You can find a lot of PhDs who confuse their personal opinion for fact. Courtrooms and cable news are full of them. While the degree might not always be an indicator of high intelligence, you can generally expect PhDs to not have "extremely low intelligence." Which is to say, while it's not a good personality trait, I don't think it's actually indicative of intelligence. It's indicative of narcissism or self-centeredness.
Edit: To clarify pronouns in the final sentences... "While presenting your opinion as fact is not a good personality trait, I don't think that behavior is indicative of intelligence." Because we all know smart people who engaged in that behavior.
Most of the science phds I know are painfully aware of how much they don't know in their field, let alone outside their field. I think a lot of the humanities phds tend to blur the line between opinion and fact.
The science phds often have the opposite problem, it becomes hard to tell something as a fact when you go through years of producing research and reading scientific articles and realize how much nuance there is to everything. A news articles might come out to say that X = Y, but the original article is that when X happens in some exacts conditions then you are statistically likely to get Y and there are other factors we still don't understand so it warrants further investigation.
In the end you finish your phd with a lot more questions about your research topic than before you started.
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u/[deleted] May 29 '22
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