[madnak]

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Perhaps any real-world example of what I'm speculating exists would involve a "trick question" flavour. Where the mental habits of logical, deep thinking people led them to make unwarranted assumptions which led away from the correct answer. Do you think the "groupthink" phenomenon Phil153 mentioned exists? If it does, isnt it reasonable it exists at some level amongst the "group" of high IQ individuals - from adopting similar mental habits and approaches to problems and acquiring similar blind spots?

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But high IQs are better at checking their assumptions and at avoiding groupthink. In a specific case it's true that a genius could be more likely to be incorrect because of increased exposure to some erroneous assumption (while a total bumpkin, unaware of the assumption, wouldn't be limited by it). But that seems pretty thin to me. It would be a very contingent situation, and a random approach would have to be superior to the genius approach (in other words, a low IQ person might do better than a high IQ person, but only if a coin-flip would also do better than the high IQ person).

Even in these cases, a person with very high IQ but without a conventional upbringing/education (someone raised in the bush for instance) should be a massive favorite over anyone with a low IQ.