I've kinda stopped believing that high intelligence always leads to high quality discussions. Every HN thread about math or physics has many misguided comments, coming from people who are probably very smart in their own fields. I've seen that on LessWrong too, really smart math/CS people talking about biology can get demolished by a second year biology student. Noticing my own cluelessness about a topic is a very subtle skill, it took me years to learn and I'm probably not there yet. Sometimes I even feel that math/CS education has damaged me in some ways, made me too arrogant, though obviously it gave me a huge advantage in other ways.
> I've seen that on LessWrong too, really smart math/CS people talking about biology can get demolished by a second year biology student.
IMO, LessWrong and other communities based around critical thinking tend to either foster a sense of intellectual arrogance or attract people who already have that quality.
> Sometimes I even feel that math/CS education has damaged me in some ways, made me too arrogant, though obviously it gave me a huge advantage in other way.
A lot of education in science and engineering is based around teaching people to walk up to a problem they are completely unfamiliar with and make a reasonable attempt at solving it. That is an extremely useful skill in some cases, but very dangerous in others.
It's dangerous when it leads a person to choose "I'm going to figure this out on my own" over "I'm going to find someone who can solve this" in cases where they really should have known to pick the latter.
Watch what happens when you let the post doc PhD "help" set up a scan in the MR scanner. It's amazing/terrifying what a very clever person will do in an unfamiliar environment with different rules to the real world.
