> Your definition of mediocrity is different from mine (mine is defined as: a person who will by others be considered mediocre in some context, which often resolves to a person who has low-to-medium relative ability in a skill).

That's a definition I'd accept. Perhaps we're not alien species after all ;-)

I definitely see that mediocrity is context dependent. Nobody is a super-man excelling in all. People like Sam Altman and Peter Thiel have rotten days as do us all.

However it seems like there are pools of mediocrity in society. It is not a stand-alone individual phenomena. You don't find many Nobel Prize winners in council estates in Britain. Or any kind of winner apart from the Lottery.

While nobody can excel at everything, we should be a bit suspicious when we see a place where there is mediocrity in everything apart from alcoholism and gambling addictions. That would suggest either extreme assortative mating (highly unreasonable, in the time scale of centuries) or that a group of people is being subdued systemically on the memetic level. What does one say when we see an entire area code suffering from what seems like depression or some existential crisis of purpose? The contrast with former glories is particularly sharp in the North of England, but if you've ever been to a similar region you get it. It is like a giant question mark in the landscape, unexplained. We should see a roughly random distribution of talents, there would be elites, yes, but there would also be a long tail. I don't see much of a long tail in present society in America or Europe, whereas I am convinced there was.

These thoughts lead me to the belief that mediocrity is primarily caused by societal structure. This suggests that talent is allowed to be exposed sometimes and not others, which depending on how you look at it, is either a very dystopian view of society and/or a potentially very hopeful one.

And of course we are seeing these same 'pools' arising in Science and Education. Whatever the 'rot' is, it is surely spreading.

> But it seems like you're making an argument /from/ them.

I have a proselytizing streak in me. When I believe something is so, then others must know. However like yourself I am not a purist, I cherrypick my way through various lines of reasoning and often am of two or more contradictory minds on one topic. Currently I believe NRx's positions on Western society and its politics (The Cathedral) are useful insights with predictive power. I think also that every model has limits. The utility of Conservatism and Liberalism has run its course in the West and now it is time for something new or old again. In the Asian countries such as China this may not be true.

> Randomness and disorder is the official definition, yes. I can't splice "randomness and disorder" onto reality.

> Reality seems to actually tend in the opposite direction, at least on a planetary level (i.e., dust -> planets -> creatures on planets).

Let us stick to centuries or thousands of years at most!

I think depending on the scale of resolution you look at physical reality, you'll see different things, but this is another topic.

> My problem is that the definitions are too vague. As well as culturally biased. Rome is more ordered than mud huts. But is Rome more or less ordered than modern USA? Mongol clans? Soviet Russia? Czarist Russia?

I can easily imagine comparing them! There are absolutes, like average life expectancy, and then confounding factors such as efficiency gains making less things to measure. As a brute estimate, you could multiply the number of years of life by the number of people the empire or system can support. That by itself should give us a fair guess at complexity. Or we could look at density, since average city size should correlate with complexity.

> Not to mention, if you consider it on a global level, you have to sum up the results in some way, and then determine whether the entire Earth is more or less ordered than some other timeframe

We already do this really. GDP. I realize all these metrics will have flaws, but if you are consistent about using them you can obtain a fair idea of trends and won't miss unusual events e.g. The Black Death. If GDP is negative from 2017 - 2117, projektir will be far from shocked if armed with that information he/she steps from the Time Machine and observes humankind.

> I think there's a difference between "everything is relative and all states are equally good" and "everything is not relative but I'm not convinced on what's more ordered and I don't trust your methods, either".

That is fine, my methods I just came up with a minute ago notwithstanding there may be good objective metrics for orderliness.

> I still fail to see the relevance of the football player being called mediocre or the tech supporter not doing too great of a job to the fall of Western civilization.

Many functions in society are options or choices.

Items like the ability to travel over distances, to not be killed, to feed and water oneself, to provide for a family, these are not really options. If enough people can't accomplish those kinds of tasks then society does actually collapse.

Fundamentally, are you saying that if the symptoms of a degeneration appear in a society, that the people of that society just don't or can't be trusted to recognize them?

I mean we have records, letters from Rome and Egypt, and they seem to indicate a very acute sense of catastrophic decline.

> From the earlier post. This to me sounds like an amalgamation of just-world hypothesis and "nature is good". I don't correlate any specific outcomes to one's "smartness" since I don't believe in either. I don't respect "niches" too much since I don't believe in the latter. I disagree with both, and THAT disagreement is fairly fundamental, it's very hard to find a bridge between the "nature is bad and the world is not fair" and "nature is good and the world is fair" groups, or even the other combinations.

You don't believe some people's native intelligence is higher or lower than others?

You don't believe societal niches exist?

Perhaps this is a straight disagreement but maybe I just don't understand what you're saying.

> but there is still a problem in assuming a specific vocabulary or axioms when talking to someone who is not already familiar.

Usually, true, but not in these circles I find, after all you understood what I was saying.

> The whole line about communists and democracy and entropy and year 0 didn't make any sense to me

Entropy I explained, Year Zero is a reference to the Khmer Rouge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_%28political_notion

The only thing I can think to add here is that in NRx thought Democracy is taken as being Communism Lite, like how there exists a Diet Coke soda.

> For other people I think a large portion of the post is likely just gibberish.

That is partly by design. Journalists have short attention spans and suffer from buffer overflows. They then fall back on 'Fascists!', which not even they wholeheartedly believe.