Why Smart People are Stupid

[uberam3rica]

Smart people can be very stupid. Take my brother for example. He is very smart, but he is an idiot. He has no common sense. All his intelligence is book smarts.

 

[marmal4de]

On a tangental note; the Dunning-Krueger effect, essentially the exact opposite effect.

 

[dougc905]

Back to the cognitive bias, perhaps these "smart" people are more susceptible because of a combination the speed of processing information and the importance that they place upon the question. That is, if the question is deemed important, then more time is spent processing, otherwise the person just throws out a quick guess. It could also be a confidence issue where the person isn't all that concerned with the way that others regard them.
Now I'm not claiming to be all that smart, but I have experienced this with a fellow I used to speak with at cigar events. This fellow would always pepper me with logic based questions and then feel good about himself when I got them wrong. Frankly, I was more insulted than concerned with getting the questions wrong.

 

[locopony]

I didnt take it that way at all.

 

[profpar]

The cognitive domain of learning actually consists of both knowledge acquisition as well as the development of reasoning formalism (I.e. development of critical and quantitative reasoning, being able to think conceptually, operating at the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy). If an educational system solely focuses on subject content and only asses algorithmicly it is feasible to produce an "educated" person who is restricted to pattern and algorithmic (procedural) methods of problem solving. The article seems to allude to such an educated person. Alternatively a person who's education has included the development of formal reasoning skills, particularly to the level of meta cognition, I.e. an "out of box" thinker is quite capable of avoiding "cognitive bias."

 

[voorhees]

That being said... at the college I work, someone once told me these were the smartest dubasses he'd ever worked with.

 

[brian64]

If an educational system solely focuses on subject content and only asses algorithmicly it is feasible to produce an "educated" person who is restricted to pattern and algorithmic (procedural) methods of problem solving.

Very insightful comments profpar. The portion quoted is essentially the point the late great George Carlin famously made, but also pointed out that this does not happen by accident, but by design...because it is exactly the way the "owners" want it. As Carlin put it, they want people who are just smart enough to run the machines and fill out the paperwork (procedural), but not smart enough to figure out how badly they're being screwed (critical/conceptual/higher level).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q