Maybe I worded myself poorly. I meant 'really smart people' not in absolute IQ terms, but more in 'hey this dude believes some things about a subject he has knowledge of and from what I can tell he is well regarded among peers and seems smart'-terms.

That's a bit better but only tends to apply within limited domains. I've met a chemistry Ph.D that would be quite knowledgeable and likely correct when it comes to inorganic chemistry but who believes that the Earth is 6000 years old and that the Noah's Ark story is absolutely literal.

Human beings can and often are extremely competent in some domains while simultaneously being highly irrational, misinformed, or just ignorant in others. Then you have to consider ideology and social conformity which can both bias people toward holding beliefs that don't make sense regardless of intelligence.

My overall point is that intelligence is only weakly related to logical validity or overall correctness. What and how you think matter quite a bit and those things are learned.

In some ways the ones who've mastered a field can be worse, they assume that mastery of an esoteric field translates to mastery of everything.

Tech is pretty bad for that.

I try hard to avoid that trap, we seem to live in a world where experts are undervalued and loud confident sounding people are listened to.

It's frustrating since people like simple answers and the loud confident ones are happy to pretend to give them.

>> we seem to live in a world where experts are undervalued and loud confident sounding people are listened to

"loud confident sounding people" is fairly self-evident

Can you share your definition of "expert", please? :)

The former get a lot of airplay (here and elsewhere). Finding the latter appears to be a whole lot harder.

Depends on which way you look at. I wrote the article from the perspective of a founder, not an investor. The math analogy is a bit stretched though. Following it, the only thing that matters is where you start. If you started in the hill leading up to the global maximum you'd be good. I have no statistics to back this up, but I would suspect reaching a global maximum is more expensive than reaching a local one. Truly world-changing ideas, therefore, don't lend themselves as well to the lean methodology.

I guess it's a matter of scale, like a fractal. If your idea is big enough, it might be easy to get fooled into thinking you are at the top when a small detour might lead to a much higher summit.