Why some people are very smart yet very dumb? Seen some people get Bachelor's and Masters's degrees but throw a fit like a mentally delayed kid.

@thisgenericnamehere Exactly right: different types of intelligence and unfortunately too many who specialize forget basics, or think they are now above them. My late wife managed a temporary agency in a university town for a while. She would come home frustrated, saying I have all these jobs for file clerks and basic office skills but the only applicants I have are Ph.D. candidates and most of them can't even alphabetize.

@dancingtongue That's an oddly specific answer but yes. I have a very specific intelligence, logical and rational, suits my profession. People with tactile intelligence your builders or dancers or craftspeople are superhuman to me. I can do that too (save the dancing) it's just harder.

@thisgenericnamehere And the true geniuses in my book have always been those who can excel in several fields; the Leonardo da Vinci's, the Ben Franklins, the Thomas Jeffersons.

@dancingtongue Mmm. There I disagree. Stephen Hawking for example specialized in a very very very specific field of a particular type of physics but he was a genius too.

@thisgenericnamehere Bad terminology on my part. I certainly never meant to imply that the Hawkings and Einsteins of the world are not geniuses. Probably should have said "the truly remarkable people" rather than geniuses.

@dancingtongue Fair, I think it also has to do with their time period. Your Ben Franklin of today would be able to focus on a single subject because the volume of knowledge available is orders of magnitude bigger. You had to dabble because the fields they worked in were comparatively shallow.

@thisgenericnamehere Very true that it was easier in that sense. OTOH, to break new ground and be an innovator in those eras -- and now I am thinking of Galileo and Copernicus -- was to invite ridicule and worse.