Intellectual Populism

The social process by which judgments of who counts as a top intellectual increasingly come from lower-ranked or more numerous peers rather than the small high-status elite. Hanson illustrates this by asking large language models for percentile estimates of the 'median judge' across historical periods and finding a steady decline in the median judge's elite percentile. — If who decides intellectual merit shifts downward, public debate and policy may be shaped by less expert, more status-driven opinion, degrading expertise and institutional decision-making.