You might be more confident than me in people's ability to discern BS. I think I am reasonably intelligent, but I get fooled all the time. Compounding the problem is that it is easier to fool someone than to tell him he has been fooled.
I wish I could agree with you here, but there's a lot of distrust of smart people especially in some parts of the US. If you are immediately and obviously smart, some people will tend to think you will use your intelligence to trick or manipulate them or that you have a hidden agenda.
It's unfortunate, but it does make sense to view someone more intelligent than you with a little bit of suspicion if they're trying to persuade you of something. The reason is that if they're trying to trick you, they have a head start due to the disparity in intelligence. Of course, someone with superior social skills is even more dangerous in that sense.
The most intelligent persons are often the best at fooling and deluding themselves.
Once a path has been taken, it is very hard for an intelligent person to admit it might have been a mistake, it is too easy to rationalize and justify why you are right than to admit you might have been wrong.
James Randi has a speech (you can probably find it on Youtube) about how it is easier to fool smart people than average people. Smart people think they can't be fooled.
A lot of what happens in both business and politics makes more sense if we consider that some people have an innate ability to evade even smart people's BS detectors when they're together in person. Doesn't matter if it's animal magnetism, pheromones, subliminal body language, or scam superintelligence. Is it so hard to believe that we all have heuristics we use to decide whether to trust someone?
Where there are heuristics, there are ways to game those heuristics. Practically none of us are as immune to non-rational persuasion as we think/claim we are. Whatever it is, I've known people whose ability to get what they want was extremely hard to explain any other way. I literally avoid being in their presence, and that has been good for me.
I feel like I'm better than most at detecting BS, at least 90th percentile, but I'd be a fool to think I'm the best in the world. When I can sense that I'm outmatched, the rational thing to do is change the game. Con men have known since forever that egotists are the best marks.
I've heard before that the smarter you are, the more naive you are. The way I think about it, the smarter you are the more often you are correct about something that no one else is, which causes you to rationally place your judgement above others, which causes you to believe a bunch of nonsense. When presented with counter-evidence, you are more likely to trust your own reasoning than to trust the evidence.
Yeah ... I hear otherwise intelligent friends (folks with PhDs, MDs, etc.) effectively parroting crap you would hear on their favorite news channel. You can tell what they watch by listening to what they say.
I think the "smarter" one is, the more gullible they are. As someone with a PhD, I try very hard not to be gullible ... I can't say I always succeed. But I am highly skeptical of everything I hear/read. That skepticism helps.
There is a large class of people who believe they are intelligent. But sadly all they have is complete confidence in their views backed up by some pseudo intellectual nonsense that they’ve either read/watched/heard without much understanding.
A lot of intelligent people aren't very smart, and a lot of smart people aren't very intelligent. The smart achive desirable outcomes, and usually that means not rocking the boat. The intelligent have a capacity for abstraction, which means it's easy to misunderstand why people are parroting absurdities. Where a good programmer is intelligent, a good product manager is smart.
I was surprised he didn't include this Dalrymple quote, "propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control."
It captures the issue more succintly, but it would also have limited the reach of the article. I'm sure he's familiar with it, but the author was probably just being smart.
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