> I've found that especially smart people have preternatural bullshit detectors

I really disagree with that. So many smart people fell for obvious bullshit because it appealed to their intellectualism. Look at all the communist sympathizers in the West. Morons, but also intelligent people most of the time. They believed stories spread by the soviet propaganda, because they wanted to believe them.

> The nice thing about observing whether someone is accomplishing what they set out to accomplish is it doesn't matter how well spoken they seemed.

It's funny that you say that - there's another poster in this thready who claims that looking at the output is the stupid people's way of evaluating intelligence. Seems like we really have no idea how to tell (except for an actual IQ test)

> Smart people can be lovely, stupid people can be lovely, golden retrievers can be lovely... but that's tangential.

Yep, I was just making a note, that intelligence might be overrated as a trait.