> If a person who didn't know about something just confidently made shit up, I wouldn't call them intelligent.
It seems to be a good recipe for success in many fields (business, politics, art, apparently somewhat in social sciences if you make up the evidence for it too) so I'm not too sure about that!
I think you want "intelligent" to mean "ethical". Those politicians are definitely intelligent, they've devised a successful strategy to gain power. You could argue a successful sprinter doesn't need high intelligence, but politics is all about it.
No, seriously, one of our PMs was clearly as dumb as a metaphor for something really dumb. Rhodes scholar too, which shows you what that's worth these days.
It seems to be a good recipe for success in many fields (business, politics, art, apparently somewhat in social sciences if you make up the evidence for it too) so I'm not too sure about that!