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NancyLebovitz comments on Some rationality tweets - Less Wrong
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I don't think this necessarily applies to the arts. Or are you just saying that fields that measure quality poorly will attract all sorts of people?
Also, Goodhart's Law applies-- any field with high rewards will attract people who will try to modify the reward system in their favor.
Should that be "ignore the existence of uninteresting things"?
No; people are often discouraged from trying addictive things.
Ahh, I originally read this as evolutionary pressure, which I think goes in the opposite direction in this case. Dependence on some external stimulus can be adaptive if that stimulus is readily available and has otherwise beneficial effects. It'd be interesting to get a look at some of the game theoretic dynamics of intelligence, novel thinking, and so on - while you would expect an evolutionary pressure to entertain (at least some limited number of) novel ideas, it seems there may also be evolutionary pressure to discourage others from doing so (to maintain social cohesion, i.e., make your neighbours more predictable).
I question this best people tweet also. Some great people become public school teachers.
Some fields are simply harder to measure than others. I have previously known a physicist who DEFINED any question that he couldn't address using the scientific method as "uninteresting." Included in his list of uninteresting questions were things like what is human consciousness. It may be more valuable to search for excellence in fields where the metrics don't work in a trivially transparent way since the fields where it does work will be adequately investigated by following the crowd.
The arts are an excellent counter-example disproving the claim that able people avoid professions where the measure of product quality is poor. But there are examples within the sciences, too. The summaries I've seen (as well as folk knowledge) indicate that chemists are substantially less intelligent than psychologists. (Physicists, however, are smarter than psychologists.)
I think the mistaken assumption stems from the egocentric fallacy: we exaggerate how similar others are to ourselves. Recognition is only one of various motives in choosing a field, and let's not overlook the obvious, interest in the subject matter.
"Best people" is vague. "More intelligent" might not be equivalent to "best".
Still, I'm intrigued by psychologists turning out to be more intelligent (higher IQ?) than chemists. Maybe chemists tend towards very strong spacial and mathematical intelligence, but are definitely not as good on verbal, while psychologists are very strong on verbal but not comparably weak on spacial/mathematical. This is just a guess, though.