Just your basic premise is wrong. Is China run by the most educated people, or a dictatorship? Russia? There are a handful of other dictatorships around the world where this is the same, and they care above all to subservience to the state and those in power, not to what is best for the country.
In many other places, you don't have dictators but populist leaders being elected based on widespread misinformation on social media. A democracy is only as intelligent as the leaders that its voters vote for. If you have a poorly educated public then you will usually have bad leaders.
Thirdly he incentives for going into government, generally speaking, tend to push away intelligent people who would rather safely work in the sciences or in the private sector earning a good income than risk being the face of public harassment as a politician or being the director for the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (fauci).
And lastly its because the education we receive in school simply isn't enough to prevent us from making terrible decisions. Jordan Peterson for example, is literally insane in many areas - he is totally detached from reality. But he was a professor at harvard for a time and has otherwise published well-received papers in psychology. So even being educated is not a shield against bad thinking. Actually people's biases tend to be incredibly destructive and drive highly intelligent people to believe in all sorts of nonsensical conspiracies. So the whole idea that intelligence alone is sufficient is wrong. You also have to have the mental strength to live freely of biases, to be self-critical, to have the strength of will to look at both sides of the argument and form your opinion strictly on the evidence and not be persuaded by your gut feelings.
A lot of people don't have this...and because of those biases, their intelligence is sabotaged in the service of deeply wrongheaded views.
But altogether I think we are generally headed in a more positive direction, because social media sort of forces people to engage and interact slightly more than it leads people to form bubbles. At least from my view.
In many other places, you don't have dictators but populist leaders being elected based on widespread misinformation on social media. A democracy is only as intelligent as the leaders that its voters vote for. If you have a poorly educated public then you will usually have bad leaders.
Thirdly he incentives for going into government, generally speaking, tend to push away intelligent people who would rather safely work in the sciences or in the private sector earning a good income than risk being the face of public harassment as a politician or being the director for the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (fauci).
And lastly its because the education we receive in school simply isn't enough to prevent us from making terrible decisions. Jordan Peterson for example, is literally insane in many areas - he is totally detached from reality. But he was a professor at harvard for a time and has otherwise published well-received papers in psychology. So even being educated is not a shield against bad thinking. Actually people's biases tend to be incredibly destructive and drive highly intelligent people to believe in all sorts of nonsensical conspiracies. So the whole idea that intelligence alone is sufficient is wrong. You also have to have the mental strength to live freely of biases, to be self-critical, to have the strength of will to look at both sides of the argument and form your opinion strictly on the evidence and not be persuaded by your gut feelings.
A lot of people don't have this...and because of those biases, their intelligence is sabotaged in the service of deeply wrongheaded views.
But altogether I think we are generally headed in a more positive direction, because social media sort of forces people to engage and interact slightly more than it leads people to form bubbles. At least from my view.
