The thing about people who have a lot of whatever it is that we're measuring with IQ is that they quite often tend to be way _more_ wrong than those who have less of whatever it is that those points stand for.

High IQ is kind of like superglue for opinions

Not only doesn't IQ compensate for ignorance or poor methodology, it acerbates the issue.

Rationalisation is a powerful drug. Most people can convince themselves of almost everything but those with high IQ tend to be _extraordinary_ at it.

Reasoning from first principles about unfamiliar fields is a popular past-time among many smart people in tech. They love to try to "solve" long-standing fields based on nothing more than their wits and personal observation.

But most fields have points in their history where they were stuck in false paradigms or fallacies because those were the conclusions a smart person would draw based on their wits and observation.

It takes years of collective work for fields to break out of these fallacies

@baldur First read that as “rationalism is a powerful drug” and, honestly, it works either way. This is one of the clearer explanations of this I’ve ever read. Thanks!