Why Experts Become Idiots
Your intelligence gets pulled toward your audience's level. It's physics, not philosophy.
There’s a pattern I keep seeing that nobody talks about.
Expert becomes thought leader. Thought leader becomes influencer.
Influencer becomes an idiot.
It happens so gradually that they never notice. But I’ve figured out the mechanism, and it’s terrifying.
The Audience Gravity Problem
Your intelligence gets pulled toward your audience’s level. Not metaphorically. Literally.
This isn’t some feel-good idea about surrounding yourself with smart people. It’s an observable phenomenon that happens whether you believe in it or not.
Spend your days explaining quantum physics to children, you’ll start thinking in children’s explanations. The simplifications you create become the ceiling of your thoughts. You’ll reach for analogies instead of actual models, stories instead of data, clarity over accuracy.
Spend your days defending ideas to Nobel laureates, and you’ll start thinking at Nobel levels. Not because you’re trying to impress them, but because your brain adapts to the cognitive demands of your environment. Every interaction is a rep. Your intellectual muscles grow or atrophy based on the weight you’re lifting.
The process is so gradual you won’t notice. You’ll think you’re the same expert you always were, just better at communication. But communication shapes cognition more than we admit.
The language you use becomes the language you think in.
The models you explain become the models you rely on.
The audience you serve becomes the standard you meet.
The Two Career Paths Nobody Admits Exist
Everyone with expertise eventually splits into one of two camps:
The Translators: They take complex ideas and make them simple. They explain AI to Congress, science to Twitter, philosophy to YouTube. They get famous, rich, invited to podcasts.
The Practitioners: They stay in the trenches with other experts. They get challenged, corrected, and sometimes humiliated. They remain unknown outside their field.
Guess which group gets smarter over time.
I Ran This Experiment on Myself
Six months ago, I split my time between two projects. I wanted to test this theory on myself. I suspected the effect was real but wanted to feel it firsthand.
Project A: Writing about decision-making for a general audience. Substack, LinkedIn, the usual platforms where everyone’s an expert. Thousands of readers who’d never studied cognitive science or behavioral economics but loved reading about it. The comments section was full of “this changed my life!” and “brilliant insight!” and “you should write a book!” The dopamine hit was incredible. Every post got easier to write because I’d found the formulas that worked. Three anecdotes, one counterintuitive claim, five bullet points, a call to action.
Project B: Consulting for companies on specific technical problems. Small rooms with people who knew more than me about their domains. No applause, just spreadsheets and edge cases and “have you considered...” followed by some factor I hadn’t considered. Every meeting felt like an exam I hadn’t studied for. Every recommendation got picked apart by people whose bonuses depended on being right. I’d leave exhausted, sometimes embarrassed, always with homework.
After six months, something weird happened.
The ideas from Project B started making Project A better. The consulting work forced me to develop frameworks that actually worked under pressure. These frameworks made for much better content.
But Project A contributed nothing to Project B.
Worse, Project A was actively making me sloppier. I’d catch myself using analogies instead of actual reasoning, making broad claims without evidence, optimizing for quotability over accuracy. The general audience work was training me to think in generalities.
And generalities are where expertise goes to die.
The Compound Stupidity Effect
Every interaction pulls your thinking toward the other person’s level. If they’re above you, you stretch up. If they’re below you, you compress down.
Do this thousands of times and you become your average interaction.
Think about your last month. What percentage of your intellectual interactions were with people who could actually correct you if you were wrong? Not disagree with you. Correct you. With evidence. With expertise.
For most people, it’s under 10%.
That means 90% of your interactions are making you dumber.
The Prophet’s Paradox
The cruel irony: The better you get at explaining things simply, the worse you get at understanding things deeply.
I watched this happen to a friend who was brilliant at machine learning. Started a YouTube channel. Massive success. Two years later, he can’t engage with cutting-edge papers anymore. He’s internalized his own simplifications.
He traded expertise for influence. And didn’t realize it until it was too late.
As I wrote in “Mediocre Success Is Worse Than Outright Failure”, sometimes success is the trap.
Why Experts Become Idiots
The degradation follows a predictable pattern:
Stage 1: You simplify for clarity. “It’s like a highway for information.”
Stage 2: You start thinking in your simplifications. The highway metaphor becomes how you actually conceptualize it.
Stage 3: You lose the ability to engage with complexity. Real discussions feel unnecessarily complicated.
Stage 4: You become your simplified self. The metaphor is all that’s left.
I’ve watched Nobel Prize winners become TED Talk cartoons of themselves. It’s not age. It’s audience.
The Practitioner’s Advantage
People who stay sharp share three characteristics:
They seek aggressive feedback. Not constructive. Aggressive. They want their ideas torn apart by people qualified to tear them apart.
They maintain technical depth. They can still do the actual work, not just talk about it. They code, they research, they build.
They optimize for correction over connection. They’d rather be corrected by one expert than praised by a thousand fans.
This is lonely. Uncomfortable. Often unprofitable.
It’s also the only way to keep getting smarter after 30.
The Test That Predicts Intellectual Decline
Want to know if you’re getting smarter or dumber? Answer these:
When did someone last change your mind about something fundamental to your expertise?
Can you still engage with the technical details of your field, or do you just talk about them?
Do you seek audiences who can teach you, or audiences you can teach?
When you’re wrong, how long before someone tells you?
If it’s been months since someone smarter than you corrected you, you’re already declining.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Modern Success
The entire creator economy is designed to make experts dumber.
Algorithms reward simplicity. Audiences reward relatability. Platforms reward frequency over depth.
Every system you use to build an audience is optimized to destroy your expertise.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s incentives. As I explored in “If You Want to Build, You Have to Understand”, you can’t fight systems without understanding their mechanics. And this system’s mechanics are perfectly calibrated to turn pioneers into popularizers.
The Price of Staying Sharp
Choosing intellectual growth over audience growth means:
Your ideas will be stolen by people who simplify them
You’ll watch less qualified people get famous explaining your work badly
You’ll make less money than you could
You’ll have smaller audiences than you deserve
You’ll question yourself constantly because you’re surrounded by people who know when you’re wrong
But you’ll keep getting smarter. While everyone else peaks at whenever they got famous.
The Choice That Defines Your Trajectory
Every day, you choose between two audiences:
The one that makes you feel smart. The one that makes you become smart.
One gives you dopamine. The other gives you development.
One builds your brand. The other builds your brain.
As I wrote in “Why People Fail to Make Important Decisions”, the hardest decisions are the ones where short-term rewards oppose long-term growth.
The Only Question That Matters
Five years from now, do you want to be more famous or more formidable? You can’t have both. The mechanisms that create one destroy the otherю
Choose consciously. Because if you don’t choose, the algorithm chooses for you.
And the algorithm always chooses fame..
Post-Credit Scene
What’s keeping me sharp this week:
Book: “The Knowledge Illusion” by Steven Sloman - Why we think we know more than we do, and how our intelligence is actually distributed across our network. Choose your network wisely.
Experiment: Post your next idea in two places: where it’ll get likes and where it’ll get critiqued. Notice which feedback actually improves the idea.
Article: “The Dangers of Elite Projection” - When smart people forget that not everyone thinks like them. The first symptom of audience capture.
Mental Model: The Feynman Technique backwards - If you can’t explain it complexly to experts, you don’t understand it simply.
Challenge: Find the smartest person you know in your field. Send them your best recent work. Ask them to tell you why it’s wrong. Then thank them.
Thanks for reading.
Vlad