Comment by lelanthran

> The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squarely within the field of his expertise.

Outliers.

You cannot come to conclusions based on examining outliers only. The better conclusion is from taking a sample of the population, and checking the correlation between test scores and success.

> Given the limits academia’s predictive power with respect to complex issues, I think it’s more important to select for and socialize pro-adaptive “gut feelings.”

There's plenty of studies that determine the correlation between academic performance and success. Have you possibly even considered that the basic "gut-feeling" only gets better (i.e. more predictive successes) with better academic scores?

IOW, the more you know, the more you learn, the better your heuristic is when making snap conclusions.