Comment by molticrystal

>In my experience I've met a ton of extremely high IQ people who believe insane things

My working hypothesis is that in individuals with high IQ, the brain has a stronger propensity to make connections autonomously. Then there is the exposures to common public information, ranging from unscientific beliefs like home remedies and crystals, and noticing in news articles, through reasoning ability, that there are omissions, inaccuracies, and outright lies. This can be great, the doubts and misapprehension about mainstream or even specialist knowledge has caused many breakthrough and discoveries.

But this goes haywire when their brain starts making connections between the nonsense and domains they only have a superficial knowledge of, often overestimating their understanding due to intellectual confidence, often driven by cognitive biases like pattern-seeking or overconfidence. For example, if a high IQ person pursued physics and engineering, they would quickly understand most rocketry and its capacities(moon landings certainly happened), but in less familiar domains, their pattern-seeking can lead to flawed conclusions.

The mix of information(pseudoscience,inaccurate news) that is prominent, as described above, combined with personal predispositions or exposure to specific communities, causes some to lose faith in the mainstream and influences whether they become occultists, moon landing deniers, or the like.