[yetihehe]

[Sometimes wall of text is necessary to convey proper depth of thought]

> It's like something is diverting that processing ability from the personal goals to something else. Dawkins' memeplexes might be the answer here: the memeplex "alternative medicine" was competing with the goals of the individual, and leeching off his processing ability to its own end, like a parasite of the mind.

I think this reinforces my argument about minimising time spent thinking. This is esentially a "stopping problem", i.e. when do you settle on a solution. When solution seems good enough, some people will stop critical thinking and looking for errors in that solution and just accept it as settled matter. Intelligent agents have to act on imperfect solutions because in many situations acting now is better than slightly better solution a hour later. This pattern can be used for all other problems, and is reason for "sometimes smart people act stupid". Plus sometimes people have a bad hour or day and don't have enough mental resources to properly make coffee without accidents.

Intelligence is also not universal, you can be more intelligent in one domain and less intelligent in other domain (street smart vs educated), which is a reason for "for some problems smart people act stupid" which is shown again and again when you ask technology experts about social issues.