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March 06, 2005
"Scary Smart" Or Scary "Smart"?
Of all the many unanswered questions I have regarding the psychology of political belief, I guess the most persistent one is: "How can a person become a blazing success at his or her chosen profession and yet exhibit the inability to assess the difference between George Bush and Adolph Hitler."
My own private name for this behavior is the "Shockley Effect", named after William Shockley who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the transistor. He later severely damaged his reputation by insisting that there were genetic differences in intelligence between different races.
Today, over at The Conservative Philosopher I found this:
Richard A. Posner on Academic Idiocy (KBJ)
Most people, including most academics, are confusing mixtures. They are moral and immoral, kind and cruel, smart and stupid—yes, academics are often smart and stupid, and this may not be sufficiently recognized by the laity. They are particularly likely to be both smart and stupid in an era of specialization, when academic success is likely to crown not the person of broad general intelligence but rather the person with highly developed intellectual skills in a particular field, and both the field and the skills that conduce to preeminence in it may be bulkheaded from the other fields of thought. The brilliant mathematician, physicist, artist, or historian may be incompetent in dealing with political or economic issues. Einstein's political and economic writings are a case in point. Picasso's artistic, or Sartre's literary and philosophical, or George Bernard Shaw's dramatic genius did not inoculate them against Stalinism, or Heidegger's philosophical genius against Nazism. But if the compartmentalization of competence, and the underlying disunity of the self, are not widely recognized—and they are not—a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot. It doesn't help that successful people tend to exaggerate their versatility; abnormal self-confidence is a frequent cause and almost invariable effect of great success.
(Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline [Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001], 51 [italics in original; footnote omitted])
This is one of the most cogent statements of the problem I've seen.
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