Eliezer Yudkowsky has dealt with some surpisingly competent elites:
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.
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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.
Read the whole thing — and the comments.