This essay begins with a historical question that has acquired new dimensions in our own era: why have the educated, the cultivated, and the intelligent (from the intellectuals of the 1789 French Revolution to the economists of the 2008 financial crisis and the elites of Silicon Valley) repeatedly failed in their assessments, judgements, and predictions? Is high intelligence a guarantee of seeing clearly? Drawing on historical evidence and contemporary research in psychology and sociology (from Dunning and Kruger to Kahan, Tetlock, Milgram, and Taleb) this essay argues that the fallibility of elites arises not from a lack of intelligence, but from four layers of structural mechanisms: concealed cognitive bias, group identity, specialist tunnel vision, and distance from the real consequences of decisions. The conclusion is that greater intelligence not only fails to eliminate error, but may sometimes make it deeper and more resistant. What history demands of us is not greater intelligence, but an uncompromising commitment to reality and intellectual humility.
Ramin Saadat (Fri,) studied this question.
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