i don't know if this is a joke or not :-) perhaps i was projecting? in any case, sure, the people you mention (e.g., von neuman) were wrong about a lot of things. so was isaac newton. definitely not stupid. i agree.
in any case, let me elaborate. i recall the higher your IQ, the less likely you are to fall into the traps of cognitive biases and heuristics which lead you to the wrong conclusion (i think bryan caplan reports this data). of course, smart people still tend to fall into these traps (especially when they have ideological blinkers), but my experience is that with smart people you can at least eat away at the intuitive foundations which serve as blocks to rational thinking. i've never had this experience with stupid people because they lack the basic cognitive toolkit to tear down the edifice of irrationality.
and i have socialized with stupid people quite a bit. those less wrong readers who've met me could probably intuit (if they are the subset who have intuition! :-) that i have no great problems with socializing with stupid people. drink beer, talk about sports & sex, and it's all good.
in fact, let me offer a concrete example. i have a friend about 1 std above the mean in IQ. he's an atheist, and open to all sorts of counter-intuitive ideas, and has an interest in intellectual topics. unfortunately, he has great difficulty with basic mathematics and following interlocking & contingent concepts very quickly. given enough time i can get the gist of the sort of ideas across to him, but it is very time & labor intensive (he simply can't think in terms of probability distributions for whatever reason). so over the years we've moved away from intellectual topics because of the frustrations which emerge. we both have an interest in history for example (to give a non-technical domain), but i read books much faster than he does and retain much more. this asymmetry means that it is hard to explore our common interest with any degree of parity.
he would have been a great candidate for the peer group of people who are interested in topics mooted on less wrong, but many of you would find it frustrating and boring talking to him because when he can follow he is in slo-mo, and some concepts and methods are simply not tractable for him. eventually he would become dispirited and withdraw.
so that's why i think stupidity is a problem. i wish it weren't, but i think it is.
i'll link to eliezer on my blog.
Razib: "i recall the higher your IQ, the less likely you are to fall into the traps of cognitive biases and heuristics which lead you to the wrong conclusion (i think bryan caplan reports this data)."
Caplan's point is narrow than that. I can't pull out specifics since my copy of The Myth of the Rational Voter is out on loan at the moment, but he's only talking about a narrow range of biases relating to the public perception of economics. I was also under the impression that Caplan's main point was that education acts as a debiaser rather than I...
Razib summarized my entire cognitive biases talk at the Singularity Summit 2009 as saying: "Most people are stupid."
Hey! That's a bit unfair. I never said during my talk that most people are stupid. In fact, I was very careful not to say, at any point, that people are stupid, because that's explicitly not what I believe.
I don't think that people who believe in single-world quantum mechanics are stupid. John von Neumann believed in a collapse postulate.
I don't think that philosophers who believe in the "possibility" of zombies are stupid. David Chalmers believes in zombies.
I don't even think that theists are stupid. Robert Aumann believes in Orthodox Judaism.
And in the closing sentence of my talk on cognitive biases and existential risk, I did not say that humanity was devoting more resources to football than existential risk prevention because we were stupid.
There's an old joke that runs as follows:
A motorist is driving past a mental hospital when he gets a flat tire.
He goes out to change the tire, and sees that one of the patients is watching him through the fence.
Nervous, trying to work quickly, he jacks up the car, takes off the wheel, puts the lugnuts into the hubcap -
And steps on the hubcap, sending the lugnuts clattering into a storm drain.
The mental patient is still watching him through the fence.
The motorist desperately looks into the storm drain, but the lugnuts are gone.
The patient is still watching.
The motorist paces back and forth, trying to think of what to do -
And the patient says,
"Take one lugnut off each of the other tires, and you'll have three lugnuts on each."
"That's brilliant!" says the motorist. "What's someone like you doing in an asylum?"
"I'm here because I'm crazy," says the patient, "not because I'm stupid."