Human beings can and often are extremely competent in some domains while simultaneously being highly irrational, misinformed, or just ignorant in others. Then you have to consider ideology and social conformity which can both bias people toward holding beliefs that don't make sense regardless of intelligence.
My overall point is that intelligence is only weakly related to logical validity or overall correctness. What and how you think matter quite a bit and those things are learned.
Tech is pretty bad for that.
I try hard to avoid that trap, we seem to live in a world where experts are undervalued and loud confident sounding people are listened to.
It's frustrating since people like simple answers and the loud confident ones are happy to pretend to give them.
"loud confident sounding people" is fairly self-evident
Can you share your definition of "expert", please? :)
The former get a lot of airplay (here and elsewhere). Finding the latter appears to be a whole lot harder.
Psychologists have found that a lot of decision making is rationalisation of an instinctive decision.
Those moments when you stand there thinking why the hell did I just agree to that etc.
Good simile.
>I struggle to understand how anyone could possibly believe [really smart people tend to be right].
You don't really struggle to understand that, do you? It's kinda shoved on us from an early age: "Respect your elders, they have more life experience.", "Do what the teacher says, they're the experts.", etc. It takes a fair amount of willpower to think "wow, no one else sees it this way, or at least if they do, they haven't come up with a solution".
What?
I couldn't believe this statement. It completely neglects the massive differences that exist between people of any intelligence in terms of what and how they think. I'm talking about things like educational level, ideological biases, epistemological approaches to thinking, etc. It also completely neglects the honesty and integrity of the person you are emulating.
To give just one example: I've found that most of the "conspiracy nuts" I've met (people who think we didn't go to the Moon, etc.) are highly intelligent, probably pretty far above average. If anything being highly intelligent makes it much easier to rationalize a ridiculous belief system. Any idiot can imagine a round Earth that spins and orbits the sun but it takes someone with very high intelligence to understand ether vortex theory. Judging by the intricacies of their speculations the "bakers" who assemble bizarre far-fetched conspiracy theories out of QAnon's cold reading act are also quite intelligent.
Con artists also tend to be highly intelligent, hence my comment about honesty and integrity.
For some odd reason it seems like a whole lot of very bright people have adopted this weird kind of biological determinist hard materialist view of cognition and its quality. By materialist I mean it reminds me of Marxist dialectical materialism: the idea that the state of society is a pure function of its technology and other capital. A bunch of people think you can measure someone's IQ and that will tell you how correct their opinions are. Smart people have better opinions because they can think more faster, or something.
I struggle to understand how anyone could possibly believe this. It's patently absurd. It's roughly analogous to saying you can tell the quality of a driver by the performance of the vehicle they are driving, or that the correctness of a computer's output is a pure function of processor speed irrespective of what software it's running.