alt Hacker NewsLudwig Wittgenstein, considered as one of the important phillosophers of 20th century, did it all the times! he even compared simple people to animals. When he was a teacher in small village(s) in Austria, he was higly disrespecting to the simple village-people and their kids he was teaching. Using force on dumb pupils to put knowledge into them with his bare hand!!!
i think its lack of understanding and empathy in smart people causing them to think others are stupid - when I studied, the only thing i really learned is to ask "why in this stupid way, and not in some other more smarter way" when there's one answer one can use to explain why, then its enough to counter that "stupid"/"smart" arguments. Smart people often live in a higher state where their knowledge allows them to find better approaches/answers/methods - so the result is they alwys question approaches/answers/methods and if there's a simple better approaches/answers/methods, they say "thats stupid" - but never consider the why was it made this way and not the other way around.
Thats my experience. Until I learned to question first, then think&suggest, I was, i thought, "the smartest guy in the world, because all other were plain dumb!". Now i differentiate more and only if something is not explainable, erratic, uncalculated, i call DUMB with an emphasis on the forced, spitting, pronounciation without opening the mouth for vowels! :)
Important doesn't mean "smart." I would actually argue Wittgenstein wasn't very smart (and in my opinion, often wrong). There were just the right enough people around him that thought he was a gifted student (though he didn't always excel academically, weirdly enough). At what, that is a mystery and is contentious. During his early years when people thought that, he was already harassing and beating children (he published Tractatus in his early 30s).
1. He rejected infinite mathematical extensions, unbounded quantification, misunderstood Godel’s incompleteness theorem and quite a bit more that the math community dismissed. So he wasn't a math genius (he originally studied engineering and became interested in math through that)
2. Most people were skeptical of his picture theory, and rightfully so. It grew out of the same environment that gave rise to, at that time and in their initial form, logical positivism, empiricism, and at its most horrific, behaviourism, which led to infant pain denial. Picture theory explains something surface-level, which in itself people understood was just incomplete, and I'm sure you know, even Wittgenstein rejected his theory later
3. But the problem with his last work, Investigations, was that it was again surface-level musings, and written in a weird cryptic way sprinkled with made up words. His language-games, to me, sounds like what teens nowadays would talk about in high school with less fancy language. And it describes, to me, this kind of juvenile high school behaviour. Which, fair enough, I'm sure rings true to some people. But his philosophy is general enough to not really contribute much as a whole. It just hides behind this high-brow language. Yet he was very adamant and defensive about it
Wittgenstein had severe anger issues that people recognized but hardly anyone wanted to do much about. He had a superiority complex (lots of childhood stuff in his life probably) and he just didn't like a lot of people and thought very little of them
I guess the one good thing about him I can say is when he wanted to accomplish something he really set his mind to it. If only that same fervour was used to be not just a better person but to work well with others, he might've contributed something most experts would still rely on and be influenced by