Re: Remember, kiddies ...
You seem to be treating "intelligence" as a scalar attribute. If intelligence means anything useful at all, it has to refer to a large set of poorly-defined, poorly-understood, divergent mental faculties. There's no reason to believe that someone with extraordinary ability in mathematics and natural sciences would be any better than average at estimating the risk of a proposition with severely limited information, or any better at deciding to act prudently having made such an estimation.
Newton and the Bubble might serve as an object lesson (albeit only anecdotal) to remind us that any one sort of intelligence has little bearing outside its domain. It doesn't really say anything about whether we might expect "normal people" (a vexed categorization anyway) to, on average, do well or poorly when deciding how to invest their resources.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
