>Smart people don't think others are stupid

In my experience, this is true even when they _should_ believe that someone is stupid. It seems that the very intelligent make two errors: humility, and then the same theory of mind error that every makes.

The "humility problem" is well-intended but incorrect; they don't want to claim they're above anyone, at at least in the same of some very intelligent people this is not just a social signal. They seem to think that other people must be just as intelligent as they are, but there's some other explanation for why they don't understand things. This ties into the next problem:

I don't have a clever name for the next problem, but I would call it "the same theory of mind error that every makes." When we try to model other people, we use our own mind as a model. We do this even when we've been proven wrong over a lifetime. We do this when we know better. We slip back into this when we've previously corrected for this. How many extroverts do you know who can tell when an introvert has had "enough" social interaction. It's exceedingly rare. But the extroverts aren't bad people. They just have no real way to slip into the introvert's perspective. They're modeling the introvert as being more or less the same as them, but just with a few quirks. The model fails over and over.

The in case of intelligent people, they seem to have no understanding what a very unintelligent mind would look like, and instead seem to believe that apparently unintelligent people _could_ be brilliant if they just read more, or were not so closed minded. Or maybe they had a poor upbringing, or are dealing with trauma. They don't seem to understand that for stupid people, abstractions are often impossible, impulse control is fleeting, and emotions rule their mind more than thoughts. They cannot really place themselves in the stupid person's mind, so they try to ask "how much would need to go wrong for _me_ to come to such an incorrect conclusion." And so they come up with a false hypothesis, such as "their school teachers must have failed them."