Why smart people defend bad ideas (A summary)

Based on reading the article by Scott Berkun:
Several points can be extracted:
1. "Proficiency in argument can easily be used to overpower others, even when you are dead wrong."

So this might mean that even if someone intimidates you with his/her arguments and you cannot rebutt them, they are not correct all the time. They simply win because they have more skils in slicing your arguments.

2. "Problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they’re wrong."

This is the main reason why even smart people fall into the trap of defend stupid and ideas. They are clouded by their inflated ego that might stem from their up growing as labelled as a smart people. Unfortunately, this might also be the reason for their downfall.

3. "Simple rule for defusing those who are skilled at defending bad ideas: Simply because they cannot be proven wrong, does not make them right. Most of the tricks of logic and debate refute questions and attacks, but fail to establish any true justification for a given idea."

Winning a verbal aruguments might not mean that you are correct.

4. "Diffusing bad thinking requires someone (probably you) to construct a healthier framework around the bad thinking that shows it for what it is"

5. "Just because everyone in the room is smart doesn’t mean that collectively they will arrive at smart ideas. "
This is the same main point from a previous book that I read "Delusion of Crowds"

6. "At any moment on any project there are an infinite number of levels of problem solving. Part of being a truly smart person is to know which level is the right one at a given time. "

"People worry about the wrong thing at the wrong time and apply their intelligence in ways that doesn’t serve the greater good of whatever they’re trying to achieve. Some call this difference in skill wisdom, in that the wise know what to be thinking about, where as the merely intelligent only know how to think."

This statement is probably very important to those of us dealing with research work where we encounter tons of problems everyday. We have to know which are the crucial problems that we need to solve in order to bring us ahead of the competition and which are those problems that does not bring us to the next level even after solving them.

7. "To defusing smart people who are defending bad ideas, you have to find ways to slow things down."

Now time for the defence move.

Reference:
Why smart people defend bad ideas