[NickC25]

>and it was always my assertion that Harvard is full of Well-Educated Idiots.

I grew up surrounded by Ivy leaguers. You could tell who came from money, and who made it on their own merit. Some of the wealthiest people I've ever met growing up were lower/middle class kids with tremendous academic intelligence AND street-smarts who made it to the ivies on their own merit and excelled from there. Some of the dumbest of that Ivy cohort were kids of exorbitantly wealthy, and due to their social class and connections, were pretty much promised a spot at one of the top schools. They aren't dumb in the sense that they are truly brainless...quite the opposite - they were good academically and often quite book-smart, but lacked every real-world marker of human intelligence; and would be the last person you'd want to hire or work with.

Harvard, Penn, Yale, etc... are places where the smart poor or smart middle class go to rub elbows with (and get jobs working for the parents of) wealthy idiots.

[angiosperm]

It is often very hard to identify the best course of action. But in any large enough group, you can in short order identify the Oracle of Wrong, who has a complementary skill. For the most difficult choices, where you honestly cannot decide, you may simply look to the local Oracle of Wrong, and do the opposite of what they advocate. This yields well above average results.

Oracles of Wrong will have above-average intelligence, but estimate it higher than that. Some decades of observation suggest they most usually come from a life of privilege, where no personal choice has caused them substantial difficulty or distress.

Do not neglect that you may be the Oracle of Wrong in the group.