Very nice. And to estimate robust competence, perhaps:

"Have you focused on this? Long-term, with reflective practice, and embedded in a critical community?"

I don't know how to make that pithy. "Is this your thing?", "Is this your life?", "Are you a contender?", ...?

I'm interested transformative improvement of science and engineering educational content, through greatly increased use of domain expertise. So I've spent a lot of time scraping against the limits of people's expertise.[1]

The steepness with which people's expertise drops, as you move away from their primary focus of effort, is greatly and pervasively underestimated.

There's a news story genre, an example of which is "Harvard MBA's confused about what causes Earth's seasons!" But why is this surprising? If the last time someone focused on something was in middle school, then their having a middle school understanding of it shouldn't come as a great surprise.

A professor wizzy in their own subfield, may have a graduate student's grasp of nearby subfields, an undergraduate's grasp of the rest of their field, and a high-school grasp of other fields.

A non-biology MIT professor may have no idea what DNA is. An MIT chemistry lecturer no recognition of dimensional analysis. A Harvard physicist, hard-nosed and empirical, in teaching "just has a feeling for it", "intuitively knowing" what will work and not and how well. If you want to find out what crayon color to use for the Sun, don't ask a random first-tier astronomy graduate student - they will almost always get it wrong.[2]

The unadorned adjective "smart"... has startlingly large negative utility.

[1] http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/MHjx6 Scientific expertise is not broadly distributed - an underappreciated obstacle to creating better content

[2] http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Jw6yo "What color is the Sun?" - An example of science education pathology.

I would be fairly shocked if more than 0.1% of the time this was the case.

PS: I loved the second link!

MIT has ~1000 non-emeritus professors. So order 0.1% would permit 3 cases. But that's including biology, and non-science/non-engineering, which I didn't include. So it's at least low order 1%. And I'd be unsurprised if it's at least several percent. And not shocked by ten.

Consider an old professor. They may well have not had a biology class in high-school or college, let alone graduate school. And never touched biology professionally. And either not have had kids, or was not deeply involved in their science education. So we're down to "ambient general knowledge". What percent of the general population of PhD's with only ambient exposure, have any idea what DNA is? And many professors are among the busiest people I know. Imagine asking a serial startup CEO, what do you mean you don't know who entertainer-X is, aren't you watching TV and following popular culture? Well, no. So no need for shocked?

Very rarely, a professor giving a talk, will put the audience on the spot. A room of EE/CS professors may not recognize astronomical tidal forces. Half a room of MechE profs may think red blood cells are thinly scattered in blood.

Sure, common curiosity trims the numbers. But it's not universal. A now-retired physics professor might respond to a suggestion that they use biological examples in their intro physics problems, with "WHAT! You want me to teach... biology?!?!?!".

At the other extreme, there are a few impressive polymaths. But even there, out of field, competence is uneven and has holes. Impressive, impressive, WTF basic misconception, impressive... Similar to comments that when Hans Rosling started doing immigration, he tripped on some basic misconceptions.

Out of field, one isn't "embedded in a critical community". Part of how science works, is people being very afraid of being embarrassed by getting it wrong in front of their peers, and so putting in the effort and questioning to avoid that. Out of field, no one cares. One still has some habits of thought, but the edge isn't there.

And baseline unmotivated competence is not high. There's an old video[1] made out of Harvard, which includes graduating MIT and Harvard students, given a battery, one long wire, and a small lightbulb, and asked to make light. And failing, and failing, and...

[1] https://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html

Re "PS: I loved the second link!", thanks! :)

Then again, nothing the article writes about is exclusive to "smart, successful people", so all in all, what exactly are we talking about?

This idea matters if you want to lead, rather than be the "go-to" expert, subservient to a boss. Smart people with people skills probably get this. Smart, smart people may fundamentally not understand this and remain pigeon holed in their areas of expertise.

Inside the Twin Trade Buildings during 9/11/01, rooms full of smart (and scared) people were killed following rules. [0] Blue collar workers reacted better. I use these extreme examples to show where "it pays not to be too stuck in your head" and develop other skills often seen as the antithesis of being smart.

I offer Rick Rescorla (Morgan Stanly Security officer, World Trade Centre) as a counter-example. [1]

[0] Martha T. Moore, Dennis Cauchon "Delay meant death on 9/11" http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2002-09-02-choice...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rescorla