I'm not the smartest person I know, but I used to think that you could be. Nobody is, for it's a heterogenous cloud of expertises. I spent a lot of time studying, mostly at Oxford and USC ie smart places, and my impression is that hardly any of my colleagues were a patch in overall brightness on many of those whom I have met in the past few years in the Bay Area. However, criteria for smarts are also exceedingly heterogeneous, and you need to have breadth, experience and wisdom to see those smarts. And acknowledge your own weaknesses that you can work on them to be a more sophistimacated [sic] human. I now know so many more smart people than I did, but it may be that I've a. trained myself in humility and b. actually found smart people so I can learn from them, and thus provide more value myself from my strengths. This then underlines my argument as it means I probably did underestimate some of my Oxford compadres in my youth.
So, beware those claiming to be smart. Mostly, as most who've encountered Wolfram, Kurzweil and their ilk know, have a big chunk of smarts missing. empathetic and listening skills, huge in other kinds of pattern matching, which we haven't been able to code yet. I have a recent acquaintance who's like that too. Brilliant coder, engineer and hosts a History Channel TV show on inventions, but his ego is so set on his and his friends' brilliance that he misses the point.
Focusing on the processing and analytic skills is a blindness to the other equally important parts of a well-adapted and responsive psyche. That you have amazing memory, analytic and processing skills is truly wonderful, but A. it's not a moral plus, it's just a rare thing you have, like skills at piano or football, whcih can be trained, but mostly inherited too and B. if you rely on that alone you're neglecting a lot of other stuff.
So, beware those claiming to be smart. Mostly, as most who've encountered Wolfram, Kurzweil and their ilk know, have a big chunk of smarts missing. empathetic and listening skills, huge in other kinds of pattern matching, which we haven't been able to code yet. I have a recent acquaintance who's like that too. Brilliant coder, engineer and hosts a History Channel TV show on inventions, but his ego is so set on his and his friends' brilliance that he misses the point.
Focusing on the processing and analytic skills is a blindness to the other equally important parts of a well-adapted and responsive psyche. That you have amazing memory, analytic and processing skills is truly wonderful, but A. it's not a moral plus, it's just a rare thing you have, like skills at piano or football, whcih can be trained, but mostly inherited too and B. if you rely on that alone you're neglecting a lot of other stuff.