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Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias says the unsayable:

One of the major surprises I received when I moved out of childhood into the real world, was the degree to which the world is stratified by genuine competence.

Now, yes, Steve Jurvetson is not just a randomly selected big-name venture capitalist.  He is a big-name VC who often shows up at transhumanist conferences.  But I am not drawing a line through just one data point.

I was invited once to a gathering of the mid-level power elite, where around half the attendees were “CEO of something” - mostly technology companies, but occasionally “something” was a public company or a sizable hedge fund.  I was expecting to be the youngest person there, but it turned out that my age wasn’t unusual - there were several accomplished individuals who were younger.  This was the point at which I realized that my child prodigy license had officially completely expired.

Now, admittedly, this was a closed conference run by people clueful enough to think “Let’s invite Eliezer Yudkowsky” even though I’m not a CEO.  So this was an incredibly cherry-picked sample.  Even so…

Even so, these people of the Power Elite were visibly much smarter than average mortals. In conversation they spoke quickly, sensibly, and by and large intelligently. When talk turned to deep and difficult topics, they understood faster, made fewer mistakes, were readier to adopt others’ suggestions.

No, even worse than that, much worse than that: these CEOs and CTOs and hedge-fund traders, these folk of the mid-level power elite, seemed happier and more alive.

This, I suspect, is one of those truths so horrible that you can’t talk about it in public.  This is something that reporters must not write about, when they visit gatherings of the power elite.

Because the last news your readers want to hear, is that this person who is wealthier than you, is also smarter, happier, and not a bad person morally.  Your reader would much rather read about how these folks are overworked to the bone or suffering from existential ennui.  Failing that, your readers want to hear how the upper echelons got there by cheating, or at least smarming their way to the top.  If you said anything as hideous as, “They seem more alive,” you’d get lynched.

I shouldn’t have to quote this, because Overcoming Bias should be one of your daily reads. Everyone should have to start the day with muscle burn from exercising your body, and headache from exercising your brain. But it’s a good headache, honestly it is.

Note that Yudkowsky is talking about the power elite, the movers and shakers, not just rich people generally. The Hollywood Elite, chameleons who have become fabulously wealthy by pretending to be real people, speaking words written for them by others, often strike me as more than a little dim in person, say on talk shows, or on their own blogs.

Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Overcoming Bias

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 11:32 am and is filed under Cool Stuff, Political Correctness, Science, Throwing Out the Trash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.