Sometimes our culture still manages to surprise me for its absurdity

So, this: http://articles.marketwatch.com/2013-04-24/finance/38773627_1_billionaires-u-s-senators-graduate-school

My first reaction was to just be appalled that someone with a job at a major research university was doing something this idiotic:

Billionaires are among the world’s cleverest people, according to new research. In “Investigating America’s Elite,” Jonathan Wai, 33, a research scientist in psychology and member of Duke University’s Talent Identification Program, looked at the correlation between wealth and brains — or at least, brains as measured by education. Some 45% of billionaires rank among the smartest 1% of people in the U.S., the study found. Other groups with high representation in the smartest set: U.S. Senators (41%), federal judges (40%), and Fortune 500 CEOs (39%).

Wai looked at five groups of America’s business and political elite, totaling 2,254 subjects. The majority of Fortune 500 CEOs, federal judges, billionaires, senators and members of the House of Representatives had attended either a selective undergraduate institution or graduate school, Wai’s research found. And if they attended one of the 29 “elite colleges,” they were considered to be among the top 1%. Wai chose the schools based on their average SAT scores and American College Test scores, as tracked by the “U.S. News & World Report.” Average SAT scores of 1400 or greater — a combined score on the math and critical reading sections — put a school in the top 1%, he says.

No seriously, he comes to the conclusion that "America’s elite are largely drawn from the intellectually gifted, with many in the top 1% of ability" (from the abstract) based entirely on the fact that graduates of top colleges and grad programs tend to end up in powerful positions. The problems with that are so extensive I can't even think about it.

But that's not the part that makes this a classic. This article brings in someone to criticize the study - one Steve Siebold. "A former professional tennis player who coaches Fortune 500 executives on mental toughness, Seibold has been interviewing multi-millionaires and billionaires since college, and he says many of the world’s wealthiest people have little or no formal education." Now, he does make a few of the relevant points (about e.g. that college admissions and the SAT are not perfect proxies for "intelligence" to put it mildly). But that's not the bone he primarily wants to pick. Well, let me quote: 

Siebold: This is based on a faulty premise. If I have a lot of money, I can get into one of the country’s elite schools. Family connections are a big part of attending colleges too. George W. Bush got into Yale. I’d love to see him get into Yale without the Bush name. I say that after 29 years interviewing the 1,200 wealthiest people in the world. I was broke and I wanted to be rich. I just wanted to follow the wealthy so I could be one of them. I found that anyone can be rich if they can find a problem and solve it.
Siebold: In terms of what separates the wealthy from the average person, it starts with their beliefs about money. Guys like Trump and other rich people tend to have positive beliefs about money. The average person tends to believe that rich people are narcissists. America wouldn’t exist without rich people.
Siebold: ...I’m more interested in how successful people use their use their emotions to work long hours that no rational human being would work and take chances that no ordinary person would take.

In other words, we get this bogus research pushing one version of the American meritocratic ideology, and they bring in to oppose it some guy pushing the contradictory ideological alternative that "you can make it if you try!"