Intellectual Populism Trend
Consider the social ranking of who is how much of an intellectual. Think of this ranking as made by a weighted average of the opinions of other intellectuals. If we look at how this weighting changes across intellectual levels, there will be a median level, where half of the weight comes from opinions above that level, and half below.
I asked ChatGPT (5.5) and Claude (4.7) to give percentile estimates for the median level who judges who are the very best intellectuals, for the West in various years. They gave median 99%,99.5% for year 1000, median 96%,97% for year 1750, median 93%,90% for 1900, and median 88%,80% for 2025.
We have thus seen an increasing populism in who among us judges who are our very best intellectuals. Which is plausibly a source of intellectual decay. Especially as it is often noted that we usually find it hard to distinguish between mental quality levels above our own.
Example: Stephen Fry is I’m sure very intelligent (maybe around PhD level). But many Britons seem to think he’s genius level, or at least a legit public intellectual - on the grounds he hosted a TV quiz show called QI in which he explained the answers to obscure questions. Apparently not realising he read them off cards.
Stephen Fry hence provided the rent-a-quote on the front cover of What We Owe The Future (and numerous other books)
Minor observation: Given the date of writing it's obvious you mean Claude 4.7 Opus, since there is no 4.7 Sonnet or Haiku released yet. But, probably best to specify.