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Anything beyond that requires you to formulate a very precise question to get any answer worth reading (what kind of smart/stupid do you mean? What result you want to get, in what context? Etc).
Currently it’s a very generic and broad question => any answer can be bad or good depending on the perspective.
Start by not asking dumb questions.
As Paul Graham wisely points out:
“At every period of history people have believed things that were just ridiculous and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell, it isn't.”
Look back at things you've already written in public and do the same.
Or perhaps I'm just being pretentious here. In any case, very entertaining.
When working on any problem or project, assume that everyone else involved is smarter than you are until definitively proven otherwise. By not making negative assumptions you'll look smarter yourself.
Joke aside, yes engineers are condescending a-hole. I think the most effective way to avoid that is to meet people who are really a lot smarter than you are.
For me it was easy, cause my brother is one of them. I think I am smart but he’s a whole other level. Sometimes I come up with an idea and work on it for 6 months, and when I talk to my brother about it, it’s like he’s 3 sentences ahead of me all the time. And it’s not rare that I make sense of what he tells me 6 hours after talking to him. So weird. No wonder he skipped 2 years when he was 6, and then proceeded to get into the best schools in the world with super high grades all the time.
I met a few other people like that in my career. This was truly humbling, and I don’t mean the fake “humbling” term startup people throw around, I mean humbling like you feel really close to the ground. Like “oh ok, I’ll just shut up now”