It seems to me that a lot of "smart" people are capable of applying their intelligence in some spheres, but not others.

Is this too obvious to be worth mentioning? I say it is not too obvious, for many bloggers have said of Overcoming Bias: "It is impossible, no one can completely eliminate bias." I don't care if the one is a professional economist, it is clear that they have not yet grokked the Quantitative Way as it applies to everyday life and matters like personal self-improvement. That which I cannot eliminate may be well worth reducing.

-The Fallacy of Gray

It also seems to me that this view is shared by other people. Can anyone point me to an article that does a good job arguing for it?

Tangential point: in deciding how smart I think someone is, for me, a lot of it has to do with how low they're capable of stooping. (I know this is just me saying "this is how I define a word", which is a pretty useless thing to say... but at the same time maybe there's something deeper that I'm trying to articulate that I haven't been able to spell out precisely with the above statement, but that maybe people could understand via some sort of empathetic inference?)