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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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I have a theory: Super-smart people don't exist, it's all due to selection bias.
It's easy to think someone is extremely smart if you've only seen the sample of their most insightful thinking. But every time that happened to me, and I found that such a promising person had a blog or something like that, it universally took very little time to find something terribly brain-hurtful they've written there.
So the null hypothesis is: there's a large population of fairly-smart-but-nothing-special people, who think and publish their thought a lot. Because the best thoughts get distributed, and average and worse thoughts don't, it's very easy from such small biased samples to believe some of them are far smarter than the rest, but their averages are pretty much the same.
(feel free to replace "smart" by "rational", the result is identical)
If you're interpreting "super-smart" to mean always right, or at least reasonable, and thus never severely wrong-headed, I think you're correct that no one like that exists, but it seems like a rather comic bookish idea of super-smartness.
Also, I have no idea how good your judgment is about whether what you call brain-hurtful is actually ideas I'd think were egregiously wrong.
I think there are a lot of folks smart enough to be special people-- those who come up with worthwhile insights frequently.
And even if it's just a matter of generating lots of ideas and then publishing the best, recognizing the best is a worthwhile skill. It's conceivable that idea-generation and idea-recognizing are done by two people who together give the impression of one person who's smarter than either of them.