That cannot be explained by (a) me only picking friends who agree with me; or (b) me intimidating people into pretending to agree with me; or (c) my personal charisma [**snort**] charming people around me into agreeing with me; because if any of those were the cause, then my non-mathlete friends would agree with me too -- and they don't, at least not as much.
An obvious explanation, and the one that I suspect is actually correct, is that your perception of your friends is wrong -- you actually respect the opinions of the people that share your opinions, not the ones who are good at math. Very likely the "smart" people that don't share your opinions are the ones that you're less likely to associate with, and so there are probably fewer of them within your circle of friends.
Another obvious explanation is that you choose your "smart" friends with different criteria than your "not-so-smart" friends. For instance, say you met the majority of your "smart" friends through academic pursuits, and your "not-so-smart" friends through recreational pursuits. Of course generalizing anything based on the "smart" group to the entire group would not be valid.
Fundamentally, drawing general conclusions about an entire population based on observations of people in your social circle is not going to give valid results, no matter how you try to justify it. If you don't understand that, I'd suggest getting one of your "smart" friends to explain it to you.
How else would you do it?
Well, you could submit the article to a large community of relatively intelligent people who actually do form a representative subset of your audience, and then get your feedback from them.
Oh, wait. That's what you do. And by and large, those few who read them dislike it. And virtually everyone dislikes the presentation.