It's not just the ones at the top, it's a strong subculture within the industry, built perhaps on valuing certain personality traits that to some extent may correlate with certain kinds of effectiveness.<p>I immediately think of HN comments from the recent news about this week being off-the-charts hot, the way a disturbing number of people people seized on technical errors in the popular reporting (the Earth was obviously hotter at points in the distant past; the estimates were "just a computer model"), and jumped straight to, as Krugman puts it, reflexive contrarianism, the notion that the climate scientists must be wrong or corrupt and my gut-instinct priors are correct because I see myself as very smart.