[codeonfire]

I think you have to be careful about making blanket statements and whether you are saying that smart people ask questions or are trying to imply that people that ask questions are smart.

It is in the interest of the speaker to claim that audience members who ask questions are in some way smarter. Being asked a question implies that the speaker has knowledge that the audience doesn't. So of course the speaker is going to claim those people are smart.

It is also not a good thing to presume that audience members are not asking questions simply to draw attention to themselves and to impress other audience members. People with awards are more probably than not to be smart, but they needed a lot of visibility to get those awards.

An important question would be to ask, "which non famous person is asking lots of questions, and is that person smart?" Since the author seems to define smart as having won awards and being well known in a field, this question fails immediately.

Personally, unless it is unpublished research, I can get most of my questions answered immediately by surfing along while listening and without disrupting the talk. It's also funny when I pull up wikipedia and it either turns out to have the same content as the talk, or directly contradicts the talk.