A lot of the 'learned blankness' or black box problem (I prefer that) seems to me to be directly related to how afraid someone is of feeling (or worse, looking) stupid.

There are exceptions of course, but by and large the people that seem to hit that wall (or, at least have a higher than average number of those walls to hit) are people that were told over and over that they're dumb, or that pursuing 'X' is dumb.

And - they become that, or at least an unreasonable facsimile thereof. Within the realm of their expertise it's very obvious they're highly intelligent, but they either assume they are just as much an authority in unrelated realms without actually educating themselves in that realm, or they get out of their comfort zone and they stop - two divergent attempts to attempt to avoid looking dumb.

I'm convinced the average IQ is actually 300+ and we simply evoke it more and more as we're less and less afraid of feeling stupid.

Jonnan