To return to your original question, on the overt information-exchange layer you see your statement "I am smarter than almost everyone here" as a neutral fact about the world which you believe is true. Now, analyze that statement on the signal-exchange level. What does it imply to hairless bipedal apes?

Thanks.

I'm not as oblivious as it sounds :-).

My mistake was in greatly underestimating the extent to which LWers are like this, given the unusually high IQ and the explicit goal of refining the art of rationality. I thought "these people are different so I don't have to worry about that."

The situation is that not all humans react negatively when someone else says "I'm better than all of you." That's the way almost all humans react, but having a sense of self-worth rooted in relative status is not biologically inevitable. It's possible to rewire status motivations so that they're rooted in the extent to which you're achieving a goal. Empirically, people who learn to do so are much more productive.

My problem was that I didn't know that you didn't know this: I didn't realize that you had no way of knowing that it's biologically possible for somebody to genuinely not care about relative status. I didn't know that you didn't know what Poincare wrote:

Science keeps us in constant relation with something which is greater than ourselves; it offers us a spectacle which is constantly renewing itself and growing always more vast. Behind the great vision it affords us, it leads us to guess at something greater still; this spectacle is a joy to us, but it is a joy in which we forget ourselves and thus it is morally sound.

He who has tasted of this, who has seen, if only from afar, the splendid harmony of the natural laws will be better disposed than another to pay little attention to his petty, egoistic interests. He will have an ideal which he will value more than himself, and that is the only ground on which we can build an ethics. He will work for this ideal without sparing himself and without expecting any of those vulgar rewards which are everything to some persons; and when he has assumed the habit of disinterestedness, this habit will follow him everywhere; his entire life will remain as if flavored with it.