One of my role models early in my career, one of the most empathetic I’ve seen at her level in our company told me during the 2016 election cycle that she was voting against Hillary due to Miley Cyrus supporting her. I understood it to mean she was against women being publicly slutty or something and the sluts were pro Hillary. I still keep in touch with this person as an outside advisor / coach when career topics come up and there are reasons not to talk to anyone in my closer circuit about them, but I just decided then and there to never talk about anything other than career advice and leadership again because it hurt to lose respect and I would rather not know other viewpoints which would inevitably erode respect further.
TLDR we all will have people in our lives who we believe to be smart and decent and then something will come out that immediately shatters that image
Stupid ideas take hold in smart people all the time because most popular stupid ideas appeal to some emotional narrative that people are susceptible no matter how smart they are.
It always shocks me to finally hear one of these revered right wing dipshits talk when they have a goofy voice like Peterson or Ben Shapiro. If those dudes were liberals they’d get dragged constantly by the right for how they sounded but since they’re on the right team it gets overlooked.
I got compared to Elon by a retiring executive because I am pretty good at providing solutions before my bosses know there is a problem - AKA innovation. Little did he know I’m comparable to Elon because my investments have been awful and I shitpost frequently.
It’s impossible to be “objectively brilliant” if you are proactively pimping out dumbshits like Peterson or Musk. It’s much more likely if you think they are “objectively brilliant” you have been duped by these people in much the same way they were by Peterson or Musk.
ITT we use the fact that smart people like stupid things to feel good about how we only like all the right things, rather than considering how easy it would be for us to actually be liking some very wrong things without knowing it.
Is an appropriate level of introspection and critical thinking broadly applied required to be characterized as brilliant? Ime some people have weirdly compartmentalized intelligence which allows them to be brilliant in their field, and yet remain complete dumbshits in other areas.
The funny thing is that it probably goes the other way too. I’m sure that there has been at a couple of people who thought “I used to think Melk was a pretty sharp guy, but have you heard that Marxist* shit he spews?”
*not actually Marxist. Of course, none of them have read Marx, but they would absolutely call it that. It’s just a term they love to throw around. It sounds insulting and makes them feel intellectual.
The reality is that “objectively brilliant” doesn’t actually exist. Lots of people are really good at some things and bad at other things. Expertise or achievement in one area doesn’t guarantee expertise or achievement in another area. Often people are smart in one field because they dedicated significant effort into honing that depth of skill and knowledge, but they are complete morons in other areas because they didn’t dedicate any serious effort to understand it. The top 100 chess players in the world includes some people who had to be brow beaten to wear masks in tournaments during the pandemic because of anti-science beliefs and includes some people who whole heartedly believe Putin’s transparent propaganda. How can you square that the idea of objective intelligence? Some of the most advanced ability in the world to consume, process, and memorize information and perform visualizations and calculations didn’t help these guys when it was their emotional preference to just accept narratives. In practice “intelligence” is both a set of abilities and a set of behaviors. And people change their behaviors in response to different circumstances and stimuli.
If I ever heard someone described as “objectively brilliant” I would likely assume they were a dimwit. Probably someone with delusions of grandeur. And almost certainly a guy. Seems unlikely you would describe an actual smart person that way.
