"stupid people are in charge" is technically correct but misleading.
The idea that really smart people could lead better than the average man has been around at least since Plato. All it takes to cure somebody of this is a good look at places where really smart people were in charge.
There is more to solving political problems than intelligence.
The issue isn't that the average man is dumb, it's that people who are highly motivated and don't think through their positions are more effective in democracies than less motivated, more educated voters.
This was interesting, and I hate to say anything bad about Chris. But I got a whiff that being smart and having a bad academic experience left some emotional marks on him. So the answers for him involve, not surprisingly, smart people outside of academia.
It's a shame, because I think he's on to something with his description of academia getting in the way of true breakout thinking.
This poor dude is actually a case in point. He could not even allow himself the small bit of authority needed to stand up for himself and not get kicked out of college. I imagine that to him, working with shitkickers is a bit like working with plants.
I will say this: be careful of selection bias! Looking back, sure, if I show you a thousand examples that ended poorly your response will be something like "But they weren't really smart. Look how poorly it all turned out!" This is, at best, circular reasoning. The important thing is that, at the time, these folks were the best and brightest and put in charge for that very reason.
Good starting point: http://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Sit...
His chance of doing anything is the same as everybody else.
http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Q&A/Archive.html#Supr...
"Because physics is governed by the scientific method, it deals exclusively with phenomena. Thus, it effectively diverts attention away from the cognitive, categorical aspect of perceptual reality, without which neither phenomena nor scientific theories could exist. Because physics is irreducibly dualistic and takes the fundamental separation of mind and matter as axiomatic, it cannot provide us with a complete picture of reality. It can tell us only what lies outside the subjective observer, not within."
Q: What is IQ?
A: A score on a test.
Grammar shortcomings aside, it was one of the most fun and interesting college courses I took.
This man might be intelligent, but he is very known for making his mind up about something and then not changing it for anything.
"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell has a whole chapter on this guy and people like him, according to Gladwell, Langan has barely had any contact with academia, so the above statement doesn't seem to have much backing. He got thrown out because he couldn't understand the "social norm" of speaking up for himself, something he hints at in the video.
