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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Perhaps I'm far more intelligent than you or perhaps I've just not met as brilliant people but I've never ever experienced the sort of general intelligence gulf you describe. If anything my experience has been the opposite, I've assumed general competence and found just general overconfidence.

Sure, there are people vastly superior to me in specific domains but not in general. They're often competent in other areas as well but not experts to the degree they are in their chosen field. Conversely, there are people less intelligent than me that occasionally are right about things that I'm wrong about even if they can't articulate why they believe what they believe very well, especially when they have a lot of experience in the subject matter.

To me it seems very common for great domain specific expertise to lead to generalised overconfidence rather than being an indicator of general competence.

This sort of thing seems especially true about mental illnesses. I'm sure John Nash was incomparably superior to me at math but that doesn't mean that the FBI really was sending him messages through light beams or that literally everyone wearing red ties are commies.

Ideology is almost as bad as mental illness at polluting thinking.