Orac has a post up discussing alternative medicine, and how we can’t say it killed Steve Jobs.

There are a few things that got me thinking in his post – but the biggest was the gap between stupidity and stupid ideas.

Steve Jobs I always viewed with amusement. His company buys components from factories so rotten they have to install suicide nets just to cut their staff turnover – yet he sold the idea of Apple being some sort of cultural icon for the modern hippy equivelant.

He was a lot of things, stupid not being one of them – and yet he fell for alternative medicine because he sounds to have had a horror of surgery. 

His reasoning was overcome by his personal issues, something that happens to the best and the brightest of us.

And it reminds the rest of us that just because someone is highly intelligent, it doesn’t mean everything they believe in all sincerity is one hundred percent to be trusted.

It highlights why that particular form to the appeal to authority is so dangerous – because very smart people often believe very stupid things.