When thinking about competency, I make a distinction between intellect and smarts. People who I consider to be intelligent are those who can think about many facets of complex ideas, and can discuss them at the very least. Smart people are those that can make good decisions about what they should apply their intellect, however much, to. Brilliant people can execute on sophisticated ideas that are worthwhile, or worthless, that may or may not be complex.
Impressive people but not necessarily brilliant people can execute on either many worthwhile relatively simple and perhaps demanding tasks OR something like a really long-running, really complex, and totally worthless idea that provides nobody any tangible value.
I have a friend who's an electrician for example. It's not an incredibly intellectually out-of-reach discipline, but somewhat so. He seems to regularly take on manly projects like redoing his kitchen or his motorbike, and finishing them. Again, he's not building camera sensors from scratch or developing a new machine learning framework in his spare time, but he gets it done. I suck at that. He's smart. But he's probably not a genius.
Meanwhile, a former colleague and I would regularly chat about type theory and datalog and Coq. It was quite a challenge to understand what he was talking about without a lot of background knowledge on that subject, and the value it could possibly create beyond curiosity. He was quite intelligent, made a series of weird academic choices that favoured deep information theory subjects, but looked like you'd expect and had almost non-existent social skills. Maybe smart, mostly intelligent.
Impressive people but not necessarily brilliant people can execute on either many worthwhile relatively simple and perhaps demanding tasks OR something like a really long-running, really complex, and totally worthless idea that provides nobody any tangible value.
I have a friend who's an electrician for example. It's not an incredibly intellectually out-of-reach discipline, but somewhat so. He seems to regularly take on manly projects like redoing his kitchen or his motorbike, and finishing them. Again, he's not building camera sensors from scratch or developing a new machine learning framework in his spare time, but he gets it done. I suck at that. He's smart. But he's probably not a genius.
Meanwhile, a former colleague and I would regularly chat about type theory and datalog and Coq. It was quite a challenge to understand what he was talking about without a lot of background knowledge on that subject, and the value it could possibly create beyond curiosity. He was quite intelligent, made a series of weird academic choices that favoured deep information theory subjects, but looked like you'd expect and had almost non-existent social skills. Maybe smart, mostly intelligent.