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Jill Stein may be an idiot politician with laughably unrealistic positions and a totally unworkable take on foreign policy (even dining with Putin) but she’s also a physician who practiced internal medicine for decades.
She’s not an idiot in general. I think she’s just unbelievably naive about people and their motivations.
Ben Carson was a (by all accounts excellent) brain surgeon.
I'm sorry, but that man is stupid.
Brains are weird, man. I work in a STEM field, but I had 3 or 4 semesters of University before declaring my major, and therefore I was able to get a much more well-rounded education than my colleagues, and I will tell you: It shows. Big time.
Lots of people who are great at what they do, and when it comes to their one very specific, silo'd, expertise, they're brilliant.
But in terms of general intelligence, rationality, ability to think critically in a novel situation, etc? Not bright.
Then there's the old (true) joke: What do you call someone who graduated at the bottom of their class in medical school? Doctor.
Did Ben Carson attempt to do surgery on himself? Otherwise I can’t explain at all how dumb he was. Wow! Thanks for the example.
Probably after he got shot by his best friend and the bullet ricocheted off his belt buckle and hit his friend killing him (wasn't that the story? Lol I'm not going to bother looking it up. If I got any details wrong, the reality was at least just as stupid).
I have worked for a university for over 25 years so I have seen in all. My first wife, who also worked for the same university, worked in a computer lab in the psych dept and they would have the most domain specific intelligent people with no common sense whatsoever. Her and a colleague used to joke about the PhD students “I bet she runs with scissors”.
It's honestly a real shame. STEM careers are obviously extremely important, but we are doing students a major disservice by limiting the scope of their education so much. Maybe these degrees should be five year programs...
A specialist in one field isn't necessarily adept in another, and particularly coming from STEM to humanities seems a particularly treacherous transition because so much about humans is based on premises that cold, logical STEM principles just aren't aware of. That doesn't mean we STEMs are stupid, we just don't know just how much there is that we don't know and would need to know before we can understand, let alone predict human behaviour.
I know I've found myself grossly misjudging human reactions in some case because humans are complex and there are so mamy premises and factors affecting individual behaviour and so many more for collective behaviour that they're effectively non-deterministic and even predicting the probabilities requires such familiarity with the people or demographics, respectively.
All that is to say: Yes, I think so too. She's well-educated, but not above tripping over the same, common stone that many smart people have stumbled on.
I have a relatively common "rare" condition and saw over 40 doctors while seeking a diagnosis. I can personally attest that most physicians range between not very bright to astoundingly stupid. You don't have to be intelligent to become a physician, just dedicated with access to the right resources.
You are assuming physicians have to be smart or compassionate or understanding.