highly successful MDs & research PhDs (eg Neil DeGrasse Tyson).
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is "media science personality" not a successful researcher.
highly successful technocrats (mayors / police chiefs / school superintendent in large metro areas)
It doesn't take that much intelligence to be elected Mayor. Especially if your black in a majority black city and the electorate votes on tribal solidarity. Hence a few infamous cases, like Mayor Marion Barry of DC.
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Ok, while we're nitpicking Paul Graham's essay, I should mention the part of it that struck me as least rational when I read it. Namely, the sloppy way he talks about "poverty", conflating relative and absolute poverty. After all, thanks to advances in technology what's considered poverty today was considered unobtainable luxury several centuries ago.
It should be obvious how focusing on one of these groups and downplaying the significance of the other creates two different political opinions. Paul Graham complains about his critics that they are doing this (and he is right about this), but he does the same thing too, only less blindly... he acknowledges that the other group exists and that something should be done, but that feels merely like a disclaimer so he can display the required virtue, but his focus is somewhere else.
So why are you focusing your complaining on Paul Graham's essay rather than ... (read more)
Basically one huge problem here is that there isn't enough data compared to the number of variables involved.
Not to mention that this is a problem in what Taleb would call extremistan, i.e., the distribution of possible outcomes from intervening, or not-intervening, are fat-tailed and include a lot of rare possibilities that haven't yet shown up in the data at all.