People watching

People watching, according to me, refers to the art/science/act of observing people, judging them, classifying them, analyzing them, finding them, etc. etc.

Identifying good people

generic, high-level strategy:

• learning everything / having the right opinions about everything by just sticking to the object level is impossible -- there's just not enough time. At some point, you will need to rely on other people to identify interesting topics, or promote to your attention the correct views, etc. In a post-singularity utopia you will have enough time to derive everything from first principles, but we are not there yet.
• as with ideas, it's sometimes useful to become super excited about someone, and obsessively read everything they've written. It's ok to let yourself get super excited about someone to the point of obsession. Just realize that you will probably change your opinions later.
• when you see that an interesting person says something you disagree with, this is an opportunity for you to decide if you know better than they do, or if they know better (you can turn the latter situation into the former by doing additional research on the topic). see also eliezer's rhythm of disagreement.
• randomly fact-check things using google/wikipedia/generic sources to score someone.
• as you become more knowledgeable about the world, things that used to seem to you like novel ideas/facts will eventually become "things everyone knows"/cliches/uninsightful. This is an opportunity for you to go back to people whom you've admired, to see if you need to tone down your admiration for them. if you find that they actually just repeat cliches that to your past self seemed insightful, you can downgrade them (but remember that insights become distilled and enter the "water supply" over time, so if they were one of the first people to start saying the now-cliche, you might actually want to upgrade your opinion of them. Someone had to invent an idea for the first time, and that person is probably quite a bit smarter than the people who are parroting that idea).
• in general, you won't be able to rank people who are significantly above you -- they will all just seem super smart. see hiring and judging character for more on this. but as you get smarter yourself, you can come back to people who seemed super smart and see if now you can tell which ones are really smart vs merely seemed-smart-to-my-younger-self. spaced repetition is a thing, you don't need to judge someone all at once.
• read about gell-mann amnesia
• you can use recommendations to generate ideas for smart people, but you will generally need to put in the work to verify that the recommended people are good. e.g. if smart person A says that B and C are smart, you usually can't trust A to be correct about this. (it's really weird! i know a bunch of smart people who give lots of false positives about who else is smart. smartness is sadly not transitive.) you have to go through B and C's stuff yourself to judge for yourself.

Big picture vision

what is the point of all of this?

Techniques

• Parasitizing on popularity
• Using "site:*.com/about" with identity labels [1]
• there's sometimes lists like [2] but idk I've never found these super good for finding people?