Cocktail party ideas

 people value intelligence and cleverness without similarly valuing on-the-ground knowledge or intellectual rigor. People often discuss the standard trendy topics (some recent ones I've observed at multiple parties are how to build a competitor to Google search and how to solve the problem of high transit construction costs) and explain why pe... See more

After having done this many times, my opinion is that the root cause of this is generally that many people who have a superficial understanding of topic assume that the topic is as complex as their understanding of the topic instead of realizing that only knowing a bit about a topic means that they're missing an understanding of the full complexity... See more