Comment by gf000
4 days ago
You are just looking at the wrong people to compare.
Leonardo Da Vinci would be a PhD student working on some obscure sub-sub-sub field of something and only 6 other people on the world understanding how marvelously genius he is. The reason they don't get to such a status is that human knowledge is like a circle. A single person can work on the circumference of this circle, but they are limited by what they can learn of this circle. As society improved, we have expanded the radius of the circle greatly, and now an expert can only be an expert in a tiny tiny blob on the circumference, while Leonardo could "see" a good chunk of the whole circle.
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"Thought leader and inventor" are VC terms of no substance and are 100% not who I would consider smart people on average. Luck is a much more common attribute among them.
Well, you might not have got my point. Those "smart" PhD students would be considered quite dumb in other ages, because working on the circumference of the circle doesn't make one smart but it might get you a big salary in a VC project