Smart Enough to Be Ridiculous

He was one of those people who could explain complicated things badly and simple things with unnecessary confidence.

At dinner he once spent fifteen minutes describing cryptocurrency to a waitress who had only asked if anyone wanted sparkling water. Nobody stopped him. Not even her. She just stood there holding the bottle opener, blinking slowly.

Later that night he forgot his own apartment number and knocked on the wrong door twice.

That was the confusing thing about him. He was obviously intelligent. You could feel it immediately. Fast connections, good memory, strange observations at random moments. He once compared airport security lines to medieval religious rituals and somehow it made complete sense.

Then twenty minutes later he would lose his phone while actively holding it.

She used to think intelligence made people less ridiculous. Growing up, smart people were described almost like another species. Calm. Rational. Above ordinary mistakes.

Then she met actual intelligent people and realized many of them were just emotionally disorganized people with good vocabularies.

One professor she knew could read ancient Greek but kept sending money to a man in Florida who claimed he was developing a “frequency-based healing pyramid.” Another person wrote brilliant essays about labor ethics while making his girlfriend cry every weekend over dishes.

Yeah... nobody tells you foolishness survives education very easily.

Sometimes it even becomes harder to detect because intelligent people can explain their nonsense beautifully.

The truly alarming people were never the openly foolish ones. At least with them you saw the wall immediately. The dangerous ones were smart enough to build explanations around every bad instinct they had.

By the end she no longer cared whether someone was intelligent. The better question turned out to be much smaller.

Could they return a shopping cart without inventing a philosophy about why they shouldn’t have to.