It bothers me for a few reasons.
Journalists have spilt a lot of ink recently about arrogance in the tech community. They point out tech figures who mistakenly think their aptitude in one knowledge domain means they know better than experts in other domains.
That's one reason.
That's even worse. Journalists are infamous for writing articles and having opinions on things they know nothing about.
To produce plausible sounding statements on a complex topics without regard to their actual truth is almost a necessity for the opinion journalist (the predominant type of journalist of the modern era).
To be criticized for intellectual hubris by that class should be meaningless.
That wasn't an appeal to authority (as embodied, I guess, by journalists). I wanted to introduce the idea, without claiming it to be some novel insight of mine.
Well, on its own merits, the idea hits the same mathematical problem. If tech enterprises are even slightly selective it wouldn't be difficult for tech people to be smarter than most.
Smarter than most isn't an exclusive club. It's a massive class.
By a mathematical necessity, half the people can say “Yes, most people are stupider than me." without lying.