The world is a big place. Your admission that you have met people smarter than yourself may well put you in a different category.
The people I talk of are the people that seem to honestly think they are the smartest people in the world/their industry. Unless they have occasion to interact with people on the level of Nobel laureates routinely, I suspect their sample may not include 'very smart people' (and I don't mean 'very smart', I mean VERY smart, i.e. I am not saying the people they have met have been dull, just that they may not be in the upper echelons of intelligence).
Also, people's self-ranking of their own traits (especially something that is somewhat ill-defined, like intelligence) is notoriously less than objective.
Just know that for some of the people you have met and consider yourself clearly smarter than, they may have the the opposite view and believe it just as assuredly as you.
The people I talk of are the people that seem to honestly think they are the smartest people in the world/their industry. Unless they have occasion to interact with people on the level of Nobel laureates routinely, I suspect their sample may not include 'very smart people' (and I don't mean 'very smart', I mean VERY smart, i.e. I am not saying the people they have met have been dull, just that they may not be in the upper echelons of intelligence).
Also, people's self-ranking of their own traits (especially something that is somewhat ill-defined, like intelligence) is notoriously less than objective.
Just know that for some of the people you have met and consider yourself clearly smarter than, they may have the the opposite view and believe it just as assuredly as you.