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Risto_Saarelma comments on Engaging Intellectual Elites at Less Wrong - Less Wrong Discussion
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Suppose we're looking for something like "the sort of people who get frequently cited by other people they don't know". What word would you prefer to use to label a group like this?
This seems like a good definition, but the term that comes to mind is "celebrity" not "elite",
I don't remember seeing many Britney Spears quotes in Nature. It does get a bit tricky and circuitous with just who's doing the quoting though. Political talk show hosts probably get quoted by lots of people, for example, but don't seem to be the people we're looking for here.
Okay, how about this:
Intellectual elites are the largest cultural cluster of such people who get approvingly cited by both other elites and non-elites and whose sayings people would approvingly cite even if they did not know anything about the person saying the thing, merely on the strength of the substance of the thing.
This would rank out infamous people, who get referred to a lot, but not approvingly, populist celebrities, unless they manage to form their own large clique of mutual affirmation and run of the mill celebrities whose sayings are only interesting because the person saying the thing is famous.
You're defining intellectual elites basically through social/memetic influence and I'm not sure that's the right approach.
Defining some sort of intrinsic intellectual quality at an useful level to someone who isn't already expected to know the concept we're trying to define seems a lot harder than looking at memetic influence. Are there other big failure modes than getting dominated by popular populists, and are there obvious problems with the idea of screening off the populists by also measuring the interconnected appreciation in the hopefully true elite cluster?
Thinking about this a bit more, it does seem like it might just get us the cluster of people running the mass media instead of the academia. Then again, the mass media refers to the academia a lot more than the academia refers to the mass media, so perhaps we could still get somewhere by following the flow through the clusters.
Depends on your goal. If your goal is to influence the culture, this is a useful definition.
Luke's goal seems to be "Engaging Intellectual Elites at LW". As I mentioned somewhere in the comments, I don't know what Luke's terminal goal is.