There’s also what one could call the “baroni effect”. I’m pretty sure that Robin Hanson has linked to this article. The gist is that, e.g., Italian academics esconced in high status positions will intentionally signal their (academic) incompetence in order to make it more credible that they will viciously defend their perks—because an incompetent could not profit by doing anything else.
Anyway, the question is: why do you tend to get the impression from high status people that they’re dumber than they ought to be, given everything else you know about them? One more reason is that people are biased to see people of perceived higher status as dumber. Such a bias would be especially acute in a very intelligent person, who would regularly see dumber people of higher status than he. Plainly you think that the higher status people you discuss here have higher status than you yourself. This feeds directly into this post of yours, in my opinion. I would be very surprised if the instinctive tendency of a teenager to rebel against his parents, in order to attain greater status, was not positively correlated with the disparity between their “true” status and the status that as parents they claim for themselves. By direct analogy, when we see anyone who has high status but seems less intelligent than we are (or less strong, less brave, less sexy...) the urge arises to expose that fact, to create a comparison on that point between them and us, and thus to displace them as the one with high status. Such an urge, whether acted on or not, will nevertheless cause us to undervalue some characteristics of high status people.
There’s also what one could call the “baroni effect”. I’m pretty sure that Robin Hanson has linked to this article. The gist is that, e.g., Italian academics esconced in high status positions will intentionally signal their (academic) incompetence in order to make it more credible that they will viciously defend their perks—because an incompetent could not profit by doing anything else.
Anyway, the question is: why do you tend to get the impression from high status people that they’re dumber than they ought to be, given everything else you know about them? One more reason is that people are biased to see people of perceived higher status as dumber. Such a bias would be especially acute in a very intelligent person, who would regularly see dumber people of higher status than he. Plainly you think that the higher status people you discuss here have higher status than you yourself. This feeds directly into this post of yours, in my opinion. I would be very surprised if the instinctive tendency of a teenager to rebel against his parents, in order to attain greater status, was not positively correlated with the disparity between their “true” status and the status that as parents they claim for themselves. By direct analogy, when we see anyone who has high status but seems less intelligent than we are (or less strong, less brave, less sexy...) the urge arises to expose that fact, to create a comparison on that point between them and us, and thus to displace them as the one with high status. Such an urge, whether acted on or not, will nevertheless cause us to undervalue some characteristics of high status people.