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.
I notice I'm confused. If the question is "who judges who", isn't it begging the question to use "a weighted average of intellectuals"? Maybe in the year 1000, nobody knew how to read, so those rare elites had Good Opinions; and in 2026, everyone is at least somewhat intellectual, and most of them aren't in social contact with Elon Musk - instead, they have a one-sided parasocial relationship. Who cares if they have badly-founded opinions, they don't actually have any social contact with the guy.
I think there's certainly something to be said about populism - I love everything I read from Joseph Heath - but this seems like a very weak lever on it