Maggie's Farm

These people couldn't have been doing too badly; they had saddle horses. Since horses need to be shod, it implies access to an infrastructure that included blacksmiths and farriers.

Are performers less intelligent? Probably not, but I think that the whole industry collectively suffers from imposter syndrome raised to a neurosis.

As others on the site pointed out, IN order to make it big as a movie star, you've got to be discovered young. If you haven't hit it big by the time you're 30, you're pretty much done. This in most cases doesn't leave time to go to college (or if you do you go into the drama or performing arts school, and spend your time trying to get out) and more importantly, doesn't grant time to have much life experience outside the industry.

Everyone who does succeed knows that there are others just as talented as they are, and willing to work just as hard as they did, who did not make it. Yes, there's a lot of merit involved as to who gets to go up the ladder, but there's a whole lot of capriciousness as to who gets on the ladder in the first place. Much of this is centered around having the right social networks, and thus they tend to surround themselves with other people in the industry. This leads to a tendency towards two assumptions: that everybody is pretty much the same as they are, and that people who succeed do it on a largely arbitrary basis.

there is also the fact that they are in an industry where superficial differences matter intensely. There are roles you don't get because you're too short, or black, or a woman, or the wrong accent. None of these things may matter if you're swinging a bond trade, but they make a lot of difference if you're playing George Washington.

So you have a bunch of people who are rewarded with success on what they believe to be a pretty much arbitrary basis, in an industry ripe with favoritism and discrimination, You're going to have people who are obsessed with proving their own merit.

You get an industry obsessed with giving itself awards, and people obsessed with proving their intelligence and worthiness to the outside world , while being institutionally incapable of seeing the limits of their own ignorance.

1. I can argue this only from personal experience, but I find correlation between intelligence and empathy to be weakly negative on a whole. The people I work with are the same guys who established that stereotype of the tech services drone - the Dilbert generation. I'm far more inclined to believe that they two are orthogonal.

2. Hamilton is to history what "The Wiz" is to "The Wizard of Oz". They took a lot of flack for specifying non-white actors in their casting calls. It's hard to reach a conclusion that someone is changing a standard by deliberately playing against it. Actually a better example of stunt-casting against type would have been Gregory Hines in Chicago.