The scariest thing in this world is that so many people easily buy into stupidity. And they are convinced that they are right! This is just one of the most obvious examples. The irony of lack of intelligence is that, by definition, it is very difficult to know that you lack it. And it is very easy to convince yourself that you don't.
What is intelligence? How does one become intelligent? And how does one guard against its lack?
And intellectual prowess is not intelligence. A computer can have intellectual prowess, the idiots who invented very destructive weapons had great intellectual prowess. Intellect is not intelligence. And the question is about intelligence.
Sustained attention certainly has something to do with it. Not focus, attention.
“Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.”
— Thomas Sowell
Tom Mueller on SpaceX's early days: “If people were negative, they were not in the next meeting.”
“Elon was technically very strong, even though he was just learning about rockets. The one thing I noticed, if people were negative, they were not in the next meeting. He said, a company is a bunch of vectors. Each person is a vector and they need to point in the direction that you want to go. Bureaucracy and office politics and low morale, it's almost random vectors. He was always about making all the vectors which are all the employees pointing in the right direction. Forward, moving forward.”
From BBC's documentary The Elon Musk Show, 2022