The smartest person I know once tried to convince me that 5G towers were causing COVID. He had a PhD in biochemistry. He sent me a 40-page PDF dense enough to impress a doctoral committee.
I didn’t read it. Not because I was too arrogant to entertain a challenge to my assumptions, but because I’ve learned something over the years that most people never internalise: intelligence is not a vaccine against stupidity. It’s a more sophisticated immune system — one that sometimes turns autoimmune and attacks the host. Smart people aren’t better at finding the truth. They’re better at defending whatever truth they already prefer.
The real question isn’t “how can smart people be so stupid?” It’s “what makes them so much better at it?”
Plato described people chained in a cave, watching shadows on a wall and mistaking them for reality. That was 2,400 years ago. We’ve upgraded the cave. The shadows are in 4K now. The chains are algorithmic. And the people who insist they see clearest are often staring at the brightest illusion.
Social media didn’t invent the problem. It industrialised it.
The algorithm doesn’t care whether you’re right. It cares whether you’re engaged. Smart people engage harder than anyone — they comment, debate, share with thoughtful annotations, write rebuttals. Every click trains the machine to serve them more of what they already believe, dressed up as revelation.
This is the core of it, and it applies to all of us.
The human brain evolved to survive, not to be accurate. Survival means belonging to a tribe, maintaining status, avoiding threats, and conserving energy. Working out whether a complex theory holds water? Evolution didn’t reward that. Spotting which member of the group might turn on you? That kept you alive.
When a smart person encounters information that threatens their tribe’s position, they don’t evaluate it neutrally. They mobilise their intelligence to neutralise it. The smarter you are, the more elegantly you neutralise. I’ve done it myself — used intelligence as armour instead of inquiry.
Psychologists call it motivated reasoning. I call it the reason a Rhodes Scholar can believe the earth is flat and make it sound almost plausible for 45 minutes — until you notice every “fact” bends toward the same conclusion and no contrary evidence survives contact with their argument.
The Dunning-Kruger effect gets cited endlessly in online arguments, but people usually get it backwards. It’s not just that the incompetent overestimate themselves. It’s that very smart people underestimate how much of their intelligence is deployed in service of their biases rather than their curiosity. The PhD gives you a bigger toolbox for rationalising what you already wanted to believe.
There’s another layer here that gets less attention. For many smart people, intelligence isn’t just a trait — it’s identity. It’s who they are. And when intelligence becomes identity, defending a belief becomes defending your sense of self-worth. That doesn’t make you more careful with your reasoning. It makes you more invested in being right, regardless of whether you actually are.
New Zealand is small enough that groupthink operates differently here.
In America, you can find a community that believes almost anything — lizard people, flat earth, celebrity clones — and never encounter pushback, because you can curate your entire social existence around people who agree with you. Here, the numbers don’t allow it. Your tribe is your suburb, your workplace, your kids’ school community. America gives you infinite niche tribes. New Zealand gives you forced pluralism. You have to get along with people who voted differently, because you’ll be sitting next to them at the school prizegiving.
So the pressure isn’t to believe something wild. It’s to believe something fashionable.
A few years back, half the people I knew in Auckland business circles were quoting Nassim Taleb and talking earnestly about antifragility. Most hadn’t read the book. They’d read a summary. Or a blog post about the summary. Or they’d watched a 14-minute YouTube explainer and decided they’d grasped the entire framework with sufficient depth to deploy it at dinner parties.
That’s not stupidity. That’s social signalling dressed as intellectual engagement. Smart people are better at it than anyone, because they know which signals carry status and which don’t.
We talk about conspiracy theories as though they’re intellectual failures — bad logic, missing evidence, faulty premises. But that’s not why people believe them. People believe them because believing makes them part of something.
The flat earth community isn’t full of people who got the physics wrong. It’s full of people who, for the first time, feel like they’re in on the secret while the rest of the world stumbles in the dark. The content is secondary. The belonging is everything.
The same dynamic plays out in mainstream politics. People don’t arrive at their political positions through careful study of policy papers. They arrive at them because those positions signal membership in their preferred tribe. Once you understand that, the endless screaming matches on social media make a different kind of sense. Nobody’s trying to convince anyone. They’re performing loyalty for their side.
A 2024 study published in BMC Psychology tested 601 New Zealanders on cognitive flexibility and found a clear pattern: people with lower flexibility were significantly more likely to hold rigid beliefs, even when presented with credible contradictory evidence. Mental flexibility — not education level, not intelligence — was the strongest predictor of who stayed open and who dug in.
If intelligence doesn’t protect us from bad ideas, what does?
The uncomfortable answer is humility. Not the performative kind where you preface every statement with “in my humble opinion” and then deliver an ironclad pronouncement. Actual humility. The willingness to be wrong in public. The habit of seeking out the strongest version of the argument you disagree with, rather than the weakest one you can comfortably demolish.
Philosophers call this the principle of charity — interpreting your opponent’s argument in its most rational, strongest possible form before responding to it. Almost nobody does it. It’s genuinely hard. It requires you to build a better case for the position you oppose than the person holding it has built themselves, then argue against that.
Most people can’t do it for ten seconds without straw-manning. Most smart people can’t do it for ten seconds either. They just straw-man with better vocabulary.
We have something going for us here, even if we squander it half the time.
In a country of five million, you can’t permanently hide from people who disagree with you. You’ll run into them at the supermarket. Their kids go to school with your kids. You’ll end up on the same sideline on Saturday morning watching under-12s football in the rain.
That’s not a cure for groupthink. But it’s a brake on its worst excesses. The person who holds the opinion you find appalling is also the person who helped you jump-start your car last winter. That cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable. Good. It should be uncomfortable. Discomfort is the friction that stops us sliding all the way into whatever ideological ditch our algorithm has prepared for us.
None of this is comfortable. The alternative is a world where smart people use their intelligence to fortify their ignorance rather than challenge it. We’re already halfway there.
The stupidest thing a smart person can do is assume they’re too smart to believe something stupid. I’ve been that person. You probably have too. The difference is whether we admit it — or reach for another 40‑page PDF to protect the illusion that we’re immune.
Steve Baron is a New Zealand-based political commentator and author. He holds a BA with a double major in Economics and Political Science from the University of Waikato and an Honours Degree in Political Science from Victoria University of Wellington. A former businessman in the advertising industry, he founded the political lobby group Better Democracy NZ. https://stevebaron.co.nz