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The more you look for it the more you recognize that a lot of the people in charge of politics (and business for that matter) aren't smart or knowledgeable or even master strategists, they're just the sort of person who skirt through life through some combination of charisma and utter willingness to say whatever it takes to please the people who can advance their career.
Like you expect the dumb shit they say to be an act by a keen mind who understands politics deeply and is manipulating the public into advancing their interests, but they're often just fucking idiots with no principles who whenever they've been stymied due to their idiocy just let it slide off their back and move on to a new path with utmost confidence.
Jill Stein isn't going to slink away into the darkness after a public demonstration of political ignorance for a lady whose whole public persona is supposed to be about politics, she's just going to forget about it and keep the scam going. Not knowing the basics of government isn't going to stop her from saying she knows how to fix the problems with government. Not being on the ballot in states is unimportant for whether it sounds good to her in the moment to say they can win in all 50 states. They're all just unimportant "facts" and you can just keep talking and most people will forget or not know that you're an idiot.
Jill Stein may be an idiot politician with laughably unrealistic positions and a totally unworkable take on foreign policy (even dining with Putin) but she’s also a physician who practiced internal medicine for decades.
She’s not an idiot in general. I think she’s just unbelievably naive about people and their motivations.
Ben Carson was a (by all accounts excellent) brain surgeon.
I'm sorry, but that man is stupid.
Brains are weird, man. I work in a STEM field, but I had 3 or 4 semesters of University before declaring my major, and therefore I was able to get a much more well-rounded education than my colleagues, and I will tell you: It shows. Big time.
Lots of people who are great at what they do, and when it comes to their one very specific, silo'd, expertise, they're brilliant.
But in terms of general intelligence, rationality, ability to think critically in a novel situation, etc? Not bright.
Then there's the old (true) joke: What do you call someone who graduated at the bottom of their class in medical school? Doctor.
I have worked for a university for over 25 years so I have seen in all. My first wife, who also worked for the same university, worked in a computer lab in the psych dept and they would have the most domain specific intelligent people with no common sense whatsoever. Her and a colleague used to joke about the PhD students “I bet she runs with scissors”.
It's honestly a real shame. STEM careers are obviously extremely important, but we are doing students a major disservice by limiting the scope of their education so much. Maybe these degrees should be five year programs...
Did Ben Carson attempt to do surgery on himself? Otherwise I can’t explain at all how dumb he was. Wow! Thanks for the example.
Probably after he got shot by his best friend and the bullet ricocheted off his belt buckle and hit his friend killing him (wasn't that the story? Lol I'm not going to bother looking it up. If I got any details wrong, the reality was at least just as stupid).
A specialist in one field isn't necessarily adept in another, and particularly coming from STEM to humanities seems a particularly treacherous transition because so much about humans is based on premises that cold, logical STEM principles just aren't aware of. That doesn't mean we STEMs are stupid, we just don't know just how much there is that we don't know and would need to know before we can understand, let alone predict human behaviour.
I know I've found myself grossly misjudging human reactions in some case because humans are complex and there are so mamy premises and factors affecting individual behaviour and so many more for collective behaviour that they're effectively non-deterministic and even predicting the probabilities requires such familiarity with the people or demographics, respectively.
All that is to say: Yes, I think so too. She's well-educated, but not above tripping over the same, common stone that many smart people have stumbled on.
I have a relatively common "rare" condition and saw over 40 doctors while seeking a diagnosis. I can personally attest that most physicians range between not very bright to astoundingly stupid. You don't have to be intelligent to become a physician, just dedicated with access to the right resources.
You are assuming physicians have to be smart or compassionate or understanding.