I’m friends with several university professors. One of them has a comment on RateMyProfessor that reads “She’s the dumbest smart person I’ve ever met.” I’ve also spent several years working with Honeywell, with a bunch of people with masters degrees or PhDs in engineering. They are all, collectively, some of the dumbest people I know. And they’re uniquely dumb in smart ways. They don’t pull on a door marked push because they missed the sign; they pull on it because they come up with a complicated rationalization that “push” actually means “pull.”

And I think I’ve identified the cause: lack of continual contact with reality. I’ve yelled on a conference call with a bunch of Honeywell engineers “STOP FUCKING HYPOTHESING AND CHECK THE LOGS!” Smart people are prone to forming their own little bubbles; groups of smart people even moreso. They suffer from a lack of continually having their bubbles popped by abrasive facts, or dumb people who point out the obvious.

I’m having work done on my house, and my contractor is an endless source of simple, “this is how it works” data. I conceive of interesting structures for my wife’s greenhouse, and then he explains why it won’t work in single syllable words.

This is the primary reason conversations on HN involving SBF, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Steve Jobs, Eliezer Yudkowsky etc can be so tedious

Exactly.