Bruce G. Charlton provides a great explanation why intelligent people don't just have stupid ideas sometimes, they are making all-out war against common sense and normalcy. You should read the whole thing, but here is a short summary from the conclusion:

Because evolved ‘common sense’ usually produces the right answers in the social domain, yet the most intelligent people have personalities which over-use abstract analysis in the social domain, this implies that the most intelligent people are predisposed to have silly ideas and to behave maladaptively when it comes to solving social problems.

Ever since the development of cognitive stratification in modernizing societies, the clever sillies have been almost monopolistically ‘in charge’. They really are both clever and silly – but the cleverness is abstract while the silliness is focused on the psychological and social domains. Consequently, the fatal flaw of modern ruling elites lies in their lack of common sense – especially the misinterpretations of human psychology and socio-political affairs. My guess is that this lack of common sense is intrinsic and incorrigible – and perhaps biologically-linked with the evolution of high intelligence and the rise of modernity.

What can we do? Well, we vastly outnumber and outgun our cognitive elites, so if we wanted to it wouldn't be all that difficult to just remove them from power and/or kill them all (in a reversal of the typical misanthropic eugenicist's calls to kill everyone with an IQ lower than himself), but I wouldn't really recommend that. I'm not sure who originally said this, but if you think sociology professors have crazy ideas about the world, try talking to someone who dropped out of eighth grade. Putting average or stupid people in charge would be an improvement in many areas, but not all and might actually be a net loss. Besides, we already tried killing millions of people in order to make the world a better place already, and that didn't work out too well. So what other options remain? Convincing really smart people to pay more attention to everyone else's ideas is a pretty hopeless task, as Udolpho points out in his commentary on Charlton's post:

Here we find the hubris of the educated (in some cases over-educated) man: because his reasoning powers have gifted him with status and prestige, it is unthinkably humbling to suggest to him that his ideas in other spheres (notably politics) are inferior to those of the common individual far below him in status and measurable intelligence. How can a man who only follows his own dumb instincts, who can barely talk or write effectively, come up with a better conception of society than an academic or pundit who is respected by his equally intelligent peers! (In fact we find this hubristic force at work among elites who are far from demonstrating a particularly high cognitive ability, notably actors and musicians.)

I'm not gonna try to come up with any grand schemes to try to fix the world, but an older Udolpho post about how loathsome computer geeks are reminded me of something that each of us can do in our daily lives.

Our cognitive elites are basically nerds on a larger scale. Even the ones who aren't nerdy in their private lives - most of the people who succeed in politics, business etc. have both high IQ and good social skills, and quite a few even had good athletic ability in their youth - basically engage in the worst nerd behavior of substituting thinking (which they are good at) for the normal social instincts which they lack. While the nerd merely irritates those near him (especially single women), though, our masters impose their nonsensical and harmful ideas upon the world.

My proposed solution is to mock and humiliate nerds at every opportunity. By relentlessly picking on nerds we can stigmatize the overuse of abstract reasoning for situations where it doesn't work well. If we do this enough, the perceived worth of reasoning powers will decline and the status of common sense will rise. At some point even really smart people will be less ashamed to follow what little common sense instincts they have instead of suppressing them with brainpower. There's no risk that the elites will fight back, either - no one likes nerds except for other nerds, after all, so no one will rise to their defense.

So, pick on a nerd today! It'll be a tiny step towards a better world.