> “Street smarts” refers to models that are too high-dimensional for linguistic transmission and were therefore acquired through calibrated experience. The street-smart person cannot explain why they know what they know, which makes them look inarticulate to the book-smart person, which leads the book-smart person to conclude that the street-smart person’s knowledge is inferior. This conclusion is precisely backwards in domains where judgement matters. The inability to articulate the model is not evidence of a crude model. It is evidence of a model too sophisticated for the transmission channel.

I disagree to a degree. Yes, what the author says is accurate about people dismissing street-smarts as a lower level of intelligence than it deserves. But a sufficiently skilled communicator can absolutely articulate many of the factors being evaluated when they judge a situation and how their descision-making process works.

> They evaluate intelligence through the lens of articulacy

There was an earlier instance of the author using a word such as unability (or similar) and it should have been inability and I let it go, but this misuse of language is making my head hurt. However, I confess that I thought the word should have been articularity and it turns out that’s not a real word either. But I at least pay attention to spellcheck. I don’t understand how someone could take the time to write a long and thoughtful essay about intelligence and not use spellcheck to proof it.

What is wrong in that quoted sentence? Do you mean "articulacy" should instead be "articulateness"? "Articulacy" is also a word, and correct in this context.

> But a sufficiently skilled communicator can absolutely articulate many of the factors being evaluated when they judge a situation and how their descision-making process works

That sounds right but I suspect it is wrong. Watching smart intuition has been a personal interest of mine for years. Few people avoid the manifold traps.

1: people hallucinate their reasoning or are self-deceptive (or even intentionally deceptive). Watching AI has helped hone watching people.

2: you need to be sufficiently close in skills and language for someone to be able to communicate the nuances. E.g. sportspeople.

3: Judging whether an intuitive statement is true is hardhard. We need to identify a correct intuition (and ignore incorrect intuitions) before judging whether some explanation is valid.