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
Proverbs 26:12 Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him.
That is exactly correct
And it also was one of the errors that Jack van Impe made, not knowing his mistake
I watched him make that mistake time after time - and others
New tagline
“Even Henry Ford worked briefly with NAZI Germany”
You are of course correct. Charles Lindburgh among other perfectly decent, respectable people were in awe of early NAZI successes economically and socially. My mother in law...may she rest in piece..spent a couple of months there in 1936 and was thoroughly impressed. Who the hell knew what was yet to come? Indeed, there are serious storm clouds approaching us right now.
Listening to his speeches, I am still amazed how Oswald Mosley got sucked into it.
Meaning that it has 1) magnitude, and 2) direction.
Regards,
Don’t confuse education with intelligence.
Because there’s a world of difference between intelligence and wisdom and common sense.
What’s that saying???
People with PhD’s know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.
When you butter up a really smart person they feel ‘finally, someone sees I’m a genius’...
Sad bit true.
Here’s how you can tell how smart you are: With people dumber than you, you can rank them in order. With people smarter than you, you just know they’re smarter. But you can’t rank them.
This is absolutely unremarkable, because eugenics were the order of the day in that era of medical education -- a brief, fleeting dalliance with extermination and genocide that benefited no one.
Now we have elites who have never let go of the concept -- pimping depopulation is perhaps the identifying hallmark of a true global elitist, remember that when the time comes -- and they plainly showed their hand by deploying a PLA-designed bioweapon as a primary Act of War, knowing they would get away with it because it was not nation vs nation but a tiny minority, with the aid of a godless confucian hivemind, against every man and woman alive, seeking to exterminate the fullest extent possible.
That sounds like low paid waitresses who go out for dinner/drinks and pay 25-30% tips!
Yeah, it is kind of the same thing.
Yeah, it is kind of the same thing.
Thomas Sowell writes that before he was scheduled to debate Kenneth Arrow (Nobel prize-winning economist), someone asked him if he was nervous because Arrow was so smart. Sowell replied “I don’t mind debating smart people. It’s debating stupid people that’s hard.”
______________________________
The seventeenth-century Spanish philosopher Baltasar Gracián wrote:
“Twice the wit is needed to deal with someone with none.”
Lack of spine?
Thomas J Watson, head of IBM, was awarded the Order of the German Eagle by Adolf Hitler for his contributions to the Reich.
IBM supplied the data processing equipment the Nazis used to run the death camps
https://besacenter.org/ibm-holocaust/
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” G K Chesterton
My college roommate said his dad was a dowser. Nevermind that Nebraska sits on top of on of the largest fresh water aquifers in the world. I remember thinking, show me a place where you can’t hit water.
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