I’m pretty sure anywhere there’s a lot of people (the northeast of the US for example) you’re going to find a lot of smart people.

People with advanced degrees accumulate in those specific states, despite not significantly different rates of HS graduation from other states.

Smart people, as measured by educational attainment, live in the NE coastal states and exceptionally stupid people (by the same metric) live in the South and Midwest. As a guy from Iowa, I was offended, but humbled by the reality of the numbers.

All things considered, I don't think advanced degrees necessarily correlate with intelligence. It's often just a marker of socioeconomic privilege.

A Carnegie Mellon study found that people with PhDs were more likely than any other educational attainment level to be against the Covid-19 vaccine: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v... (page 17)

Gallup polls during the Vietnam War found that higher-educated Americans were more likely to be pro-war while the most anti-war group were those with only a grade school education: https://afterthewarproject.org/files/original/3e5e5a47a15203... (page 19 of the PDF, page 38 of the document)