It seems to me that a lot of "smart" people are capable of applying their intelligence in some spheres, but not others.
Is this too obvious to be worth mentioning? I say it is not too obvious, for many bloggers have said of Overcoming Bias: "It is impossible, no one can completely eliminate bias." I don't care if the one is a professional economist, it is clear that they have not yet grokked the Quantitative Way as it applies to everyday life and matters like personal self-improvement. That which I cannot eliminate may be well worth reducing.
It also seems to me that this view is shared by other people. Can anyone point me to an article that does a good job arguing for it?
Tangential point: in deciding how smart I think someone is, for me, a lot of it has to do with how low they're capable of stooping. (I know this is just me saying "this is how I define a word", which is a pretty useless thing to say... but at the same time maybe there's something deeper that I'm trying to articulate that I haven't been able to spell out precisely with the above statement, but that maybe people could understand via some sort of empathetic inference?)
It seems to me that a lot of "smart" people are capable of applying their intelligence in some spheres, but not others.
What is your exact claim? That people don't have the ability to apply their intelligence if they chose to do so or that they simple don't choose to apply their intelligence?
What to you mean with intelligence? If it's something like rational thinking, many people use different standards in different domains. A person who on the one hand believes that placebo-blind trials are necessary to establish causation can still believe th...
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