I think there is something interesting in the piece… the smart people are found wanting by their own measurement criteria e.g: the puzzle about the bat and ball that together cost a dollar and ten cents (the rest of the puzzle: the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, so what is the cost of each?). This is the sort of thing that smart people love to trade among each other and use to separate themselves from the dullards (recall the glee with which some liberals were forwarding around some finding that conservatives have lower IQ or some such). And yet, ~ 50% of students at MIT, Harvard, so on, got this puzzle wrong.
I suspect that had this puzzle been administered in a test that explicitly related to some form of ranking or admittance, more of them would have got it right. It’s not even that tricky. And I think that’s the point, that the credentialed managers we entrust matters to are prone to overconfidence in their instinct to the point of making trivial [analytical] errors.
—ravi