"But He's So Smart!"

It does not seem uncommon for a certain sort of person to defend a position on the basis of its endorsement by some public figure alleged to have a higher than normal level of intelligence.

"But he's so smart!" they will say when anyone challenges them on this.

It is a case of that very basic logical fallacy, the "appeal to authority," one that is the more blatant because alleged high general intelligence is the source of the authority on what may be a very specialized topic, addressing which high intelligence may simply not mean much unless it has been trained and informed and, of course, put to use on the problem in a serious way, which is far from always being the case. The intelligent may on average be better-equipped to form a rigorously thought-out opinion, but they have their areas of special concern, and there are so many issues in the world, and only so many hours in the day, while even the greatest intelligence is uneven in its performance across the full gamut of mental tasks and subject matter, and even among the intelligent few are capable of wholly setting aside prejudice and self-interest. And they often offer opinions in line with all these limitations--even the genuinely accomplished offering only banalities and worse when they speak about something outside the area of their special expertise (and alas, not realizing it themselves).

The illogic of the approach is underlined by the selectivity of the approach, and its vulnerability. Those who appeal to the authority of intelligence in, for example, citing tech billionaires' statements in support of unrestricted capitalism cannot on this basis respond when someone cites that supreme icon of the Cult of Intelligence, Albert Einstein, in defense of the opposite--remembering that he published "Why Socialism?" in the very first issue of the Monthly Review. Indeed, taking that into account it becomes very easy to argue that tech billionaires (even if one accepts the far from unimpeachable claims for their "superior" intelligence) support capitalism not because they have reasoned out that this is best for society, but because they are billionaire capitalists who, perhaps knowing and caring nothing about anything else, are selfishly defending their positions of extreme privilege.