The electrician and the professor both spent years learning. Respect every kind of smart.

Different kinds of learning get different amounts of respect, and the ranking has more to do with how the knowledge is displayed than with how hard it was to get. Wiring a house safely and reading a difficult text are both years of training with real consequences for getting it wrong. Treating one as the smart option and the other as the fallback says more about the sorting than about the skills.

Notice where you have absorbed that ranking, since almost everyone has. Then ask someone whose work you quietly filed as simple what the hardest part of it actually is.