Then again, maybe I'm just a bit jealous of your idealism.

That's the thing – it's not zero sum! Other LWers can become thousands of times more intellectually sophisticated than they are. Some of them may have substantially more potential in principle than I have. Similarly for idealism.

We should have a culture of positive sum cooperation, where people are happy to have someone more who's much more knowledgable around because they can benefit from it, rather than thinking in terms of "if they're around than they have more status, so I have lower status, so it's bad for me if they signal intellectual superiority." If people had consistently adopted such attitudes throughout history, we would still be in the dark ages.