Posted on 07/21/2023 8:35:13 AM PDT by bitt
"As a rule, I have found that the greater brain a man has, and the better educated, the easier it has been to mystify him."
So said master illusionist Harry Houdini. He said it during his spat with Sherlock Holmes’ creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle over the latter’s belief in seances and fairies. Despite being a literary genius, Conan Doyle nevertheless had some foolish ideas.
He’s not alone. Researchers have even coined ‘Nobel Disease,’ referring to the tendency for some Nobel Prize winners to embrace unconventional beliefs. Charles Richet, for instance, won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine but also believed in dowsing and ghosts.
Taken to the extreme, almost half of all German doctors in the 1930s joined the Nazi Party early, which was a higher rate than any other profession. Their education and intelligence did not shield them from madness – quite the opposite.
We are all deluged with attempts to manipulate us, from Big Tech and politicians to salespeople and colleagues. It is comforting to think that this is only a concern for the less intellectually gifted: we conjure up stereotypes of backwards ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘science deniers’ who need protecting from misinformation.
Yet the reality is that intellectuals are just as vulnerable to bias, if not more so. The scientific term is dysrationalia. Psychology professor Keith Stanovich researched it thoroughly and once concluded that ‘none of these [biases] displayed a negative correlation with [intelligence]… If anything, the correlations went in the other direction.’
Why might that be?
The first explanation is motivated reasoning, where logic is used to satisfy an underlying emotional motivation. Conan Doyle, for example, may have convinced himself of the truth of fairies and seances because he was struggling with the recent death of his son. With a deep psychological need to fill, Conan Doyle’s remarkable intellect simply provided the justification.
People reach the conclusions they want to reach, and then post-rationalise it – but smarter people are better at coming up with these justifications. To paraphrase George Orwell, some things are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.
...more
Are they truly intelligent, or are they merely highly trained robots?
My father in law used to say that the best salesmen are most often easily duped by a good sales job because they are impressed by the salesman. He used to teach sales.
Why are smart people more prone to bad psychedelic experiences?
We like control.
Because intelligence has limits, while gullibility doesn't.
“Because they’re not as smart as you think they are”
Amen. That speaks to the millions of fools who think 1) Biden won the 2020 election and 2) that Biden is a good President.
German people had high nationalism and pride
Rejected Bolshevism even as some incubated it
Resented the way the west treated them due to WWI
They are a chilly rational folk
You can see that even today here the personality differences tween Scots Irish and Germanic descendants
Lots of reasons they supported fascism
I suspect that at least some of this phenomenon is due to the emergence and success of the two great and successful “absurd” breakthroughs of physics that turned our view of reality on its head in the last century.
Relativity and quantum mechanics are both exceedingly strange and yet are absolutely valid. Their acceptance and widespread promulgation “gave license to” absurdist pseudo-intellectuals in other fields, from psychology and religion (think dyanetics and scientology) to ethics (think Peter Singer) to social science (think Cloward-Piven).
Concur.
It’s also notable that when Hitler was Time Magazine’s 1938 Man of The Year this was not a snarky act. Not at all. The actual article is very complimentary towards Hitler and it was concurrently supportive of the FDR New Deal that had initiatives similar to that of the Hitler administration.
They have the narrative in their head...It just needs to be fed...Annnnd dems are ready to feed the beast....
Has this been proven? I could be that people who just think they are smart are easily tricked. It has been proven that stupid people think of themselves as smart.
Answer: they weren’t intelligent to begin with.
The great majority of people with degrees are just going through the motions and mimicry.
True intelligence requires questioning yourself and your conclusions - anything else is just faith based beliefs.
Not that there’s anything wrong with faith - but we all know how zealots work…
Because they’re not as smart as they tell you they are or think they are.
That, or...
Romans 1:22
Professing themselves to be wise
They became fools
.
A significant percentage of “smart” people are simply persons of mediocre intelligence whose parents were successful enough to send them to college where they became like trained dogs performing mindless tricks.
Smart people often suffer from hubris.
But these days stupid people often do as well - because if they are dems, the media protects them from reality.
Because they want to be.
Even smart people suffer from greed and envy. They’re just better at covering it up with rationalizing.
I think in Musk’s case he knew why he was voting for Biden & Co.
We have institutions whose sole purpose is to tell people that they are smarter than they actually are. They are called law schools.
The article is very negative.
Here is the article.
Adolf Hitler: Man of the Year, 1938
Monday, Jan. 02, 1939
https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,760539,00.html
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