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djcb comments on High Status and Stupidity: Why? - Less Wrong
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What about some concrete examples of people who have lost their edge because they achieved high status? Or some counter examples?
If I am thinking of some people of high status in different intellectual fields, say, scientists like Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Richard Dawkins, Bertrand Russel or even technologists like Linus Torvalds, Paul Graham; I'm not sure I can see the kind of "High Status Stupidity" there. Or did I just pick the wrong examples?
I have a mysterious feeling that it would have been much, much easier for me to have a smart conversation about the intelligence explosion with Douglas Hofstadter if I'd talked to him before Godel, Escher, Bach was published. People here have been questioning what we think we know and how we think we know it, which is right and proper; but does anyone really think this is not true?
It seems surprising to me that Hofstadter would have difficulty having such a conversation today (even with a grad student), but maybe you've tried.
(And, of course, I was surprised when you recounted that he thought Einstein belonged in the transhuman end of the intelligence spectrum.)
Did he think that? Or was it that Einstein was close to an upper bound on intelligence for any mind, artificial or otherwise?
ETA: Someone here once linked to a Usenet conversation in which Greg Egan expressed a similar view.
Well, either way, it's surprising.
A great example would be Arthur Conan Doyle. When it came to Sherlock Holmes, he was a brilliant writer but failed when he tried anything else, including his belief in spiritualism and the supernatural.
Why should he have succeeded at anything else? You don't need "high status stupidity" to explain his failures. Regression toward the mean would suffice, just like with "one hit wonders" in music.
If we're going to allow examples from the arts we can also list the Wachowski siblings and George Lucas.
ETA : Actually, now I think both of those were due to the fact that successful writers/directors/etc are given less oversight by financiers.
Yet less oversight still might lead them to behave less intelligently. Another item for the list?
Albert Einstein might actually have been a good example. He did his most important work being a patent clerk and having no status. Later in his life you could call his refusal of quantum dynamics "High Status Stupidity".
What do you mean by that? the dice line? EPR shows that he was quite willing to think about QM.
Einstein was not that great a scientist in his later years.