Large groups of high IQ people are capable of this one thing.

They can rationalize nearly anything.

I could give examples, of course, but they would probably be too controversial.

People would read between the lines things that were simply not there.

Slavery might be the most obvious example.

An institution that has been around for the entirety of human history was rationalized for too long.

This is one of the reasons, this pure logic, that I think some are so terrified of the long-term implications of advanced AI.

Pennarun, an engineer at Google, has commented, that one of the things that makes smart people smart is their skill at such rationalization: “Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.”

-Alan Jacobs, How To Think