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Do you already have something written on the subject? I'd like to read it.
No. It would probably be worth doing but difficult, since evaluating truth or at least plausibility depends on a complex web of assumptions.
Let's be successful? Sure, let's. But it has nothing to do with non-conformity.
Let's be successful through cooperation, which conformity is an ingredient of.
For people to cooperate, they have to agree on the project they cooperate on, and also agree on the general strategy to accomplish this project. With perfect Bayesian reasoners, the agreement would be achieved by Aumann's Theorem. With humans, certain doze of conformity is required to overcome the remaining differences in opinion remaining after people have already updated on each other's opinions.
If you can't do this last step, you get Mensa. Nothing ever gets done, because everyone has a different opinion, and everyone feels it would be low-status to accept someone else's solution when it is obviously imperfect (therefore it wouldn't be accepted on basis of pure logic).
As an example, a few years ago, when I had much more free time, I was active in two societies: Mensa, and a local Esperanto group.
In the Esperanto group, as a team of five or ten people we succeeded to publish a new textbook, a multi-media CD (containing books, songs, and computer programs in E-o) and later a larger DVD edition (with added E-o courses, and an offline version of E-o Wikipedia), and created a website containing a wiki and a forum; all this within two years. (Later I decided that E-o isn't my high priority anymore, so I quit the team. As far as I know, the remaining members now use their skills for some commercial projects related to learning languages other than E-o, plus organize international E-o meetups.)
During the same time in Mensa... generally, whenever I suggested anything, it was almost certainly rejected; and even when by miracle people finally agreed about something, when we looked at the details, the same pattern repeated on the lower level. It was a fractal of nitpicking. At the end, nothing got done. We succeeded to agree that we ought to change our web forum, because it had no moderation and was dominated by a few prolific crackpots (who weren't even our members). But during two years we were unable to agree on which software solution to use, and what specific rules should the new forum have.
I spent about the same amount of energy in both groups, and the difference in outcome was staggering. This is how I learned that productivity is a two-place word: how much I am productive is a function of both my personal traits and the traits of the environment I am trying to work in. When you have people who second-guess everything but contribute nothing, the output is close to zero. When you have people who can go along with your crazy experiments, some of those experiements succeed, and a few of them will be really impressive. (But going along with something that you have a different opinion about, that's conformity.)
When programming, you have the option to do the whole thing yourself, and then you don't need to cooperate with anyone. But even that applies to specific kinds of projects, where you can become an expert at every relevant aspect. (For example, if you make a computer game, it is unlikely for the same person to be great at coding and graphics and music and level design and balancing multiplayer.) But when you look at the real world, you have basically two options: either cooperate with non-nerds, or find nerds who are able to cooperate.
My first thought is that it's easier to get things done in an Esperanto group because the goal-- spread Esperanto-- is more obvious than what a Mensa group should do, but perhaps I'm underestimating how much is obvious for a Mensa group to do.
I was a member of Mensa for a while, but was underwhelmed by the intellectual quality. I know a couple of very smart people who are or were in Mensa, but they weren't local to me. I've been told that there's a lot of variation between local groups.
There's a pattern I saw in local Mensa publications that I now have filed under people trying to appear intelligent. The article starts with a bunch of definitions that don't look obviously awful, but which somehow lead to a preferred conclusion.
Do you think Salon would publish a piece about how to check on what you read?
Gleb's article is about as rigorous as a (non-famous) academic author can be to still get published in the popular press.
Would he be allowed to add a link or two for people who want more background?
I start twitching when emphatic statements are made about the motivations of large numbers of people. How can you check on whether you're right?
This being said, Sanders is also appealing to anger and fear, and both candidates are also appealing to hope.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9513740
What do you make of this? I'll note that it's a very small sample size, and I don't think it says whether those particular CFS patients report feeling chilled all the time. It also wouldn't surprise the hell out of me if there's some way a body can go wrong so that a person has a normal core temperature (what about the periphery?), but feels chilled anyway.
Also, in regards to being stupid-- I know some people with CFS who seem pretty smart, but who complain of brainfog. Perhaps they do most or all of their posting when the brainfog lifts.
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Like a number of people I browse LW by using the "recentposts" URL to avoid missing anything new. However in the sidebar it appears that "recent comments" and "recent posts" only seem to show those in Main/Promoted. With the move away from the use of Main, does this need to be fixed? Or is it not worth the effort given dwindling comment levels here and the eventual shift to a LW2.0?
If you start from the Discussion page, you'll get the recent posts and recent comments for Discussion.