I'm tired of this meme; it is way overstated. You could just as easily say "the curse of smart people is arrogance, because they know just how stupid the people around them are." I can assure you, I've known plenty of incredibly smart people who were quite arrogant.
Depends how you define "smart" then. Viewed differently, nominal smarts + arrogance = lack of big-picture smarts = at the end of the day, just not all that smart.
One of the absolute worst attributes of smart people is their willingness to argue over the semantics of a word rather than simply accept the overall premise being communicated by the other person.
Except when, as in this case, the underlying semantic confusion of their premise (or how they articulated it) has a lot to do with why it was wrong in the first place.
