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
For example, a smart person, adhering to an ad hoc "I'm smart therefore what I see is true" process, reasoning from first principles, would come to the conclusion that the earth is at the centre of the solar system
It'd be next to impossible to change their minds with data
The effort to reason from first principles creates an emotional investment in the (wrong) conclusion that makes the conviction extremely hard to undo afterwards.
Now smartypants tend not to apply this to astronomy, because the story of Galileo is a powerful warning tale about exactly the problems with thinking like this. But biology, art, and sociology remain popular targets despite this.
Now that's normally fine. If you want to make shit up in your head about neuroscience, fine arts, or human behaviour when you're at home, kicking back on the sofa, and want to indulge in feeling like a smartypants, have at it. Enjoy yourself.
Baldur Bjarnason
js290