[madnak]

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I don't think that such a fact necessarily means that Y must be true. It would be a small piece of evidence in favor of Y being true, but it wouldn't be overwhelming.

It could easily be the case that being smart would put you in a special position which would blind you to the factors surrounding Y. Perhaps you surround yourself with people with similar intelligence so you are insulated from the larger community and therefore hold certain beliefs. Or maybe society treats you differently systematically and this results in your belief that Y is true when it is actually false.

It could even be the case that this increase in intelligence lets this group to notice certain trends around them that most people don't notice, but 30% of them misattribute the cause of these trends to Y. So in this case, the fact that they were smart let them notice something unusual and they misinterpreted its significance.

The fact that such a large percentage of the "smartest people alive" do not believe Y should actually decrease the chance that Y is true unless it is a very complex and nuanced concept.

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I'm assuming ceteris paribus here. This is valid if we know nothing about Y. So long as smart people are consistently and systematically more likely to be right, their opinions should be valued higher than those of dumb people in general. There are some situations in which smart people are less likely to be right, but there are (by definition) many more situations in which smart people are more likely to be right. Since Y is unknown in the OP, all this is irrelevant.

In terms of the IQ as liability argument, I didn't appropriately consider the impact of IQ on the personal history of the individual. I should have made my assumption that all other things are equal explicit. While environmental factors related to IQ may result in a situation in which high IQ individuals are less likely to be correct, I don't think IQ itself is likely to have a negative impact.

This is what I was saying about Tom's example, too - I think we have to assume everyone has the same information, etc.

The situation in which being partially right results in the wrong answer more often than being clueless is interesting, and it's exactly the type of situation that I think a good statistical argument can get at. I was trying to come up with such a statement with my coin-flip response to bunny, but there's something more complete... In these situations, I think the responses of dumb people can be considered random somehow. Maybe I'll be able to articulate it later, or someone else will help out.

I don't think it's possible to say anything interesting about the OP that Tom hasn't already said.