Comment by Remnant44

This is my favorite passage from the article:

"Beyond this, people make mistakes. Brilliance represents an upper bound on the quality of your reasoning, but there is no lower bound. The most brilliant scientist in the world can take really dumb stances. Indeed, the success that often goes with brilliance can encourage a blind stubbornness. Not always—some top scientists are admirably skeptical of their own ideas—but sometimes. And if you want to be stubborn, again, there’s no lower bound on how wrong you can be. The best driver in the world can still decide to turn the steering wheel and crash into a tree."

It is one of those profound realizations that seems so obviously true it's irrelevant. But then ask if we evaluate the decisions and statements from smart people this way. Generally the answer is no.

While the brilliant person will have higher quality reasoning on average due to the stretching of the distribution... any individual belief or statement they come up with is being drawn from a distribution that still includes boneheadely wrong.