IS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It’s a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush’s IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and “as a result ill-informed”. The political pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough accused him of lacking intellectual depth, claiming that compared with other US presidents whose intellect had been questioned, Bush junior was “in a league by himself”. Bush himself has described his thinking style as “not very analytical”.
How can someone with a high IQ have these kinds of intellectual deficiencies? Put another way, how can a “smart” person act foolishly?
Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re smart – life – 02 November 2009 – New Scientist
I see it all time. Cognitive power does not equate to decision making skills. Forget Bush; look at Obama. The same problem is there.
People are like computers. No matter how good the processor or how much RAM is there, garage in still results in garbage out. [That would seem to imply that the problem is the data, not the processor. - Ed.]
Tangentially, some of the best decision makers I’ve met were NOT above average IQ. A couple were in the high 80s according to tests, but – with a bit of time, which they took – they reached solid decisions and could tell you why they reached them.