My feeling is that these people are right about some things where the society is wrong, but also wrong plus horribly overconfident about other things.
Maybe it is a curse of being significantly more intelligent than most people around you. Nine times of ten, people around do something obviously stupid. Once, it is you who is stupid about things that most people get approximately right, but you cannot distinguish it from the former case—also you are already stuck in the belief that the other people are always wrong (especially if they don’t have enough verbal skills or academic credentials).
Also, underestimating domain-specific knowledge, and thinking that general intelligence can solve everything even without the relevant data. Not necessarily arguing literally from the “first principles”, but rather having very little and very unrepresentative data (an equivalent of seeing a few youtube videos on the topic today), and believing that this is enough as long as you use a lot of brainpower to extrapolate from these data.
My feeling is that these people are right about some things where the society is wrong, but also wrong plus horribly overconfident about other things.
Maybe it is a curse of being significantly more intelligent than most people around you. Nine times of ten, people around do something obviously stupid. Once, it is you who is stupid about things that most people get approximately right, but you cannot distinguish it from the former case—also you are already stuck in the belief that the other people are always wrong (especially if they don’t have enough verbal skills or academic credentials).
Also, underestimating domain-specific knowledge, and thinking that general intelligence can solve everything even without the relevant data. Not necessarily arguing literally from the “first principles”, but rather having very little and very unrepresentative data (an equivalent of seeing a few youtube videos on the topic today), and believing that this is enough as long as you use a lot of brainpower to extrapolate from these data.