The typical person is the result of ruthless selection pressures over millions or billions of years depending on how one sets their watch, a chain of the fittest, savviest, toughest, and hardest to kill members of the most dangerous life form we know about.
Most people, more than half, are unsophisticated by the definitions implied, which would make people of above average intelligence “dumb”. Dubious, to put it mildly.
A much more plausible theory, and one not laden with all the trim and tackle of a bigoted agenda, is that the typical person receives a poor education, leaving them ill-equipped to outmaneuver operations research PhDs whose entire job is to use the very efficient frontier of mechanism design, dark patterns writ large, to outfox individuals who (in the typical case) didn’t have wealthy parents or some other greased path into an advanced degree.
And the real kicker to me, as someone who has spent serious time with seriously high-profile people in technology, is that for whatever combination of reasons (one watches out for post hoc ergo propter hoc type fallacies, cause and effect are nuanced in human affairs), I’ve found that the higher someone’s station in life is, the less formidable they seem. I don’t know if power corrodes the necessity to stay sharp, or if privileged positions emphasize some other set of traits at the expense of basic competencies, but if half the big shots I’ve met started from scratch in my neighborhood, they’d have been an easy mark for the unscrupulous and/or hungry.
Being ill-served by an education system that is broken by design, and being outfoxed by fraudsters with sophisticated mathematics who all but write their own laws doesn’t make someone stupid.