesome is much harder because it's political. Agreeing that Sergey Brin and Larry Page are awesome is political. Agreeing that Peter Thiel is awesome is political.
Steve Job management to have status while expressing his intelligence but he was a Buddhist who painted himself as being serious about beauty.
As a community we also don't agree that we want to stand our ground on intelligence. When talking about LW PR implications someone argued that being seen as a crowd of people who think that they are smart is bad for LW.
When doing QS presswork I never tried to pretend to be no geek. In one instance I put on EEGs with a friend and danced while throwing the visualization of the EEGs with a projector against the wall behind us. The goal was to stand the ground that being a geek is cool.
On LW people try to tell me that using the age old technology of a bow and practicing firing arrows is cool and that the activity maximizes their coolness function.
If the idea of smart people to be cool is about firing arrows with a bow, why should anyone consider smart people to be cool and high status?
It's difficult to be a sport star, but it's easy to recognize a sport star. Doesn't work the same with science. At least we have the Nobel price to tell us who the cool scientists are, otherwise most people wouldn't know. But being told is not the same as seeing. People enjoy watching sport. (Actually, it's only easy to recognize the sport stars in a specific environment. If no one ever organized golf championships, we wouldn't know who the best golf players are.)
If we could perhaps make the scientists somehow... compete with each other in a few-minutes se...
Paper by the Cultural Cognition Project: The culturally polarizing effect of the "anti-science trope" on vaccine risk perceptions
This is a great paper (indeed, I think many at LW would find the whole site enjoyable). I'll try to summarize it here.
Background: The pro/anti vaccine debate has been hot recently. Many pro-vaccine people often say, "The science is strong, the benefits are obvious, the risks are negligible; if you're anti-vaccine then you're anti-science".
Methods: They showed experimental subjects an article basically saying the above.
Results: When reading such an article, a large number of people did not trust vaccines more, but rather, trusted the American Academy of Pediatrics less.
My thoughts: I will strive to avoid labeling anybody as being "anti-science" or "simply or willfully ignorant of current research", etc., even when speaking of hypothetical 3rd parties on my facebook wall. This holds for evolution, global warming, vaccines, etc.
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Also included in the article: references to other research that shows that evolution and global warming debates have already polarized people into distrusting scientists, and evidence that people are not yet polarized over the vaccine issue.
If you intend to read the article yourself: I found it difficult to understand how the authors divided participants into the 4 quadrants (α, ß, etc.) I will quote my friend, who explained it for me:
I was helped by following the link to where they first introduce that model.
The people in the top left (α) worry about risks to public safety, such as global warming. The people in the bottom right (δ) worry about socially deviant behaviors, such as could be caused by the legalization of marijuana.
People in the top right (β) worry about both public safety risks and deviant behaviors, and people in the bottom left (γ) don't really worry about either.