Everyone, including you (and me ofc), is dumb AF but in different ways.

You seem to be suffering from imposter syndrome. Step 1 is to understand that we’re all just winging it.

Are you getting the job done? Plenty of people you perceive as smarter than you are not getting the job done.

“Everyone knows something. Nobody knows everything.” If you focus on what you don’t know, ofc you will not feel smart. But you know something, so focus on that. Even if it’s not directly relevant, a lot of advances are made by taking ideas from a similar discipline and applying them to a current problem.

It goes like this nowadays: “Hahah, I fooled these suckers into hiring me”

“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”

Be curious, not comfortable. Never stop learning from those who are smarter than you.

Why would someone “less smart” not deserve success?

Get out of your stem bubble (Lemmy being one), do some local sport or activity where there is actual social mixing. You will notice the gap between your bubble and people who barely finished highschool. For me the gap is rather having the privilege to be educated to abstraction rather than being smart (~ IQ). Being able to manage abstraction better is often why you are better paid in STEM.

Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration (I think it’s like 50% luck, too, but it’s not my cliche). Being smart helps, but just being present and putting in the work is the surest path to success. I say this as a relatively smart person who once thought he could coast on just being smart, you have to put in the work.

Christ look at the world around us. It’s pretty clear that the most successful members of society are some of the stupidest motherfuckers alive. Successful and smart is practically completely orthogonal.

But I digress. Smart is … overrated, particularly by smart people. You put in the work, you deserve success. Whether you get it or not is another question, but don’t doubt that it’s been earned.

Luck.

Wait you guys are having success?

I’ve seen the work of others.

What does it mean to be smart? Even someone who scores well on an IQ test might be completely unable to be productive for more than a half hour a day.

From what I’ve seen, success is more about not fucking around than being smart.

We need to get past this idea of smart being the key, Everyone is smart in their own way. I spent a good few years in stem, everyone says oh your so smart. I am not i am logical and persistent (or as i see it unfortunately obsessive).

Second your schooling likely led to this path, cognitive edu models, alongside problem solving roles amplifys the idea of smart. Reality you leaned to your strength, not everyone gets the means to do that.

Don’t feel guilty for doing what you are good at and what your edu pointed you at. If you want to feel grounded again why not try giving back by teaching, mentoring, upskilling, voulenteering to local community projects or running workshops etc.

I guess I can answer this, because I work in IT and that gives me the opportunity to feel smarter than people regularly. And despite also feeling like a moron regularly, the curse of competence tells me the imposter syndrome is bullshit.

Why do you need to justify it?

Being the smartest person in the room means you have nothing new to learn from those in the room. That sucks.

When you aren’t the smartest in the room you should take the opportunity to talk with those smarter people to expand your knowledge and to do some networking. As much as I hate it socialisation works wonders in professional circles.