I didn't mean to trivialize horrible things that have been done by evil people in the past (regardless of their IQ). I think that there is a general definition that an "intellectual" is someone who is, at best, detached from reality in a way that you brought up. This wasn't my intent with the word.<p>I was referring more to the high-school-like effect where people interested in exploring "intellectual" topics like math tend to be treated as "uncool" because of how our education system tends to focus on how to perform a calculation rather fostering its real applications as Devlin mentions here.<p>If math was just boring calculation, I would also say it's "uncool."