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It's not that I disdain the concept of common sense or street smarts, or that I don't believe in the book smart genius who is a babe in the woods in life.
It's that I find that stating out loud, constantly, boasting, identifying that one is "street smart" instead of "book smart" is poorly correlated or even anti-correlated with actual street smarts. The people I know who brag about their street smarts are often just as if not more likely to fall constantly for scams, cons, flimflams etc. The perpetual victims in my life, the ones who are always buying the wrong car or dating the wrong woman or telling me about some magic product they bought from a weird website the lowers their electricity bill using technology developed by Nikola Tesla, they are exactly the people telling me they aren't book-smart but they have common sense.
So assess people based on the visible evidence that results from their intelligence, not based on their claims. For common sense, that looks like somebody who runs their life well. Someone who doesn't fall for scams, who always knows the score, who always gets a deal, who has a guy for that, a contact over there, a trick for getting things done. That guy has street smarts. The guy who claims he has street smarts, he is most typically falling back on the way of identifying himself that people won't call him out on the way they would book smarts. Always check for receipts.
We have a word for genuine street smarts- wisdom. You’ll notice these people rarely call themselves, or are described as, wise.
There’s definitely wise men who are not so good at math or books. And there’s definitely math whizzes and literary geniuses who are not so wise. But the first group doesn’t tend to use the word ‘street smarts’.
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