Smart

A common Berkeley phenomenon I've noticed in my wanderings and interactions is the situation of people becoming aware of someone else's success, be it their friend or the friend of a friend or a famous faculty member, doesn't matter especially. When interfacing with this sort of information, the most common response is for the person to proclaim, "Wow! He/she/the person is so smart!"

This is a thing with good motivations, complimentary and positive. No doubt. I just want to raise the possibility that saying someone is "smart" is not strictly a compliment.

I think it's fair to say intelligence is a quality held pretty universally in high esteem. Universities are intended as pooling and boosting grounds for intelligence, where we theoretically get the bright bulbs together and, by their togetherness, make them shine more brightly. Feats of brainpower like eidetic recall and rapid calculation appear on YouTube and the news with some regularity, impressing the general public with how "smart" these people are.

However, from one of my points of view: say your friend presents you with an achievement of theirs, something they've earned, something they've made, anything. This person got a 97 on a math midterm, or some such event, huzzah! Now, your first reaction may be to tell your friend how "smart" or "talented" (depending on what the thing is) they are, in the hopes of communicating that you're impressed with their achievement and bolstering their self-esteem through validation and praise. This is because you're a basically good person and want to accentuate their positive feelings. Essentially, you want your friend to feel good (no, I'm not going to disparage that).

Using the term "smart" to describe a person, however, is problematic if you stop to think about it. Your friend has achieved something, and therefore they are worthy of some amount of praise. The key issue here, for my thinking, is that they achieved something. The use of the term "smart" implies a natural, inborn advantage; that is to say, your friend got a 97 on their test simply because that's the norm for them, because they're "smart." It robs their achievement of value and implies it was an easy thing for them, in some ways.

Imagine examining the Sistine Chapel, with all its beautiful paintings and elaborately detailed frescoes. At the conclusion of your tour, you might come to the conclusion that Michelangelo and Roselli and Botticelli and all the others were "talented" as painters, or "gifted" as artists. Let's be clear; the Sistine Chapel is the result of a marriage between masterful skill in art and a Herculean amount of effort. Nothing about it involves being "gifted" with anything. Every square inch of it is undoubtedly the result of rare brilliance, but it's brilliance combined with work.

TL;DR Consider that a truly "smart" person might consider your assertion of their natural intelligence to, in some ways, devalue the fruits of their committed labor and focus.