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Actually, the supposedly intelligent ones are just incomprehensibly stupid.

 

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"The "Why does ..." not answered by "How does ..." is the philosophical / non-scientific portion of the question."

Why in the scientific portion of the question, "because", data says so.

 

What do you call a plastic bag with a hole in the bottom?

Spoiler

a tube

 

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Battle of Waterloo skeletons uncovered in Belgium


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Tens of thousands died in the fighting, but few remains have been found. According to contemporary accounts, large numbers of bones were collected, ground down and used as fertiliser on farms.

 

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/13/1111281998/nyc-nuclear-attack-video-psa-eric-adams

 

You have to love #2 and #3 in that first video...as if you will still have running water and power.

 

"what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul."

 

"what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul."

"... just following orders" ... the perfect excuse to justify the most horrible atrocities ...

 

Listen to your Dad when he says stop.

 

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”

 

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'I'm not God' Think safety.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/herb-black-american-iron-metal-deaths-1.6525268

He blamed human error for the first death, a man whose name has not been public, and said he couldn't see how the more recent death, of Darrell Richards, could have been prevented.
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In the meantime, "I don't see how it could have been prevented," Black said. "I genuinely don't. But I welcome an investigation and I welcome somebody coming and showing me that they can teach me something that I don't know.
"Listen, I'm not God. I only have the experience I've accumulated over 62 years."

 

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Hiring managers who know they are approaching the limits of their skills will hire employees who are less educated, from lower ranked schools and achieved lower GPAs than themselves. This is how good organizations spoil.

 

Hiring managers who know they are approaching the limits of their skills will hire employees who are less educated, from lower ranked schools and achieved lower GPAs than themselves. This is how good organizations spoil.

I have repeated this particular observation many times. My first contact with it was working with DP/IT departments in large, old companies. Since they started in the mainframe days, when no one was really an expert in business computing, they would “promote” someone to head of the department for whatever reason other than knowledge and experience of computers.

If the person was a poor manager, not understanding their role as manager, believed they had to be the smartest computer guy in the room to keep their job, they’d hire people who knew a little (or a lot) less than they did. This made them feel safe.

If the person was a good manager, understanding that unit success was their success and hiring experts would make the department a more competent, successful group, they’d look for people that know a lot more than they did to contribute to it. They knew they were there to do the work a manager does (which did include being conversant in the technology so they could make good decisions based on expert staff advice).

Over the decades the former organization would decay and through attrition the manager would get worse and worse at both managing and computing. They would repeat the mistake of their predecessor for the same reasons and competence would reduce with every generation of staff. This type made me a lot of money as a consultant but were very unpleasant to work with and considered consultant “wizards” who knew secrets they could never divine as a mere mortal.

The latter type were extremely competent, and grew in competence over the decades. They were a pleasure ot work with because not only weren’t their systems a messy patchwork of guesses and workarounds, they only called me after they’d already worked out everything they could, and being competent it meant that I was handed a package of good documentation and troubleshooting, etc., simplifying my work and making it more interesting.

I usually tell this story to the one-level-up management in an organization whose IT infrastructure is in peril because of scared, gormless managers using technical obfuscation to cover for lack of skill and knowledge. A few times it was possible to reorient the manager and group to pursue competence and rigor—usually not. We’d solve the current problem only to be called back after the cruft had crushed the original solution.

In any case, I endorse @MrSalts short version of this idea, it‘s very important if it can be gotten across.