[codetrotter]

> not what I expected from the title talking about "smart"

I think the title is mainly a reference to the TV show “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?”

Fittingly then, is the fact that a lot of types of questions that they were asking in that TV show was mostly trivia. Which I also don’t think of as being a particularly important characteristic of being “smart”.

When I think of “smart” people, I think of people who can take limited amount of information and connect dots in ways that others can’t. Of course it also builds on knowledge. You need to have specific knowledge in the first place to make connections. But knowing facts like “the battle of so and so happened on August 18th 1924, one hundred years ago today” alone is not “smart”. A smart person is someone who uses knowledge in a surprising way. Or in a way that others would not have been able to. After the smart person made the connection others might also go like “oh that’s so obvious why didn’t I think about that” or even “yeah that’s really obvious, I could’ve thought of that too”. And yet the first person to actually make, and properly communicate that connection was the smart one. Smart exactly because they did.