>>12105872A lot of universities aren’t good places to discuss high-level ideas
The university I studied at for my undergrad reached the rank of 2nd place worldwide for one of the years I was there. Admittedly I was pretty intellectually underdeveloped at the time, but I still would meet quite a few people who seemed to only get in by sheer hard work to get the required grades, or who had potential but it wasn’t yet refined.
I’ve also met people from lower ranked universities, and they generally tend to not be as capable as the worst I met at my undergrad university.
This is to answer your question about reliably finding people who are smart (high intelligence and refined cognitive ability), you can find them at universities, the better universities are more reliable.
That said, you can probably meet a lot of intelligent people at some of the more successful companies like google, amazon, Microsoft, but only in the more intellectually demanding jobs. Also renaissance technologies, a hedge fund (I think), was founded by a math PhD, and he only hires PhDs who have done exceptional work.
You can likely find the same kind of smart people there, but I don’t have experience here, so I can’t say with any reasonable probability.
I met a few smart people through a group that invited /sci/ users, which is where I met the mathematician who’s at MIT now. That group was quite small and we were able to filter out a lot of posters we didn’t want. The group is dead now, but I’m planning on starting a new invite only group with another guy from the dead chat, where existing members vote on new members, but the platform and mode of operation are not yet decided
