Overrated: Ludwig Wittgenstein
Stupid people should strive to become smarter.  They should not proclaim themselves to be the norm for being stupid and smart people to be somehow inferior for failure to conform with that norm and for failure to communicate the complex thoughts they have to people who are incapable of taking in complex thoughts.<p>It&#x27;s a type of transaction that I bet takes place every single day in every single tech-sector business between a smart-guy code monkey and a dimwit pointy-haired boss and, for some reason, it&#x27;s always the pointy-haired boss who walks away with his overconfidence in tact and the code monkey that walks away having been made to feel bad about themselves, when it <i>should</i> be the other way around.<p>It&#x27;s a cultural norm that may exist in the tech world today, but it&#x27;s certainly not a cultural norm that existed at Cambridge back in Wittgenstein&#x27;s and Russel&#x27;s day.  -- It&#x27;s one of the many cultural attitudes that are working together to create the post-truth society we live in today.<p>It is true about pretty much any philosopher of note that they are thought of as being hard to understand (just think of Kierkegaard).  That&#x27;s not because those philosophers are altogether so very overrated.  It&#x27;s because the readership is mostly comprised of people who are not as smart as those philosophers.  That&#x27;s true by construction.  Because the reason you read is because you start out stupid and want to end up smart.