One thing you realize after a certain age is that the notion of a person having any attribute X, whether X is a good thing (genius etc.) or bad thing, is almost

One thing you realize after a certain age is that the notion of a person having any attribute X, whether X is a good thing (genius etc.) or bad thing, is almost completely a product of the environment / society and has little to do with the person themselves. People are just people, society puts these labels on people and that shapes people to express / develop certain attributes and hide others. The more interesting question is why certain attributes are highlighted over others. Think about that for a bit and the answers will probably surprise you. Some reasons are self-reinforcing / recursive but others are rooted in a functional reason or a flaw in thinking (also interesting to consider why some flaws are so common that they are grandfathered into the system). My thinking abruptly stops once I get to the physical survival layer and I don’t think we have sufficient language to reason beyond that.