reply from Seb Paquet : Most High-IQ types are pretty much owned by a set of cultural constructs that tell them how awesome it is to fulfill their potential by striving to reach as close to the "top" of their field as they can.
However, making the world significantly better requires one to operate in fuzzy, emergent, overlapping domains where there is no top, no points, no hierarchy, often no clear measure of recognition or status. This confuses smart, driven people immensely and they tend to stick with legible games.
If we could make world improvement a legible game, however...
