It's lonely. You're surrounded by fucking idiots, and you realize all the bad stuff going on. And with immigration as it is, it's only going to get worse. jews destroying civilization and we are arguing over what MIGA candidate is better.
It's going to keep getting worse until the meatgrinder of WW3 kills off billions of mongrels.
If I had an axe for every time I warned "smart" people not to do certain things and they had listened to me I'd still have an axe because the retarded MD I told not to do something then did it anyway and broke the axe!
That's definitely me trying to tell people about things about "recent' scandals for years. Yes Dan Schneider is a pedophile with a foot fetish. Remember when I showed you half the evidence in the documentary 4 or more years ago
You're surrounded by fucking idiots, and you realize all the bad stuff going on.
You don't even need to be smart to see this stuff is the sad part, just being able to think for yourself is a miracle these days and just doing that leads to seeing just how much of modern 'reality' is a complete farce.
I can see why many people just turn off their brains and go with the programming vs having to actually deal with real life issues in a meaningful way.
Yeah that's the bell curve meme. Low IQ people go off of instinct and instantly see everything for as it is. Midwits think they are the best because they are "experts" who know everything. High IQ know what they do not know and are able to accurately analyze things for what they are.
There are still difficult problems and fun challenges, but for most things it's like having the cheat code for a game - it's not fun anymore.
Or like why Linux desktop is so crap. Making a useful, consistent UI is not hard at all, it's actually very easy, but it takes a lot of time and effort so nobody does it unless they're paid to; it's a chore. It's too easy.
The smarter you are the more of your life is just chores and busywork.
I don't think the 2SD gap is really accurate. Actually smart people who don't have autism (read: brain damage), are generally pretty good at communication and emulation. They can make themselves understood to a bunch of C- bureaucrats for the sake of getting grants, just like they can distill their ideas for children. Morons can't do that.
If the 2SD gap was legit, then retards would be a bunch of Dr Doolittles, living in harmony with beasts, while smart people would need retard proxies to train their dog for them. That is clearly not the case.
Making yourself understood does not equal having fun communicating.
I want to talk to others that can see the apple in 3D and spin it around in their heads. "But I did have breakfast"-tier of communication is not sufficient for enjoyment. It is not my responsibility to bring stupid people up to my level. But I'm starting to accept that maybe it is my responsibility.
I talk to people, and it just takes so fucking long.
You have to use "scaffolding" to frame the topic if it is anything at all interesting or controversial.
Here is how it goes. You pick a topic. How about Money Laundering in Ukraine.
Start by encouraging the other person to talk on the subject. Show empathy and understanding.
Repeat back to the other person what they just said, to demonstrate that you understand their feelings and PoV.
Using the most mild tone and depreciating language suggest some minor changes to their (straight from MSNBC) worldview. "Have you considered..." Or "Have you ever thought about..."
If you did step one and two well enough, they MIGHT be in a place that they can accept a tiny little nugget of new information. Don't push to hard or you will alienate them and they will stop listening.
Watch the other person squirm because they don't like the way this new information makes them feel. They instinctively understand that for the new information to be true, then they must have been very wrong about a bunch of stuff for a long time, and they don't like that.
Use emotional language to deliberately manipulate the emotions of the other person so they are more likely to be persuaded.
Watch them agree with you (because you are pretty clearly very knowledgeable and consistent) then walk away and immediately reject or forget everything you discussed because they don't like the way it makes them feel.
People don't have to be dumb to require this process. l have met very smart people who are 100% emotional thinkers; that is they think with their feelings and use their mind to rationalize their decisions.
I have also met people who are smart but very firmly in the grip of the Dunning Kruger effect.
I am not even that smart. My IQ is about 150, but I am absolutely, deeply, obsessive about discovering the real, actual, measurable truth of the world. I am delighted to be shown wrong, because I can correct my worldview.
So I don't talk to a lot of people. There is literally nothing for us to talk about that isn't utterly trivial and insignificant.
I've found points 3,4 to be rather effective (actually without doing 1 and 2). An important factor, which is what 1,2 may be about, is that people need to like you. They're not even going to give what you say a hearing if they dislike you or are neutral towards you.
Regarding 5: it is not exactly a surprise that someone's worldview does not change based on one new fact that is inconsistent with it. If you think of someone's worldview in terms of a Kuhnian scientific revolution, one single anomaly should not make him change his entire worldview. Only when anomalies stack up and increase to make the worldview unsustainable.
Only when anomalies stack up and increase to make the worldview unsustainable.
My experience shows that for most people the new facts must reach a point where the cognitive dissonance becomes almost physically painful before they will change their mind about anything.
Then they will probably hate you for changing their mind, because they decide that you are the source of the discomfort, which is false, because you don't control the Truth of the world.
If parts of their worldview are connected to their identity, then they would probably rather die than change. For example, lefties who are deprogrammed enough to see that the cause they were advancing causes almost unlimited misery and death. To discover that you have been so badly wrong is intensely painful should cause deep reflection.
I am strange in that I have cultivated a willingness to be shown how I am wrong, specifically, so I can be less wrong in the future. It is a deeply unnatural mode of thinking and requires rigorous application to develop. I am still struggling with it. Being a devotee to the capital T truth of the world does not make one a nice person, nor is it advantageous for making friends or cultivating social relationships. I'd rather be right than happy. I won't lie, even to myself.
The people who believe the 2SD thing also believe a modern computer can't emulate a Nintendo 64's computer, because there's too much of an artificial intelligence gap between the two. The N64 can't ever emulate a windows 11 desktop, communication is impossible there, but windows 11 desktop can certainly emulate the N64.
And we'd all call a computer that couldn't emulate lower-level software to be handicapped in some way.
It's not as great as if you're on the same level, you're constantly aware you're running on a lower-level, but "near impossible" is truly ridiculous a sentiment, for sure.
You sidestep it. If the other processor cannot handle 4 cores, you don't hit them with 16 cores, you downscale. Don't try to make them "get it". You're not picking a marriage partner, you're picking someone to make smalltalk with while accomplishing some side objective such as playing a game or conducting business.
We know it's aggravating, but you described it as "impossible." Most the replies are reading that literally like there is a bidirectional language barrier rather than it just being so frustrating it's difficult not to walk away.
It is impossible within the confines of a polite conversation.
If the other party were very trusting of the speaker
If the other party were truly motivated to grasp the concepts being used
if the other party were to actually do the work (which might take weeks or months) they would be truly changed by the ramifications of the new concepts and the new, improved world model.
For example: Where does money (fiat currency) come from? How is it created? Under what circumstances is it destroyed? What are the long term implications; especially WRT the boom and bust cycle?
Someone with an IQ of 84 literally can't get the concepts involved in this discussion. They just can't. No amount of work will get them there.
Even having such a discussion with you would require that we have enough shared culture (and attached concepts) to be able to discuss the matter.
If you didn't know what fiat currency was or how it is created, I'd probably rely on about an hour of animated videos to get you there.
I don't want to try to sum up a literal hour of very careful scripted and animated educational videos so I can establish the base foundations for the conversation. More to the point the person I am talking with won't have a single useful or interesting thing to say on the subject. Why would I even bother?
So, define impossible buddy. Can it be technically done? Sometimes. Often even. Is is utterly, completely pointless on every single occasion? Yes.
That's all and good, but let's go back to the original claim that was being discussed.
This. Communication beyond 2 SD less intelligent is near impossible outside of basic interaction.
If you define "basic interaction" as anything short of discussing economic concepts. Sure, it's impossible. But, to me at least, "basic interaction" means something you can manage with someone who barely even speaks your language.
Not being able to communicate with some 2 SD less intelligent would mean that someone with 129 IQ could manage better than basic interaction with someone with 100 IQ, but someone with 131 IQ would not be able to. Obviously a flawed premise. The decisive factor in the complexity of communication is the minimum of the two IQs, not the delta.
Also, side note. People value intelligence when it benefits them. Nobody likes being on the receiving end of an intellectual beat down but plenty enjoy being on the side that do it. See modern media and it's portrayal of "smart is sexy". It's almost always a smart character using their brain to outwit everyone else in the room while showing off to a love interest. Dr Who has done it for decades, Sherlock did it, Disney and Marvel have done it, and always with a support group in tow made up of pretty and pretty dumb characters who love to see their smart champion play wordsmith with everyone else and emerge as the biggest brain in the box. When someone else is smarter and this gets used against both the champion and his cheerleaders then suddenly smart isn't sexy any more, it's creepy, or weird, or ominous, or whatever.
tl;dr People value intelligence for selfish reasons.
It's almost always a smart character using their brain to outwit everyone else in the room while showing off to a love interest.
Sherlock
Holmes's only love interest is an afternoon at the opium den, he hates women. If you read the books the guy is 100% aspie savant. He has two operating modes... pursuit, and coked off his ass.
In this case, I think he was referring to the hugely popular on tumblr show called literally Sherlock that was highly praised for its "portrayal" of an intelligent character.
It had a final season so bad people literally memoryholed it, rewrote history to call it always trash, and forget that its the only reason Benedict Cumberbatch got famous, but it was one of the leading examples of "smart is sexy" a decade ago.
Everyone likes it when Sherlock Holmes does his thing on someone else's or has a flair about his abilities. Telling someone that you know their walking route because they stepped on the red mud at the construction site two blocks over in a single sentence sounds pretentious to them.
But aim it at them, and they get scared. Now have a German accent and facial response. Suddenly everyone thinks you're planning their doom and not Scooby Doo.
And smarter people are more self-critical and aware that there are even smarter people out there, so have an ironic tendency to downplay themselves while the midwits are puffing themselves up.
115 is still considered "average" and being say, 114 and talking with somebody at 84, who just misses "average" by 1 point, is borderline impossible, and if the 84 is disagreeable, practically torture.
That 85 to 115 is 68% of people. If you're 116 you're close to being in a club with the top 30%.
Now "smart" can mean a lot of things, and the people who invent rocket ships probably aren't top 30%, or even top 5%. So there's a massive gap between "Smarter than almost everybody you'll ever meet" and "A very smart person relative to other competent people."
I haven't taken a test in a long ass time. So I don't know where I'd end up. What I do know is that day to day, the people who are slog to deal with far outnumber the ones with a scintillating intellect. On the other hand, when I do meet somebody who's obviously smarter than me, they run circles around me and it's not even close.
It's exponential in other words. And being +1, means you're smart, but being +2 means you're probably twice as smart as the +1 guy. It's a big gap.
I am just pointing out that an IQ of 140 is getting close to the absolute upper edge of testability.
At higher than 140, the flaws and irregularities of the test are thrown into sharp relief. Tests have culturally specific content and only rank people within a statistically significant population of test-takers. Relating that ranking to a specific score is not trivial. For example, you might be in the top two percent of the people who take this particular test. What does that mean compared to other tests? What IQ is that?
That's more or less what I'm getting at. It's a one eyed man thing. Smart relative to "most people" is a lot different than smart relative to "smart people"
110 is plenty of IQ to consider yourself "smart" but there's still a large number of people who are going to intellectually body you. And if you're in an environment full of them (technical lab etc.) It'll be aparent where you are.
If you're managing a mcdonalds with 110 IQ points it's going to be hard not to get a bit arrogant about it.
That 85 to 115 is 68% of people. If you're 116 you're close to being in a club with the top 30%.
That makes 116 sound really low. And if you're 115 you're also close to being in a "club" with the top 30%. You can put the separation anywhere you want, and people do it in a way to flatter their own ego.
The easiest person to fool is yourself, and people make ample use of that.
I wasn't suggesting that you believe what you wrote yourself, if that's what you mean. You were clearly mocking something that the midwits believe, though I couldn't quite pin down what.
Knowledge is not the same thing as intelligence, though it is often mistaken for intelligence, but a similar rule applies there. The less I know about something, the more I think I know. But when you figure out more, your realization of your vast ignorance grows, because you know more about all the stuff that you don't know.
I feel like a good measure for intelligence is to ask people "who do you personally know that you think is smart?" Then ask them "why do you think they're smart?" Because most people's idea of smart is such a low bar that the term is meaningless is conversation.
It's hard to imagine anyone's self perceived IQ is just a totally independent guess at this point, I figure almost everyone has done one of the free online tests at this point. Be they of dubious quality or not, it's probably going to influence your perception at least a little.
Most people here are just SJWs painted a different color. Replace something like "Jew" with "Patriarchy" and they speak with the same level of intelligence and coherence.
They confuse being probably right with "I am very smart" and follow their ego until they feel comfortable screaming at anyone who slightly questions them on a detail.
The longer answer I would give is: It depends on a lot of things such as how much smarter you might be compared to those around you, how frequent any differences may be demonstrated, and how, if at all, said differences improve over a period of time.
The short answer is: it ranges between tedious and infuriating.
And now for the sperg of text. When others can't do things that you find easy enough to be trivial it brings up questions why it's so difficult for them as well as why they can't improve, even when you already know the answer which is: everyone is different and has different capabilities.
Being able to look at a puzzle, or a mix of letters, or some other potential pattern and "just get it" is as pointed out elsewhere in the comments just a trait. It's how someone is and how they interpret and respond to stimuli. But when you then add various context to that situation it can go from solving a puzzle in seconds just because you can, to being told everyone else has spent the last 15 minutes trying to solve it and failing. Thus creating the comparison. You're not just "smart" at this point for solving the problem, you're now also "smarter" then others which leads to various issues from both sides of the comparison.
Frustration at others inability to do what you can and/or consider trivial will lead to resentment which can in turn lead to distancing and isolation. This can also come about by others feeling intimidated or put off just how much someone outshines everyone else and more so when it's clear through less effort than everyone else needs to put in. Even though it may be known it's not intentional or malicious behaviour the result is still the same, and there is very little that can be done to solve it.
a 140 IQ person with an LLM can have many times more value output over 100x 120 IQ people with LLMs and 10,000x more output over 100x 100 IQ people with LLMs.
First, 120 is usually just past the pretentious halfwit range. Ignoring machine learning, the only reason this would be true is the difficulty and cost of managing increasing amounts of people. Assuming that there's acceptable leadership, it's better to have 10 people ranging from 140-105 IQ with diverse backgrounds (not the intersectional type) than three 145s of similar background. The Wisdom of Crowds book cites at least 1 study showcasing how important it is for a team strategy to not have blind spots resulting from groupthink.
A rockstar is still capable of unique invention, so 1+ genius shouldn't be discarded if possible.
VIs only benefit is lessening the burden of less virtuous or misaligned individuals on the more productive. The homogeneity they output reminds me of the Irish potato famine, however British oppression plays into it. Certainly not gauranteeing 1 borderline genius to out profit 100 borderline smarts working g together.
If you are around retards, it feels like being in the movie Idiocracy. They are functionally incapable of engaging you beyond simple conversation.
If you are around midwits, it feels like an episode of the Outer Limits (which is better than the Twilight Zone, fight me). They think of themselves as knowledgeable, intelligent even. They are blissfully ignorant of the ways in which they are manipulated on a day to day basis, believing themselves to be informed even as they are misdirected and propagandized.
If you are around other intelligent people, you don't stand out. Your experience will differ depending on how much of a sociopath they are.
Being intelligent isn't some mystical superpower. It just means you are a monkey with a bigger brain. You are still fallible to manipulation. It is incredibly important to be aware of your limitations. You are just as capable of making retarded mistakes at 150 IQ as someone with 80 IQ. The only difference is that you might learn not to make them again.
I would say that the biggest problem with being smart is that it is very difficult to make genuine connections with people, because the smarter you are, the harder it is to find someone who can really engage with you.
I think about the amount of people who have no internal monologue a lot. If having it is the actual wiring of the brain or just a different kind of filter that demands everything be articulated in case it needs to be spoken. They say only half of everyone has it and neither side knows the other exists. It's unnerving.
I've also heard that a lot of people think in printed words, seeing their thoughts lined up in their mind in real time like newspaper type.
These things can't be a measure of intelligence, there are way too many people who are genuinely smart that fall into either category. It just seems strange.
Do you think the internal monologue separates (as a whole, I'm sure there's exceptions) introverts from extroverts? Maybe the reason extroverts seek out others, is that's how they bounce ideas, whereas the introverts are busy thinking, and the interruptions are tiresome.
Possibly, sure. I hate to use the term but personalities are on a spectrum and it would take a study to sort it all out. Part of me would be afraid to read the results because we might find out that there are a growing number of people who think only in emojis.
whereas the introverts are busy thinking, and the interruptions are tiresome.
While you are probably onto something, this is the line of thinking that creates the insufferable idea that "introverts are just smarter than everyone."
Most of them are probably too busy thinking, but often over thinking until they've created a paranoid reality for themselves until they are paralyzed with anxiety and depression.
Maybe. I wasn't going in that smart/dumb direction. I was just thinking that introverts would be more likely to have that internal soundboard. Even if the endless rumination was attached more often than not.
Right, I didn't think you were. Just pointing out that its the kind of first steps that can lead to that kind of thinking, the same way that "they have no internal monologue" doesn't necessarily make someone less intelligent either in reality but for a lot of people online the "internal monologue/apple test/breakfast question" has become their shorthand to call someone retarded.
I still wonder about that. I've always thought that there's a good chance that some people just say their internal thoughts are "heard" because that's the closest physical phenomenon to describe it to someone else.
We lack consistent language for describing things that we can't be certain are being experienced by another person in the same way. Make a noise, we can describe what both people experience as "hearing." But when both have a thought, there's no common reference stimulus to tie to the sensation.
There may be no (direct) common reference between the two people, but there is a common reference. If a person hears a sound, and then later their mind reproduces that sound (say, remembering a song) they'd say they 'hear' the sound in their head (or at least I've never met anyone that doesn't unless they're making a fine distinction between the subjective experiences of hearing with the ears vs 'hearing' with the mind.) If someone says 'I don't hear my own thoughts/memories', particularly in reference to a common experience (take the song example from earlier) we can reasonably infer that their subjective experience is very different from someone who does 'hear' their own thoughts.
I know that personally, I am quite capable of hearing (or seeing) thoughts/memories, and the experience is near enough to the real thing that I wouldn't use any other term other than to clarify that I'm not undergoing some sort of self-induced hallucination.
Pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is a key component of intelligence. It's why IQ tests have a lot of 'what number is next in this series' and 'which of these things is not like the other' questions. You are a lot better at predicting outcomes - positive and negative - because you recognize patterns. You see people making the same mistakes repeatedly, and wonder why. It's not that you never make mistakes, but you never make them twice. You are also really good at extrapolating the consequences of others' mistakes, ie: 'johnny stuck a fork in an electrical outlet and got shocked. I'd better not stick a fork in an electrical outlet.'
I don't know what it actually is, just that I was off the chart. I did an IQ test as the educational-psych/teacher running the G&T program put us all through an IQ test early in the program (for being over 130 for eligibility I am assuming, after us being nominated by teachers. That or it was a part of research). I maxed the test out at 145 or 150, the test couldn't measure higher than that, or at least didn't do so without supplemental material (it's more likely that it was 145 that was the max, as that is 3SD's above the average). And that's with my visual-spatial skills being utter shite and presumably dragging the score down. With IQ quite static after the age of 6, and the test being done a fair bit later than that I therefore know that I am at least that intelligent, but how much more I cannot say.
What is it like?
I got fucking lazy. Ended up dropping out of school actually.
I communicate but then steps that seem obvious to me need to be broken down in what feels like painful detail for the listener to understand, they've not made the leap I have. It is also a struggle to restrain myself and use fewer subordinate clauses and parentheses when writing. My natural style is to add a tonne of them and have this big long run-on sentence.
You end up reading and thinking about dissident ideas. I see a lot of people here responding that they are gifted. I believe it. Not everyone. But more people than average and from their comments, I have some pretty good guesses as to who. The pattern-recognition and starvation for engaging conversation has you ending up reading and pondering things like the stuff on slate star codex or moldbug (back in the day) to start with and sliding down into other stuff from there, and then exploring the ideas of great men of old. That sort of stuff would start at least 120+ I imagine. Those of us here are the racist, sexist, homophobic splinter group of a splinter group of a load of pattern-recognisers and autists. It's not implausible that there are more gifted people here and in old /pol/ than elsewhere.
On a related line, you end up exploring esoteric or niche theology. It's not enough for you to just read the gospels and go to your nearest church on a Sunday, oh no. If you don't go off the deep end, you have to at least engage with and resolve the filioque to your satisfaction ensure the orthodox don't have it right, and determine which of the Nicene creeds you are happy to affirm before then going off and reading some Aquinas, then seeking out the Latin mass or the ordinariate orsomething. I'm not saying all will, or that all of those are all that niche. I am saying that I think that there is pattern to explore this stuff further and deeper and to be a bit weirder about it than Joe-Sunday when you're at 140+ or so.
Can you pick up any book, read it, and understand the gist with minimal repetition?
You mean people repeatedly read the same thing?
Can you infer solid and accurate conclusions based on a small amount of evidence?
Did so today and impressed the boss yeah.
Is any subject or discipline up for grabs or do you have to have a keen interest in a particular field in order to flourish?
Hard to say given the laziness. Yeah you end up with a broad knowledge and understanding of a load of things. It's more I end up using that other study as a procrastination method. You read some economics for fun.
What is something you are able to do that you know is because of your intelligence -- the proverbial 1,000 pound deadlift of the brain, if you will.
I'm great at pulling things from ages ago? To my shame I don't have any great skill or flex. It's more just doing simpler things but with it needing far less effort. Remember how I said I dropped out? Well a few years later I need those scores for something, after I'd found something I was actually passionate about and wanted to learn, so rather than do 2 years of study I just rock up and sit the adult equivalent thing and score an equivalent 99th+ percentile score. 2 hours prep, that's it. Rather than 2 years of schooling. Which just rewards my bad habits and reinforces the laziness ya know?
Well, that's enough wanking myself off for my intellect for one evening I think.
You might take a qualified IQ test as an adult for curiosity's sake. Start with Mensa's free online test for an idea of the spatial test. The mental-age/chronological-age metric approximates childhood potential but loses accuracy as you reach 18-25 years old.
Similar to being short, or autistic, or having brown hair, it is a trait, not a super power, and a very large amount of how useful it is depends on who you are, which is shaped by upbringing and life experience.
If you read well, and pass tests, people think you're "smart". Unfortunately, they also think "smart" = "knows everything", so they will fail to explain things to you, or train you properly, and you wind up having to figure shit out for yourself, at which point you have to pray you do have the smarts you've been gaslit into thinking you have.
It's not just "public education", it's been the perception since forever. It's the flip side of the coin to deaf people who can't speak being considered automatically "stupid" (hence the shift in meaning that the word "dumb" originally meant. Medieval writers knew the difference.)
The best example in popular culture is probably the goddamn Professor from Gilligan's Island. The castaways expect him to know everything - but he's a goddamn botanist. No wonder his glue didn't hold - he's not a chemist. He might know THAT a certain sap or plant is used for something, but not how to use or extract what you need from it.
Or Hermione from HP. Great at book learning, but she couldn't get it though her thick skull that House Elves are not slaves and don't want to be "freed". Ron and Hagrid tried to tell her that Dobby was an exception ("There's oddballs in every bunch, Hermione")
Questions directed at "intelligent people" always feel like iamverysmart bait just waiting for cringe. Defining yourself as a smart person is like defining yourself as atheist, if that alone has given you a sense of superiority it can get kind of embarrassing pretty quickly. I don't believe intelligence is the sole measure of importance of a person or even myself, and then IQ tests only demonstrate an even narrower application of intelligence, but I do typically score 2.5-3 standard deviations above average in IQ tests.
you pick up any book, read it, and understand the gist with minimal repetition?
Short answer, more or less yes, as long as it's not heavily reliant on foreign concepts not defined or inferable within the book itself.
Can you infer solid and accurate conclusions based on a small amount of evidence?
Sometimes. Some situations just need more data to understand accurately, sometimes you can come up with creative ways to get there with less evidence, sometimes you miss those creative solutions and only realise them after you brute forced it with more info gathering. Creative problem solving isn't quite as consistent as solving a straightforward logic problem, just being smart doesn't mean you're guaranteed a eureka moment.
Is any subject or discipline up for grabs or do you have to have a keen interest in a particular field in order to flourish?
Motivation and conscientiousness are separate from intelligence and no field is completely effortless to flourish in no matter how smart you are, so yeah interest is necessary. But switching lanes is definitely easier if you're more intelligent.
What is something you are able to do that you know is because of your intelligence -- the proverbial 1,000 pound deadlift of the brain
Interdisciplinary work is definitely the realm where having a high general intelligence has the greatest advantage. Intelligence alone is not enough to just automatically make it work, you still need the right foundational knowledge of each discipline to make it work. Hence despite being old enough that I'm not as plastic and my straight logic processing speeds are slowing slightly, I find interdisciplinary work easier than ever, as my repertoire of foundational knowledge has continued to expand. But trying to introduce concepts from other subjects and synthesizing that with knowledge from our own discipline to solve a problem is definitely where I start losing some of my more studious than naturally intelligent colleagues.
The more intelligent you are, the lonlier you are. Imagine trying to carry on a meaningful social or romantic relationship or work with a mentally retarded person. That's what almost everyone is to us. We don't look down on you, we just don't want to deal with your foolishness. Like someone else said, interacting with you ranges between tedious and infuriating.
People expect more from you and then treat you like utter garbage if you don't deliver.
But really, there's a vast difference between smart with a high IQ and intelligent. Intelligence can be measured, how you use what you've learned in a practical setting can't.
I have a pet theory that what we casually refer to as 'intelligence' or smarts is actually a three-pronged function of fundamental aspects of the way we think.
would be actual brainpower in terms of processing speed, the ability to be faced with completely new information and to process it into different information or meaningful conclusions quickly - like the high IQs or indeed autistic savants who can look at a number pattern or visual puzzle in an IQ test and waste minimal time on it.
would be knowledge base - your wealth of 'book smarts' or 'life experience' you can draw on, independent of the time or prompting you require to do it. This also depends on the strength of your memory and would account for why long and short term memory loss can affect intellect in different ways.
'wisdom' on the D&D char sheet, which I'd define as your ability to usefully pattern-match your knowledge base (2) to the world around you, independent of speed. You might be faced with new info and be able to perform transformations on it quickly in your head as in (1), but the new info might also correspond to old info in your knowledge store(2) which would affect the nature of this info and the way you should process it, so unless you're good at the application of knowledge to reality(3), every wider conclusion you're reaching could be trash.
so it's basically 'int'(in GHz)/Knowledge/Wis. I want to find a different term than 'Intelligence' for the first one, because that's the word everyone is already so attached to even though I think the concept is broader, but I can't think of one.
You can theory craft these to come up with archetypes that cover every kind of person across the board, such as a sheltered person with no life experience (low in #2), who is nevertheless academically gifted (high in #1) and able to apply their limited knowledge to a broad range of situations, like childish fables or Karl Pilkington outsmarting Ricky Gervais using comparisons he would never think of (high #3). Karl for his part would be low Int/low knowledge(I know he's experienced a lot but he always seems to go back to comparisons from his childhood and home life)/high Wis.
All the academics and researchers during the pandemic who continue to parrot covid lies are - the good faith ones at least - High Int (they deal with complex models and maybe they out-argue the uneducated in the heat of the moment), High Knowledge (lot of stuff to remember, lot of years behind the microscope), and zero fucking Wis ('lol idiot how could ALL my inputs be wrong, I guess EVERYONE in politics and science is lying huh?? conspiracy theorist! oh and you must be one of those nazis they told me about too!')
I've worked with peers who could engineer a solution to just about any technical problem handed to them...and they still believe communism will work and vote blue no matter who.
Sowell suggests that these kinds of people are attracted to systems with centralized control, like communism, because they imagine it would give them more power. If they can engineer a solution to any problem, arrogance would tell them that they could also "solve" societal issues in a childish "if I were king" way.
I think the other thing missing is how narrow the knowledge is. Everything is niche and field-specific and narrow nowadays. The world was a much better place when scientists were doing astronomy at night, chemistry on a monday morning and then reading the latest in geology and anthropology on a tuesday afternoon.
Knowledge being narrow makes mid-to-low wis people think they are far smarter than they actually are, and its preventing some important innovation I think. This is one of my soapbox issues.
Generalists are definitely under-appreciated. One of the refuges of the scientismo is to knock people back by saying akshully black is white because you don't have enough detailed knowledge in X field.
It has ramifications for human progress for sure. I was recently watching the Tucker podcast with Casey Means, the former surgeon and health researcher. She described medical education in the USA as multiple disciplines where no specialist is ever taught to look at the whole system of the body, hardly any being taught about nutrition for example. And as it turns out, of course, one of the best ways to never reach a solution to a profitable problem (chronic health issues in the wider public) is to break it down into various sub-specialties, all of which need their own paid specialist, gatekeeping their field using opaque language, and discouraging them from talking to eachother or from forming a generalised overview of how human health works. So you end up just finding multiple expensive non-solutions and that's more important than being actually correct, because you respected all the various specialists sufficiently and you followed the accepted process.
So that means that anyone claiming to actually have had their IQ formally assessed is full of shit beyond a few learning disability kids paid by the school board?
There are likely a couple, like myself, who have had IQ tests administered back in grade school to see if they could skip a grade or two. But at this point, those tests for anyone posting on here would be woefully out of date.
you can do it privately but (where I live at least) it's hundreds of dollars for the Psychologists time. I looked into it a while back and decided against it.
A high IQ just means you can fuck up better and more properly. It also means nothing is designed for you. Let's say you're really short, you need a stool to get to the counter and an electric motor to get around. It's reasonable to supply this in everyone's minds. If you're tall, no one cares that the counter is at your knees and the bottom shelf is Narnia. Everyone just tells you to grow up.
That's what it's like to have a High IQ. Everything is designed for someone who can do one or two things and then nothing. If you can do more, they don't know what to do with you. This is not a rise slowly through the system, this is a get a specialized office and make money off of him deal.
The thing is, even being smart requires learning stuff. You can be completely new at something, and everyone expects you to understand it as if you're God.
The scene in Idiocracy where the guy talks about watering plants is accurate. You assume everyone is as smart as you, but they aren't and it leads to weirdness.
On the flip side, almost everything everyone conplains about is usually something that isn't real or will solve itself with enough time. Once you realize this, a happiness kicks in that you wish others could have.
There's a pretty big stigma to just posting your IQ online. It's unverifiable so it's pointless and it can easily make you look kind of like a douche. Impressively enough that even in a place where people regularly get called subhuman bigots many are still are reluctant to do it.
I was obtuse about it but I did give a value to mine too. Plus realistically if you're talking about casual measurements not a specific testing methodology giving an upper-lower range is probably more helpful than giving a single concrete number. Even if you trust it isn't completely made up you still don't know who's listing their highest/lowest/average result.
That and there's endless debate about what constitutes a valid and accurate IQ test, so unless someone really likes to geek out about the minutiae of attempts to quantify human cognitive function they probably just want to sidestep all that noise.
The one thing I would say is that I think intelligence is a tool and not a virtue. It's not as simple as either having intelligence or not having it, and a person's worth, morally and spiritually, doesn't scale linearly with an IQ graph. The bell curve meme is accurate-ish but I think it goes deeper than that (ie. you're not automatically an insufferable twat just because you're a midwit).
This seems like an overly obvious thing to say, yet at the same time I think a lot of people (irl, not necessarily on this forum) act like the ultimate goal of life is to prove you're smarter than everyone around you and that there's some innate moral value to clawing your way up the ladder of intellect. The important thing is not just to have intelligence and show it off but to do something with it that amplifies your value system.
'If only I could understand absolutely everything that was going on right now and completely destroy my enemies with facts and logic!' - noble human qualities like humility can teach you the former is impossible and remind you that the latter is important not because your enemies are dumb, but because they're evil, which is not the same thing. Evil being dumb is good because it suggests an easier win, but make that association too much and you fall in the trap of always thinking 'my enemies are dumber than me' and also 'smart must be good'.
You should ask this question on Reddit or a Rick and Morty forum, not here.
what is it like? Can you pick up any book, read it, and understand the gist with minimal repetition?
Instead of asking people who delude themselves into believing that they have high intelligence, you could look at correlations with high intelligence. Reasoning seems to be most highly correlated. Things like vocabulary and memory (and even reaction time) are also correlated, but to a lesser extent. I can point you to a journal article by a noted researcher if you are interested.
What is something you are able to do that you know is because of your intelligence -- the proverbial 1,000 pound deadlift of the brain, if you will.
While noting that I in no way assert that I am 'smart', the only thing that gives me that impression is the stupidity of other people. And not the stupidity of holding 'bad opinions', but not noticing large inconsistencies in their own thinking or what they are told. Or not being able to figure out the simplest things. Left to my own devices, I feel neither stupid nor smart, but just ordinary.
And sometimes I have moments of clarity that make me think I might be more than that. But it's unlikely I'm actually genuinely smart. Just able to rationalize and think a bit more clearly than most.
Can you elaborate a bit on the first two sentences. What made you think you were smart, and what made you think that you're only slightly above average?
I can elaborate, but I wonder how much I can say on the internet before someone starts piecing together who I am.
I'd rather not open dump my personal life, so I'll just say that my mother is not very bright, and I discovered that before I hit double digits old, so I had to take on adult responsibilities at a very young age to stop grifters from realizing they found a human version of crack with my mother who isn't smart enough to realize a gift is coming, or how to fight her way out of it.
Not only does it make you have to learn things quick, but making mistakes was costly, so I had to learn to take the correct choices, be precise, and how to spot a grift coming before it became a problem.
Like recently when we learned about that guy who is imploding Second Wind for his own gain. That's the kind of grift I'd be able to spot, having been close to a few of them and in some of them, and had to find ways of getting out of them.
Does that make me smart? No. I just know the type, and what they want, and how to shut them down before I become too entwined in their web.
While I agree with the thread here in many ways, I will answer In true autistic forum post format.
Can you pick up any book, read it, and understand the gist with minimal repetition?
I've never had to re-read a book to 'get the gist', but I will sometimes if it's interesting (though nowadays it's technical documents, and just to get the wording of how someone else said it exactly as they said). Podcasts and other stuff more commonly I will re-listen/watch, but that's often because audio is less grok-able than text with inflection and other stuff.
Can you infer solid and accurate conclusions based on a small amount of evidence?
This one most people can actually do, it just depends on their experience where and how often they can do this. You can also tell someone has little in touch with reality if they are vocal about stuff all the time and are hilariously wrong consistently, yet still do it.
Is any subject or discipline up for grabs or do you have to have a keen interest in a particular field in order to flourish?
I suppose it could be, but optimizing your talents isn't just 'what are you good at' but also 'what can I get good at with this, quickly'. Doing that has made me a lot happier in life overall, not just professionally.
What is something you are able to do that you know is because of your intelligence -- the proverbial 1,000 pound deadlift of the brain, if you will.
This one I don't actually know, or maybe it's just being this way? Not sure... If I had to take a stab at it, actually explaining the difference between the Abrahamic religions, including the gnosticicm offshoot that we are currently living in the hellscape of.
I wrote something painfully long her. Not worth reading.
Short answer which is still too long:
It's like being an alien. I cannot be interested in the entertainment my coworkers talk about. I sit in meetings, and the entire table will laugh, and laugh hard, and a generic comment I have heard over 100 times. That they've all heard 100 times.
"well it IS monday!" hahahahahahahahhaha
They snicker like they've done something subversive and surprising.
Have you talked to somebody with Downs? The cheerful conversational ones that are pretty high functioning? You can like them and respect them and feel they're pleasant to be around. But you never ask them a question you need a real insight on.
That's how most conversations end up being.
To be more direct.
It depends how difficult the book is but generally yes. I could review books i read once 14 years ago. Of course there are smarter people than me, and they have written books and those ones take a bit more work, but most literature isn't a challenge. I expect that the way I feel about very chewy books might be how people with a lower IQ feel about books I find easy. As an example. I still don't REALLY understand what "studying" is. I just don't get how you can sit for hours internalizing the same information. I don't understand how to do it, I don't understand how it's effective. I don't get it. You read the thing, and then you've read it. Do you just read the same paragraph over and over? I don't understand it.
Small amounts of evidence is relative. I don't know. I don't think logic is necessarily tied to/dependent on IQ. If logic is the path, IQ is the engine. Your speed is important, but it doesn't help you not get lost. You can try more paths than others in the same amount of time, but again, speed doesn't help you navigate any better. As with many things, making good inferences is more about experience than anything else. It's less about having an instinct, vs knowing how much information you need to have before your instinct can actually connect the dots properly. Otherwise you're just guessing.
No. Maybe if you're an actual genius, which I am not. People do have facets and areas they are drawn to and better at. When i took the SAT, I did entire sections of the language test without reading the passages, and in some cases I even started skipping the questions themselves. I scored in the 99th percentile. I've always been able to do that, and I've tried multiple times to teach it and failed. It just works. My Math score was decidedly mid list 56th or something if I remember right. I'm also absolute shit at spatial reasoning, and partially prosopagnostic. These are things I cannot do regardless of how hard I try.
I cannot be interested in the entertainment my coworkers talk about. I sit in meetings, and the entire table will laugh, and laugh hard, and a generic comment I have heard over 100 times. That they've all heard 100 times.
Anyone who thinks they are smart is almost certainly a retard and has no other objective measure to preen about their superiority to other people. Especially if they know or brag about their IQ.
But people love to circlejerk about how they, their group, and their hangout is filled with High IQ individuals who are capable of answering those questions.
Its not a "this place" thing, its a basic human nature thing. Everyone thinks they are smarter than everyone else, no one will admit they are in the 50% of the population below 100 IQ if they can even recognize it.
You can see in the answers you got, which is filled with people smugly crowing about how everyone else is boring and they are so ostracized and alone because of their super intellect.
There seemed to be a few replies from actual smart people though,
How can you tell? There are some people for whom I'd think that it's not very unlikely that they're telling the truth... but since we're on the internet, no one knows you're a dog and no one knows that you ain't bright.
It may be even worse in real life, because how well-spoken you are has an enormous impact on how smart you're considered to be. I think this is less the case on the internet, as people know you can just edit stuff to sound coherent.
because how well-spoken you are has an enormous impact on how smart you're considered to be
I'll back this up. I speak far more eloquently online than I do in real life, where my speech is highly hampered by a strong Cajun dialect/accent at times and a need to physically stop speaking to reach the ability to say a word my brain hitches on (like Jimmy from South Park).
So I'm often considered quite retarded, which leads to a lot of surprise to people who I can and do switch to a more serious topic and am able to list off large amounts of data and outpace most arguments. Not that I would call myself "smart" but my schooling at least has the physical documentation that says I was above the average to some irrelevant extent.
The one time I ever got professionally tested, it was 134. I spent most of my younger life as an edgy misanthrope because people are retards, but as I got older I learned to appreciate the wisdom of older people. Young people in the stupid range are infuriating and I avoid them at all costs.
My dad's entire (big) family is over 160IQ, which is statistically unheard of. All of them can grasp anything they put their mind to. They only put their mind to things that interest them. As far as I can tell, only one or two of them are smart enough to see the forest through the trees and be immune to marketing and propaganda, because it interests them to put their minds to those sorts of things.
They're all boomers, and like most boomers they have largely been failures as far as their families go; although, I'd say that's mostly because of women being allowed to be batshit insane. Their intelligence hasn't really helped them avoid batshit crazy women.
As far as the various example tasks you mentioned, they're all skills that can be trained and require both interest and discipline. Some require a baseline intelligence, but it's not substantial. Sherlock Holmesing conclusions from mere minutia is a bit fantastic, though.
Personally, I slept through AP Calculus and aced it, but that's because I liked the math and spacial reasoning, and I sometimes did my homework (usually during lunch). I had previously flunked out of a 6th grade advanced math course called MEGSS because I was bored and uninterested (it was basically pre-algebra for 6th graders, and I would have ended up taking AP Calc a year earlier).
IQ tests only need to be proctored so that they are verified. If you're not so deluded you'll let yourself cheat on time or take questions you've seen before you can administer your own test with just a little discipline and a stopwatch, but the result is only useful for yourself (and anyone who trusts your objectivity greatly)
The hardest part is finding a good test, which have to be taken blind, so you have to take the whole test first and then evaluate if it was a good test, ideally before you receive/calculate your results to avoid bias.
Plus IQ is a pretty dated term for g, a measure of general intelligence, the holy grail of semi-quantifiable transferable capability across a wide range of cognitive tasks that the layperson intuits as natural intelligence. The most state of the art batteries of tests don't typically bill themselves as IQ tests anymore.
My understanding is that IQ and g are distinct. g is the quality that IQ attempts to (imperfectly) measure. Are there tests that present themselves as 'g' tests rather than IQ tests?
Yeah, 'g' is what IQ wishes it was but couldn't quite be.
Turns out it still can't be easily pinned down as a single objective number, best we get is more of a coefficient. After taking a bunch of different cognitive tests, weighting the results and integrating things down a level or two you can try to figure out how much those results were down to generalized cognitive aptitude and how much was specialised/learned talent for each task.
CHC cognitive testing (edit- changed from CAS, I mixed up my three letter cognitive test acronyms, -0.03g for me. You can also use the CAS2 battery of tests to calculate 'g' too, but they're against the idea that 'g' is a single constant so it seems kind of rude to do so 😂) is one battery of tests that has been around for a while that doesn't purport to be an "IQ test" but is comprehensive enough to be used as a base to try and calculate 'g' from. But that's the thing, the tests themselves stop at giving you the results of multiple independent cognitive performance tests, the 'g' calculating is something else afterwards.
The 'g' is only semi-dependant on the test results, you can get the different 'g' results from the same answers just by changing how you weight each test result, and they're all debatably plausible. 'g' is supposed to be the essence of general intelligence, it is not learned or specialized, it is something structural and rock steady across all tasks. The hallmark of a good formula for 'g' interpretation is that it is even more tightly heritable than traditional IQ values. But it's also kind of an academic distinction, good IQ values still track very closely with 'g' and the only diagnostic advantage of 'g' is potentially differentiating between edge cases of someone with high 'g' and low learned ability across almost all cognitive tasks and someone with moderate 'g' and high learned ability across almost all cognitive tasks, but the real world problem solving ability of both individuals is going to be comparable except on one or two types of task.
Because you can have somebody who is completely fucking dumb in every capacity but if they've worked hard at something very specialised they would seem like a 200+ IQ genius if you didn't talk to them about anything else.
IQ is general intelligence. That's why you would have to not talk with him about anything else. And it's also why IQ tests include a variety of questions. You can also test IQ in ways that are very difficult for an ordinary guy to train, like the highly g-loaded reverse digit span.
There are definitely different types of intelligence I mean a great one to look at which schools and traditional education refuse to acknowledge is street smarts.
Street smarts is just 'wisdom', not intelligence. If you grow up sheltered, that does not actually decrease your intelligence, it just makes you incapable of dealing with anything.
Even if I satisfied my curiosity finally and went to get an IQ test and I did get something high at the end of the day it just seems like another dick measuring contest.
If you brag about it online, it really is. It's not an honest signal, of course, because whether you score 80 or 150, you can claim to be 150.
I’ve never had an IQ test, so I’m just going to assume I’m stupid. Hey, all the more reason to push myself to learn more! Some have called me smart, yet others have called me smartass. Perhaps it’s both, or perhaps it’s neither.
Whether or not I care to be defined as “smart,” I will say I do have an uncanny ability to understand complex things as if they were simple. easily—machines, electronics, and the like. But I’m also not great with people in real-time verbally, meaning any of the wit I have when I have the time to think about a response is nonexistent, and it’s replaced with frustration. I also have about as much athletic ability as a rock. So, I mean take whatever aptitudes I have and decide for yourself if I’m smart or not.
Edit: Oh and I use my memory as a crutch. People around me know that when I say I remember something I AM right, always. There’s no ambiguity in my mind. Either I remember in detail or I don’t. Anything else, I’m lying. Yes, I often lie about things I actually remember, because sometimes the level of detail I remember would freak people out. Take my memory away, and I’m a shell of my former self.
There are just so many aspects to intelligence in my perspective that I think it is pretty difficult to articulate (maybe I am stupid lol)
Working in a niche IT field and being respected and lauded by peers definitely helps me think I am at least more intelligent than average.
I enjoy life and while it is despairing at time to see how braindead, drooling, mouth breathing retarded other humans are, but I don't want to be them. I just try to live my best life and use what I have in the best way I can, which I think lines up with intelligence as well.
I have a reasonably high IQ, and I don't feel smart. I pick up on some things easily, other things I struggle with.
It's more that a lot of other people seem very stupid.
What is something you are able to do that you know is because of your intelligence -- the proverbial 1,000 pound deadlift of the brain, if you will.
Pattern recognition and seeing how issues connect, I suppose. But I don't think of that as an innate consequence of intelligence, I tend to think that most people simply refuse to do it. It's not that they can't think, it's that they don't. Which is frustrating.
To be clear, the really frustrating part is realizing how stupid the supposedly "smart" members of society are. The ones who are convinced of their own infallible intellect. The midwits.
Stupidity isn't the problem. Dumb people can be smart. The problem is the veneration we as a society have for people who are utterly ill-equipped to be making any sort of meaningful decisions, whether because they're innately stupid or simply refuse to use their brains correctly.
The people who are smart enough to feel smart, but not smart enough to be smart are the true retards of society. And they are the cause of a great many of its issues.
I guess I'm what's considered "smart" in general. Didn't try the first time in school, but crushed math and physics when I returned and ended up with studying nanotechnology in post secondary.
It doesn't really 'feel' like anything to me, as it's all just normal for me. I have a hard time understanding why other people do things the way that they do sometimes though, and people get frustrated with me for doing things in unusual ways sometimes. It's hard to fit in, but I also just don't try that hard.
It's lonely. You're surrounded by fucking idiots, and you realize all the bad stuff going on. And with immigration as it is, it's only going to get worse. jews destroying civilization and we are arguing over what MIGA candidate is better.
It's going to keep getting worse until the meatgrinder of WW3 kills off billions of mongrels.
You forgot to mention the worst part where you try to warn the idiots and they all treat you like you're crazy.
If I had an axe for every time I warned "smart" people not to do certain things and they had listened to me I'd still have an axe because the retarded MD I told not to do something then did it anyway and broke the axe!
This is the worst part. You see the danger, you try to warn people, and they treat you like you're the crazy one, because you're not an "expert".
"SOURCE??"
That's definitely me trying to tell people about things about "recent' scandals for years. Yes Dan Schneider is a pedophile with a foot fetish. Remember when I showed you half the evidence in the documentary 4 or more years ago
You don't even need to be smart to see this stuff is the sad part, just being able to think for yourself is a miracle these days and just doing that leads to seeing just how much of modern 'reality' is a complete farce.
I can see why many people just turn off their brains and go with the programming vs having to actually deal with real life issues in a meaningful way.
Yeah that's the bell curve meme. Low IQ people go off of instinct and instantly see everything for as it is. Midwits think they are the best because they are "experts" who know everything. High IQ know what they do not know and are able to accurately analyze things for what they are.
That's the real difference, imo, is people that think at all vs people that prefer to be media programmed.
Lots of high iq people want to just sit in front of a screen and be told what to think.
They are not actually high IQ. Their pattern recognition is broken.
More boring than lonely.
There are still difficult problems and fun challenges, but for most things it's like having the cheat code for a game - it's not fun anymore.
Or like why Linux desktop is so crap. Making a useful, consistent UI is not hard at all, it's actually very easy, but it takes a lot of time and effort so nobody does it unless they're paid to; it's a chore. It's too easy.
The smarter you are the more of your life is just chores and busywork.
Ain't that the damn truth. Once you've figured out why everything is shit. What's next? The only solution I can see is trying to wake people up.
I'll eat my hat if your IQ is higher than 100.
Mine about 140 depending on what test you use.
You are still a faggot.
Excuse me, that's "massive faggot".
And OP is a massive moron, despite his name.
I don't think the 2SD gap is really accurate. Actually smart people who don't have autism (read: brain damage), are generally pretty good at communication and emulation. They can make themselves understood to a bunch of C- bureaucrats for the sake of getting grants, just like they can distill their ideas for children. Morons can't do that.
If the 2SD gap was legit, then retards would be a bunch of Dr Doolittles, living in harmony with beasts, while smart people would need retard proxies to train their dog for them. That is clearly not the case.
Making yourself understood does not equal having fun communicating.
I want to talk to others that can see the apple in 3D and spin it around in their heads. "But I did have breakfast"-tier of communication is not sufficient for enjoyment. It is not my responsibility to bring stupid people up to my level. But I'm starting to accept that maybe it is my responsibility.
I talk to people, and it just takes so fucking long.
You have to use "scaffolding" to frame the topic if it is anything at all interesting or controversial.
Here is how it goes. You pick a topic. How about Money Laundering in Ukraine.
People don't have to be dumb to require this process. l have met very smart people who are 100% emotional thinkers; that is they think with their feelings and use their mind to rationalize their decisions.
I have also met people who are smart but very firmly in the grip of the Dunning Kruger effect.
I am not even that smart. My IQ is about 150, but I am absolutely, deeply, obsessive about discovering the real, actual, measurable truth of the world. I am delighted to be shown wrong, because I can correct my worldview.
So I don't talk to a lot of people. There is literally nothing for us to talk about that isn't utterly trivial and insignificant.
I've found points 3,4 to be rather effective (actually without doing 1 and 2). An important factor, which is what 1,2 may be about, is that people need to like you. They're not even going to give what you say a hearing if they dislike you or are neutral towards you.
Regarding 5: it is not exactly a surprise that someone's worldview does not change based on one new fact that is inconsistent with it. If you think of someone's worldview in terms of a Kuhnian scientific revolution, one single anomaly should not make him change his entire worldview. Only when anomalies stack up and increase to make the worldview unsustainable.
My experience shows that for most people the new facts must reach a point where the cognitive dissonance becomes almost physically painful before they will change their mind about anything.
Then they will probably hate you for changing their mind, because they decide that you are the source of the discomfort, which is false, because you don't control the Truth of the world.
If parts of their worldview are connected to their identity, then they would probably rather die than change. For example, lefties who are deprogrammed enough to see that the cause they were advancing causes almost unlimited misery and death. To discover that you have been so badly wrong is intensely painful should cause deep reflection.
I am strange in that I have cultivated a willingness to be shown how I am wrong, specifically, so I can be less wrong in the future. It is a deeply unnatural mode of thinking and requires rigorous application to develop. I am still struggling with it. Being a devotee to the capital T truth of the world does not make one a nice person, nor is it advantageous for making friends or cultivating social relationships. I'd rather be right than happy. I won't lie, even to myself.
but spinning the apple is the one thing I can't do :(
The people who believe the 2SD thing also believe a modern computer can't emulate a Nintendo 64's computer, because there's too much of an artificial intelligence gap between the two. The N64 can't ever emulate a windows 11 desktop, communication is impossible there, but windows 11 desktop can certainly emulate the N64.
And we'd all call a computer that couldn't emulate lower-level software to be handicapped in some way.
It's not as great as if you're on the same level, you're constantly aware you're running on a lower-level, but "near impossible" is truly ridiculous a sentiment, for sure.
Isn't it that they don't want to get it? The limiting factor for people's comprehension is generally not their intelligence, but their self-interest.
You sidestep it. If the other processor cannot handle 4 cores, you don't hit them with 16 cores, you downscale. Don't try to make them "get it". You're not picking a marriage partner, you're picking someone to make smalltalk with while accomplishing some side objective such as playing a game or conducting business.
We know it's aggravating, but you described it as "impossible." Most the replies are reading that literally like there is a bidirectional language barrier rather than it just being so frustrating it's difficult not to walk away.
It is impossible within the confines of a polite conversation.
For example: Where does money (fiat currency) come from? How is it created? Under what circumstances is it destroyed? What are the long term implications; especially WRT the boom and bust cycle?
Someone with an IQ of 84 literally can't get the concepts involved in this discussion. They just can't. No amount of work will get them there.
Even having such a discussion with you would require that we have enough shared culture (and attached concepts) to be able to discuss the matter.
If you didn't know what fiat currency was or how it is created, I'd probably rely on about an hour of animated videos to get you there.
I don't want to try to sum up a literal hour of very careful scripted and animated educational videos so I can establish the base foundations for the conversation. More to the point the person I am talking with won't have a single useful or interesting thing to say on the subject. Why would I even bother?
So, define impossible buddy. Can it be technically done? Sometimes. Often even. Is is utterly, completely pointless on every single occasion? Yes.
That's all and good, but let's go back to the original claim that was being discussed.
If you define "basic interaction" as anything short of discussing economic concepts. Sure, it's impossible. But, to me at least, "basic interaction" means something you can manage with someone who barely even speaks your language.
Not being able to communicate with some 2 SD less intelligent would mean that someone with 129 IQ could manage better than basic interaction with someone with 100 IQ, but someone with 131 IQ would not be able to. Obviously a flawed premise. The decisive factor in the complexity of communication is the minimum of the two IQs, not the delta.
Also, side note. People value intelligence when it benefits them. Nobody likes being on the receiving end of an intellectual beat down but plenty enjoy being on the side that do it. See modern media and it's portrayal of "smart is sexy". It's almost always a smart character using their brain to outwit everyone else in the room while showing off to a love interest. Dr Who has done it for decades, Sherlock did it, Disney and Marvel have done it, and always with a support group in tow made up of pretty and pretty dumb characters who love to see their smart champion play wordsmith with everyone else and emerge as the biggest brain in the box. When someone else is smarter and this gets used against both the champion and his cheerleaders then suddenly smart isn't sexy any more, it's creepy, or weird, or ominous, or whatever.
tl;dr People value intelligence for selfish reasons.
Holmes's only love interest is an afternoon at the opium den, he hates women. If you read the books the guy is 100% aspie savant. He has two operating modes... pursuit, and coked off his ass.
In this case, I think he was referring to the hugely popular on tumblr show called literally Sherlock that was highly praised for its "portrayal" of an intelligent character.
It had a final season so bad people literally memoryholed it, rewrote history to call it always trash, and forget that its the only reason Benedict Cumberbatch got famous, but it was one of the leading examples of "smart is sexy" a decade ago.
Everyone likes it when Sherlock Holmes does his thing on someone else's or has a flair about his abilities. Telling someone that you know their walking route because they stepped on the red mud at the construction site two blocks over in a single sentence sounds pretentious to them.
But aim it at them, and they get scared. Now have a German accent and facial response. Suddenly everyone thinks you're planning their doom and not Scooby Doo.
I wonder what the difference is, on average, between self-perceived IQ and actual IQ on this forum.
Huge. Everyone thinks they are 'smart.' Statistically, very few are.
And smarter people are more self-critical and aware that there are even smarter people out there, so have an ironic tendency to downplay themselves while the midwits are puffing themselves up.
It's an easy mistake to make.
115 is still considered "average" and being say, 114 and talking with somebody at 84, who just misses "average" by 1 point, is borderline impossible, and if the 84 is disagreeable, practically torture.
That 85 to 115 is 68% of people. If you're 116 you're close to being in a club with the top 30%.
Now "smart" can mean a lot of things, and the people who invent rocket ships probably aren't top 30%, or even top 5%. So there's a massive gap between "Smarter than almost everybody you'll ever meet" and "A very smart person relative to other competent people."
I haven't taken a test in a long ass time. So I don't know where I'd end up. What I do know is that day to day, the people who are slog to deal with far outnumber the ones with a scintillating intellect. On the other hand, when I do meet somebody who's obviously smarter than me, they run circles around me and it's not even close.
It's exponential in other words. And being +1, means you're smart, but being +2 means you're probably twice as smart as the +1 guy. It's a big gap.
I am just pointing out that an IQ of 140 is getting close to the absolute upper edge of testability.
At higher than 140, the flaws and irregularities of the test are thrown into sharp relief. Tests have culturally specific content and only rank people within a statistically significant population of test-takers. Relating that ranking to a specific score is not trivial. For example, you might be in the top two percent of the people who take this particular test. What does that mean compared to other tests? What IQ is that?
That's more or less what I'm getting at. It's a one eyed man thing. Smart relative to "most people" is a lot different than smart relative to "smart people"
110 is plenty of IQ to consider yourself "smart" but there's still a large number of people who are going to intellectually body you. And if you're in an environment full of them (technical lab etc.) It'll be aparent where you are.
If you're managing a mcdonalds with 110 IQ points it's going to be hard not to get a bit arrogant about it.
That makes 116 sound really low. And if you're 115 you're also close to being in a "club" with the top 30%. You can put the separation anywhere you want, and people do it in a way to flatter their own ego.
The easiest person to fool is yourself, and people make ample use of that.
I feel like you didn't read my comment carefully.
But you've always had trouble with subtext.
Not just with subtext...
I wasn't suggesting that you believe what you wrote yourself, if that's what you mean. You were clearly mocking something that the midwits believe, though I couldn't quite pin down what.
Yeah I'm aware you can't pin down anything not spelled out lol.
Knowledge is not the same thing as intelligence, though it is often mistaken for intelligence, but a similar rule applies there. The less I know about something, the more I think I know. But when you figure out more, your realization of your vast ignorance grows, because you know more about all the stuff that you don't know.
Good point, and there's a reason the "midwit" meme is so popular right now!
Exactly.
I feel like a good measure for intelligence is to ask people "who do you personally know that you think is smart?" Then ask them "why do you think they're smart?" Because most people's idea of smart is such a low bar that the term is meaningless is conversation.
I'd imagine most people here are a mix of both socially isolated and relatively higher iq than the gen pop.
But gen pop is dumb af after years of dumbing down from the top down in our education system. And immigration lowering iq as well
It's hard to imagine anyone's self perceived IQ is just a totally independent guess at this point, I figure almost everyone has done one of the free online tests at this point. Be they of dubious quality or not, it's probably going to influence your perception at least a little.
It's probably similar to the concept that everyone believes they are an above average driver. Except for people who are terrified of driving.
Most people here are just SJWs painted a different color. Replace something like "Jew" with "Patriarchy" and they speak with the same level of intelligence and coherence.
They confuse being probably right with "I am very smart" and follow their ego until they feel comfortable screaming at anyone who slightly questions them on a detail.
The longer answer I would give is: It depends on a lot of things such as how much smarter you might be compared to those around you, how frequent any differences may be demonstrated, and how, if at all, said differences improve over a period of time.
The short answer is: it ranges between tedious and infuriating.
And now for the sperg of text. When others can't do things that you find easy enough to be trivial it brings up questions why it's so difficult for them as well as why they can't improve, even when you already know the answer which is: everyone is different and has different capabilities.
Being able to look at a puzzle, or a mix of letters, or some other potential pattern and "just get it" is as pointed out elsewhere in the comments just a trait. It's how someone is and how they interpret and respond to stimuli. But when you then add various context to that situation it can go from solving a puzzle in seconds just because you can, to being told everyone else has spent the last 15 minutes trying to solve it and failing. Thus creating the comparison. You're not just "smart" at this point for solving the problem, you're now also "smarter" then others which leads to various issues from both sides of the comparison.
Frustration at others inability to do what you can and/or consider trivial will lead to resentment which can in turn lead to distancing and isolation. This can also come about by others feeling intimidated or put off just how much someone outshines everyone else and more so when it's clear through less effort than everyone else needs to put in. Even though it may be known it's not intentional or malicious behaviour the result is still the same, and there is very little that can be done to solve it.
Preach.
First, 120 is usually just past the pretentious halfwit range. Ignoring machine learning, the only reason this would be true is the difficulty and cost of managing increasing amounts of people. Assuming that there's acceptable leadership, it's better to have 10 people ranging from 140-105 IQ with diverse backgrounds (not the intersectional type) than three 145s of similar background. The Wisdom of Crowds book cites at least 1 study showcasing how important it is for a team strategy to not have blind spots resulting from groupthink.
A rockstar is still capable of unique invention, so 1+ genius shouldn't be discarded if possible.
VIs only benefit is lessening the burden of less virtuous or misaligned individuals on the more productive. The homogeneity they output reminds me of the Irish potato famine, however British oppression plays into it. Certainly not gauranteeing 1 borderline genius to out profit 100 borderline smarts working g together.
Hey, we could easily be all three!
It really depends on who you are around.
If you are around retards, it feels like being in the movie Idiocracy. They are functionally incapable of engaging you beyond simple conversation.
If you are around midwits, it feels like an episode of the Outer Limits (which is better than the Twilight Zone, fight me). They think of themselves as knowledgeable, intelligent even. They are blissfully ignorant of the ways in which they are manipulated on a day to day basis, believing themselves to be informed even as they are misdirected and propagandized.
If you are around other intelligent people, you don't stand out. Your experience will differ depending on how much of a sociopath they are.
Being intelligent isn't some mystical superpower. It just means you are a monkey with a bigger brain. You are still fallible to manipulation. It is incredibly important to be aware of your limitations. You are just as capable of making retarded mistakes at 150 IQ as someone with 80 IQ. The only difference is that you might learn not to make them again.
I would say that the biggest problem with being smart is that it is very difficult to make genuine connections with people, because the smarter you are, the harder it is to find someone who can really engage with you.
I think about the amount of people who have no internal monologue a lot. If having it is the actual wiring of the brain or just a different kind of filter that demands everything be articulated in case it needs to be spoken. They say only half of everyone has it and neither side knows the other exists. It's unnerving.
I've also heard that a lot of people think in printed words, seeing their thoughts lined up in their mind in real time like newspaper type.
These things can't be a measure of intelligence, there are way too many people who are genuinely smart that fall into either category. It just seems strange.
Do you think the internal monologue separates (as a whole, I'm sure there's exceptions) introverts from extroverts? Maybe the reason extroverts seek out others, is that's how they bounce ideas, whereas the introverts are busy thinking, and the interruptions are tiresome.
Possibly, sure. I hate to use the term but personalities are on a spectrum and it would take a study to sort it all out. Part of me would be afraid to read the results because we might find out that there are a growing number of people who think only in emojis.
While you are probably onto something, this is the line of thinking that creates the insufferable idea that "introverts are just smarter than everyone."
Most of them are probably too busy thinking, but often over thinking until they've created a paranoid reality for themselves until they are paralyzed with anxiety and depression.
Maybe. I wasn't going in that smart/dumb direction. I was just thinking that introverts would be more likely to have that internal soundboard. Even if the endless rumination was attached more often than not.
Right, I didn't think you were. Just pointing out that its the kind of first steps that can lead to that kind of thinking, the same way that "they have no internal monologue" doesn't necessarily make someone less intelligent either in reality but for a lot of people online the "internal monologue/apple test/breakfast question" has become their shorthand to call someone retarded.
I still wonder about that. I've always thought that there's a good chance that some people just say their internal thoughts are "heard" because that's the closest physical phenomenon to describe it to someone else.
We lack consistent language for describing things that we can't be certain are being experienced by another person in the same way. Make a noise, we can describe what both people experience as "hearing." But when both have a thought, there's no common reference stimulus to tie to the sensation.
There may be no (direct) common reference between the two people, but there is a common reference. If a person hears a sound, and then later their mind reproduces that sound (say, remembering a song) they'd say they 'hear' the sound in their head (or at least I've never met anyone that doesn't unless they're making a fine distinction between the subjective experiences of hearing with the ears vs 'hearing' with the mind.) If someone says 'I don't hear my own thoughts/memories', particularly in reference to a common experience (take the song example from earlier) we can reasonably infer that their subjective experience is very different from someone who does 'hear' their own thoughts.
I know that personally, I am quite capable of hearing (or seeing) thoughts/memories, and the experience is near enough to the real thing that I wouldn't use any other term other than to clarify that I'm not undergoing some sort of self-induced hallucination.
Pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is a key component of intelligence. It's why IQ tests have a lot of 'what number is next in this series' and 'which of these things is not like the other' questions. You are a lot better at predicting outcomes - positive and negative - because you recognize patterns. You see people making the same mistakes repeatedly, and wonder why. It's not that you never make mistakes, but you never make them twice. You are also really good at extrapolating the consequences of others' mistakes, ie: 'johnny stuck a fork in an electrical outlet and got shocked. I'd better not stick a fork in an electrical outlet.'
I'm at 145+.
I don't know what it actually is, just that I was off the chart. I did an IQ test as the educational-psych/teacher running the G&T program put us all through an IQ test early in the program (for being over 130 for eligibility I am assuming, after us being nominated by teachers. That or it was a part of research). I maxed the test out at 145 or 150, the test couldn't measure higher than that, or at least didn't do so without supplemental material (it's more likely that it was 145 that was the max, as that is 3SD's above the average). And that's with my visual-spatial skills being utter shite and presumably dragging the score down. With IQ quite static after the age of 6, and the test being done a fair bit later than that I therefore know that I am at least that intelligent, but how much more I cannot say.
What is it like?
I got fucking lazy. Ended up dropping out of school actually.
I communicate but then steps that seem obvious to me need to be broken down in what feels like painful detail for the listener to understand, they've not made the leap I have. It is also a struggle to restrain myself and use fewer subordinate clauses and parentheses when writing. My natural style is to add a tonne of them and have this big long run-on sentence.
You end up reading and thinking about dissident ideas. I see a lot of people here responding that they are gifted. I believe it. Not everyone. But more people than average and from their comments, I have some pretty good guesses as to who. The pattern-recognition and starvation for engaging conversation has you ending up reading and pondering things like the stuff on slate star codex or moldbug (back in the day) to start with and sliding down into other stuff from there, and then exploring the ideas of great men of old. That sort of stuff would start at least 120+ I imagine. Those of us here are the racist, sexist, homophobic splinter group of a splinter group of a load of pattern-recognisers and autists. It's not implausible that there are more gifted people here and in old /pol/ than elsewhere.
On a related line, you end up exploring esoteric or niche theology. It's not enough for you to just read the gospels and go to your nearest church on a Sunday, oh no. If you don't go off the deep end, you have to at least engage with and resolve the filioque to your satisfaction ensure the orthodox don't have it right, and determine which of the Nicene creeds you are happy to affirm before then going off and reading some Aquinas, then seeking out the Latin mass or the ordinariate orsomething. I'm not saying all will, or that all of those are all that niche. I am saying that I think that there is pattern to explore this stuff further and deeper and to be a bit weirder about it than Joe-Sunday when you're at 140+ or so.
You mean people repeatedly read the same thing?
Did so today and impressed the boss yeah.
Hard to say given the laziness. Yeah you end up with a broad knowledge and understanding of a load of things. It's more I end up using that other study as a procrastination method. You read some economics for fun.
I'm great at pulling things from ages ago? To my shame I don't have any great skill or flex. It's more just doing simpler things but with it needing far less effort. Remember how I said I dropped out? Well a few years later I need those scores for something, after I'd found something I was actually passionate about and wanted to learn, so rather than do 2 years of study I just rock up and sit the adult equivalent thing and score an equivalent 99th+ percentile score. 2 hours prep, that's it. Rather than 2 years of schooling. Which just rewards my bad habits and reinforces the laziness ya know?
Well, that's enough wanking myself off for my intellect for one evening I think.
You might take a qualified IQ test as an adult for curiosity's sake. Start with Mensa's free online test for an idea of the spatial test. The mental-age/chronological-age metric approximates childhood potential but loses accuracy as you reach 18-25 years old.
Similar to being short, or autistic, or having brown hair, it is a trait, not a super power, and a very large amount of how useful it is depends on who you are, which is shaped by upbringing and life experience.
And like all talents it's useless if you don't actively work to make good use of it.
If you read well, and pass tests, people think you're "smart". Unfortunately, they also think "smart" = "knows everything", so they will fail to explain things to you, or train you properly, and you wind up having to figure shit out for yourself, at which point you have to pray you do have the smarts you've been gaslit into thinking you have.
It's not just "public education", it's been the perception since forever. It's the flip side of the coin to deaf people who can't speak being considered automatically "stupid" (hence the shift in meaning that the word "dumb" originally meant. Medieval writers knew the difference.)
The best example in popular culture is probably the goddamn Professor from Gilligan's Island. The castaways expect him to know everything - but he's a goddamn botanist. No wonder his glue didn't hold - he's not a chemist. He might know THAT a certain sap or plant is used for something, but not how to use or extract what you need from it.
Or Hermione from HP. Great at book learning, but she couldn't get it though her thick skull that House Elves are not slaves and don't want to be "freed". Ron and Hagrid tried to tell her that Dobby was an exception ("There's oddballs in every bunch, Hermione")
Exhausting.
Smart smarter not harder :templetap:
Questions directed at "intelligent people" always feel like iamverysmart bait just waiting for cringe. Defining yourself as a smart person is like defining yourself as atheist, if that alone has given you a sense of superiority it can get kind of embarrassing pretty quickly. I don't believe intelligence is the sole measure of importance of a person or even myself, and then IQ tests only demonstrate an even narrower application of intelligence, but I do typically score 2.5-3 standard deviations above average in IQ tests.
Short answer, more or less yes, as long as it's not heavily reliant on foreign concepts not defined or inferable within the book itself.
Sometimes. Some situations just need more data to understand accurately, sometimes you can come up with creative ways to get there with less evidence, sometimes you miss those creative solutions and only realise them after you brute forced it with more info gathering. Creative problem solving isn't quite as consistent as solving a straightforward logic problem, just being smart doesn't mean you're guaranteed a eureka moment.
Motivation and conscientiousness are separate from intelligence and no field is completely effortless to flourish in no matter how smart you are, so yeah interest is necessary. But switching lanes is definitely easier if you're more intelligent.
Interdisciplinary work is definitely the realm where having a high general intelligence has the greatest advantage. Intelligence alone is not enough to just automatically make it work, you still need the right foundational knowledge of each discipline to make it work. Hence despite being old enough that I'm not as plastic and my straight logic processing speeds are slowing slightly, I find interdisciplinary work easier than ever, as my repertoire of foundational knowledge has continued to expand. But trying to introduce concepts from other subjects and synthesizing that with knowledge from our own discipline to solve a problem is definitely where I start losing some of my more studious than naturally intelligent colleagues.
The more intelligent you are, the lonlier you are. Imagine trying to carry on a meaningful social or romantic relationship or work with a mentally retarded person. That's what almost everyone is to us. We don't look down on you, we just don't want to deal with your foolishness. Like someone else said, interacting with you ranges between tedious and infuriating.
People expect more from you and then treat you like utter garbage if you don't deliver.
But really, there's a vast difference between smart with a high IQ and intelligent. Intelligence can be measured, how you use what you've learned in a practical setting can't.
I have a pet theory that what we casually refer to as 'intelligence' or smarts is actually a three-pronged function of fundamental aspects of the way we think.
would be actual brainpower in terms of processing speed, the ability to be faced with completely new information and to process it into different information or meaningful conclusions quickly - like the high IQs or indeed autistic savants who can look at a number pattern or visual puzzle in an IQ test and waste minimal time on it.
would be knowledge base - your wealth of 'book smarts' or 'life experience' you can draw on, independent of the time or prompting you require to do it. This also depends on the strength of your memory and would account for why long and short term memory loss can affect intellect in different ways.
'wisdom' on the D&D char sheet, which I'd define as your ability to usefully pattern-match your knowledge base (2) to the world around you, independent of speed. You might be faced with new info and be able to perform transformations on it quickly in your head as in (1), but the new info might also correspond to old info in your knowledge store(2) which would affect the nature of this info and the way you should process it, so unless you're good at the application of knowledge to reality(3), every wider conclusion you're reaching could be trash.
so it's basically 'int'(in GHz)/Knowledge/Wis. I want to find a different term than 'Intelligence' for the first one, because that's the word everyone is already so attached to even though I think the concept is broader, but I can't think of one.
You can theory craft these to come up with archetypes that cover every kind of person across the board, such as a sheltered person with no life experience (low in #2), who is nevertheless academically gifted (high in #1) and able to apply their limited knowledge to a broad range of situations, like childish fables or Karl Pilkington outsmarting Ricky Gervais using comparisons he would never think of (high #3). Karl for his part would be low Int/low knowledge(I know he's experienced a lot but he always seems to go back to comparisons from his childhood and home life)/high Wis.
All the academics and researchers during the pandemic who continue to parrot covid lies are - the good faith ones at least - High Int (they deal with complex models and maybe they out-argue the uneducated in the heat of the moment), High Knowledge (lot of stuff to remember, lot of years behind the microscope), and zero fucking Wis ('lol idiot how could ALL my inputs be wrong, I guess EVERYONE in politics and science is lying huh?? conspiracy theorist! oh and you must be one of those nazis they told me about too!')
I've worked with peers who could engineer a solution to just about any technical problem handed to them...and they still believe communism will work and vote blue no matter who.
Sowell suggests that these kinds of people are attracted to systems with centralized control, like communism, because they imagine it would give them more power. If they can engineer a solution to any problem, arrogance would tell them that they could also "solve" societal issues in a childish "if I were king" way.
I think the other thing missing is how narrow the knowledge is. Everything is niche and field-specific and narrow nowadays. The world was a much better place when scientists were doing astronomy at night, chemistry on a monday morning and then reading the latest in geology and anthropology on a tuesday afternoon.
Knowledge being narrow makes mid-to-low wis people think they are far smarter than they actually are, and its preventing some important innovation I think. This is one of my soapbox issues.
Generalists are definitely under-appreciated. One of the refuges of the scientismo is to knock people back by saying akshully black is white because you don't have enough detailed knowledge in X field.
It has ramifications for human progress for sure. I was recently watching the Tucker podcast with Casey Means, the former surgeon and health researcher. She described medical education in the USA as multiple disciplines where no specialist is ever taught to look at the whole system of the body, hardly any being taught about nutrition for example. And as it turns out, of course, one of the best ways to never reach a solution to a profitable problem (chronic health issues in the wider public) is to break it down into various sub-specialties, all of which need their own paid specialist, gatekeeping their field using opaque language, and discouraging them from talking to eachother or from forming a generalised overview of how human health works. So you end up just finding multiple expensive non-solutions and that's more important than being actually correct, because you respected all the various specialists sufficiently and you followed the accepted process.
How is your average person getting their IQ assessed beyond online free tests?
I've never come across an IRL opportunity to have mine evaluated. Nor can I recall anyone else mentioning having been quantified either.
You pay a psychologist who administers the tests to do it, it takes hours to do properly.
So that means that anyone claiming to actually have had their IQ formally assessed is full of shit beyond a few learning disability kids paid by the school board?
There are likely a couple, like myself, who have had IQ tests administered back in grade school to see if they could skip a grade or two. But at this point, those tests for anyone posting on here would be woefully out of date.
you can do it privately but (where I live at least) it's hundreds of dollars for the Psychologists time. I looked into it a while back and decided against it.
A high IQ just means you can fuck up better and more properly. It also means nothing is designed for you. Let's say you're really short, you need a stool to get to the counter and an electric motor to get around. It's reasonable to supply this in everyone's minds. If you're tall, no one cares that the counter is at your knees and the bottom shelf is Narnia. Everyone just tells you to grow up.
That's what it's like to have a High IQ. Everything is designed for someone who can do one or two things and then nothing. If you can do more, they don't know what to do with you. This is not a rise slowly through the system, this is a get a specialized office and make money off of him deal.
The thing is, even being smart requires learning stuff. You can be completely new at something, and everyone expects you to understand it as if you're God.
The scene in Idiocracy where the guy talks about watering plants is accurate. You assume everyone is as smart as you, but they aren't and it leads to weirdness.
On the flip side, almost everything everyone conplains about is usually something that isn't real or will solve itself with enough time. Once you realize this, a happiness kicks in that you wish others could have.
well... grow down...
Tips my hat and hits head on doorway like Gandalf.
How many people posting have sat an IQ test? I only saw 1 comment that listed an actual concrete number.
There's a pretty big stigma to just posting your IQ online. It's unverifiable so it's pointless and it can easily make you look kind of like a douche. Impressively enough that even in a place where people regularly get called subhuman bigots many are still are reluctant to do it.
I was obtuse about it but I did give a value to mine too. Plus realistically if you're talking about casual measurements not a specific testing methodology giving an upper-lower range is probably more helpful than giving a single concrete number. Even if you trust it isn't completely made up you still don't know who's listing their highest/lowest/average result.
That and there's endless debate about what constitutes a valid and accurate IQ test, so unless someone really likes to geek out about the minutiae of attempts to quantify human cognitive function they probably just want to sidestep all that noise.
The one thing I would say is that I think intelligence is a tool and not a virtue. It's not as simple as either having intelligence or not having it, and a person's worth, morally and spiritually, doesn't scale linearly with an IQ graph. The bell curve meme is accurate-ish but I think it goes deeper than that (ie. you're not automatically an insufferable twat just because you're a midwit).
This seems like an overly obvious thing to say, yet at the same time I think a lot of people (irl, not necessarily on this forum) act like the ultimate goal of life is to prove you're smarter than everyone around you and that there's some innate moral value to clawing your way up the ladder of intellect. The important thing is not just to have intelligence and show it off but to do something with it that amplifies your value system.
'If only I could understand absolutely everything that was going on right now and completely destroy my enemies with facts and logic!' - noble human qualities like humility can teach you the former is impossible and remind you that the latter is important not because your enemies are dumb, but because they're evil, which is not the same thing. Evil being dumb is good because it suggests an easier win, but make that association too much and you fall in the trap of always thinking 'my enemies are dumber than me' and also 'smart must be good'.
You should ask this question on Reddit or a Rick and Morty forum, not here.
Instead of asking people who delude themselves into believing that they have high intelligence, you could look at correlations with high intelligence. Reasoning seems to be most highly correlated. Things like vocabulary and memory (and even reaction time) are also correlated, but to a lesser extent. I can point you to a journal article by a noted researcher if you are interested.
While noting that I in no way assert that I am 'smart', the only thing that gives me that impression is the stupidity of other people. And not the stupidity of holding 'bad opinions', but not noticing large inconsistencies in their own thinking or what they are told. Or not being able to figure out the simplest things. Left to my own devices, I feel neither stupid nor smart, but just ordinary.
It's been a while since you had a good take but I really approve of this one. Good job Tony.
I used to think I was smart.
Now I realize I'm only slightly above average.
And sometimes I have moments of clarity that make me think I might be more than that. But it's unlikely I'm actually genuinely smart. Just able to rationalize and think a bit more clearly than most.
Can you elaborate a bit on the first two sentences. What made you think you were smart, and what made you think that you're only slightly above average?
I can elaborate, but I wonder how much I can say on the internet before someone starts piecing together who I am.
I'd rather not open dump my personal life, so I'll just say that my mother is not very bright, and I discovered that before I hit double digits old, so I had to take on adult responsibilities at a very young age to stop grifters from realizing they found a human version of crack with my mother who isn't smart enough to realize a gift is coming, or how to fight her way out of it.
Not only does it make you have to learn things quick, but making mistakes was costly, so I had to learn to take the correct choices, be precise, and how to spot a grift coming before it became a problem.
Like recently when we learned about that guy who is imploding Second Wind for his own gain. That's the kind of grift I'd be able to spot, having been close to a few of them and in some of them, and had to find ways of getting out of them.
Does that make me smart? No. I just know the type, and what they want, and how to shut them down before I become too entwined in their web.
While I agree with the thread here in many ways, I will answer In true autistic forum post format.
I've never had to re-read a book to 'get the gist', but I will sometimes if it's interesting (though nowadays it's technical documents, and just to get the wording of how someone else said it exactly as they said). Podcasts and other stuff more commonly I will re-listen/watch, but that's often because audio is less grok-able than text with inflection and other stuff.
This one most people can actually do, it just depends on their experience where and how often they can do this. You can also tell someone has little in touch with reality if they are vocal about stuff all the time and are hilariously wrong consistently, yet still do it.
I suppose it could be, but optimizing your talents isn't just 'what are you good at' but also 'what can I get good at with this, quickly'. Doing that has made me a lot happier in life overall, not just professionally.
This one I don't actually know, or maybe it's just being this way? Not sure... If I had to take a stab at it, actually explaining the difference between the Abrahamic religions, including the gnosticicm offshoot that we are currently living in the hellscape of.
I wrote something painfully long her. Not worth reading.
Short answer which is still too long:
It's like being an alien. I cannot be interested in the entertainment my coworkers talk about. I sit in meetings, and the entire table will laugh, and laugh hard, and a generic comment I have heard over 100 times. That they've all heard 100 times.
"well it IS monday!" hahahahahahahahhaha
They snicker like they've done something subversive and surprising.
Have you talked to somebody with Downs? The cheerful conversational ones that are pretty high functioning? You can like them and respect them and feel they're pleasant to be around. But you never ask them a question you need a real insight on.
That's how most conversations end up being.
To be more direct.
It depends how difficult the book is but generally yes. I could review books i read once 14 years ago. Of course there are smarter people than me, and they have written books and those ones take a bit more work, but most literature isn't a challenge. I expect that the way I feel about very chewy books might be how people with a lower IQ feel about books I find easy. As an example. I still don't REALLY understand what "studying" is. I just don't get how you can sit for hours internalizing the same information. I don't understand how to do it, I don't understand how it's effective. I don't get it. You read the thing, and then you've read it. Do you just read the same paragraph over and over? I don't understand it.
Small amounts of evidence is relative. I don't know. I don't think logic is necessarily tied to/dependent on IQ. If logic is the path, IQ is the engine. Your speed is important, but it doesn't help you not get lost. You can try more paths than others in the same amount of time, but again, speed doesn't help you navigate any better. As with many things, making good inferences is more about experience than anything else. It's less about having an instinct, vs knowing how much information you need to have before your instinct can actually connect the dots properly. Otherwise you're just guessing.
No. Maybe if you're an actual genius, which I am not. People do have facets and areas they are drawn to and better at. When i took the SAT, I did entire sections of the language test without reading the passages, and in some cases I even started skipping the questions themselves. I scored in the 99th percentile. I've always been able to do that, and I've tried multiple times to teach it and failed. It just works. My Math score was decidedly mid list 56th or something if I remember right. I'm also absolute shit at spatial reasoning, and partially prosopagnostic. These are things I cannot do regardless of how hard I try.
That is just called autism.
Anyone who thinks they are smart is almost certainly a retard and has no other objective measure to preen about their superiority to other people. Especially if they know or brag about their IQ.
But people love to circlejerk about how they, their group, and their hangout is filled with High IQ individuals who are capable of answering those questions.
Its not a "this place" thing, its a basic human nature thing. Everyone thinks they are smarter than everyone else, no one will admit they are in the 50% of the population below 100 IQ if they can even recognize it.
You can see in the answers you got, which is filled with people smugly crowing about how everyone else is boring and they are so ostracized and alone because of their super intellect.
How can you tell? There are some people for whom I'd think that it's not very unlikely that they're telling the truth... but since we're on the internet, no one knows you're a dog and no one knows that you ain't bright.
It may be even worse in real life, because how well-spoken you are has an enormous impact on how smart you're considered to be. I think this is less the case on the internet, as people know you can just edit stuff to sound coherent.
I'll back this up. I speak far more eloquently online than I do in real life, where my speech is highly hampered by a strong Cajun dialect/accent at times and a need to physically stop speaking to reach the ability to say a word my brain hitches on (like Jimmy from South Park).
So I'm often considered quite retarded, which leads to a lot of surprise to people who I can and do switch to a more serious topic and am able to list off large amounts of data and outpace most arguments. Not that I would call myself "smart" but my schooling at least has the physical documentation that says I was above the average to some irrelevant extent.
The one time I ever got professionally tested, it was 134. I spent most of my younger life as an edgy misanthrope because people are retards, but as I got older I learned to appreciate the wisdom of older people. Young people in the stupid range are infuriating and I avoid them at all costs.
My dad's entire (big) family is over 160IQ, which is statistically unheard of. All of them can grasp anything they put their mind to. They only put their mind to things that interest them. As far as I can tell, only one or two of them are smart enough to see the forest through the trees and be immune to marketing and propaganda, because it interests them to put their minds to those sorts of things.
They're all boomers, and like most boomers they have largely been failures as far as their families go; although, I'd say that's mostly because of women being allowed to be batshit insane. Their intelligence hasn't really helped them avoid batshit crazy women.
As far as the various example tasks you mentioned, they're all skills that can be trained and require both interest and discipline. Some require a baseline intelligence, but it's not substantial. Sherlock Holmesing conclusions from mere minutia is a bit fantastic, though.
Personally, I slept through AP Calculus and aced it, but that's because I liked the math and spacial reasoning, and I sometimes did my homework (usually during lunch). I had previously flunked out of a 6th grade advanced math course called MEGSS because I was bored and uninterested (it was basically pre-algebra for 6th graders, and I would have ended up taking AP Calc a year earlier).
IQ tests only need to be proctored so that they are verified. If you're not so deluded you'll let yourself cheat on time or take questions you've seen before you can administer your own test with just a little discipline and a stopwatch, but the result is only useful for yourself (and anyone who trusts your objectivity greatly)
The hardest part is finding a good test, which have to be taken blind, so you have to take the whole test first and then evaluate if it was a good test, ideally before you receive/calculate your results to avoid bias.
Plus IQ is a pretty dated term for g, a measure of general intelligence, the holy grail of semi-quantifiable transferable capability across a wide range of cognitive tasks that the layperson intuits as natural intelligence. The most state of the art batteries of tests don't typically bill themselves as IQ tests anymore.
My understanding is that IQ and g are distinct. g is the quality that IQ attempts to (imperfectly) measure. Are there tests that present themselves as 'g' tests rather than IQ tests?
Yeah, 'g' is what IQ wishes it was but couldn't quite be.
Turns out it still can't be easily pinned down as a single objective number, best we get is more of a coefficient. After taking a bunch of different cognitive tests, weighting the results and integrating things down a level or two you can try to figure out how much those results were down to generalized cognitive aptitude and how much was specialised/learned talent for each task.
CHC cognitive testing (edit- changed from CAS, I mixed up my three letter cognitive test acronyms, -0.03g for me. You can also use the CAS2 battery of tests to calculate 'g' too, but they're against the idea that 'g' is a single constant so it seems kind of rude to do so 😂) is one battery of tests that has been around for a while that doesn't purport to be an "IQ test" but is comprehensive enough to be used as a base to try and calculate 'g' from. But that's the thing, the tests themselves stop at giving you the results of multiple independent cognitive performance tests, the 'g' calculating is something else afterwards.
The 'g' is only semi-dependant on the test results, you can get the different 'g' results from the same answers just by changing how you weight each test result, and they're all debatably plausible. 'g' is supposed to be the essence of general intelligence, it is not learned or specialized, it is something structural and rock steady across all tasks. The hallmark of a good formula for 'g' interpretation is that it is even more tightly heritable than traditional IQ values. But it's also kind of an academic distinction, good IQ values still track very closely with 'g' and the only diagnostic advantage of 'g' is potentially differentiating between edge cases of someone with high 'g' and low learned ability across almost all cognitive tasks and someone with moderate 'g' and high learned ability across almost all cognitive tasks, but the real world problem solving ability of both individuals is going to be comparable except on one or two types of task.
That's the next thread. I'm sure the average reported will be around 12 inches.
IQ is general intelligence. That's why you would have to not talk with him about anything else. And it's also why IQ tests include a variety of questions. You can also test IQ in ways that are very difficult for an ordinary guy to train, like the highly g-loaded reverse digit span.
Street smarts is just 'wisdom', not intelligence. If you grow up sheltered, that does not actually decrease your intelligence, it just makes you incapable of dealing with anything.
If you brag about it online, it really is. It's not an honest signal, of course, because whether you score 80 or 150, you can claim to be 150.
I’ve never had an IQ test, so I’m just going to assume I’m stupid. Hey, all the more reason to push myself to learn more! Some have called me smart, yet others have called me smartass. Perhaps it’s both, or perhaps it’s neither.
Whether or not I care to be defined as “smart,” I will say I do have an uncanny ability to understand complex things as if they were simple. easily—machines, electronics, and the like. But I’m also not great with people in real-time verbally, meaning any of the wit I have when I have the time to think about a response is nonexistent, and it’s replaced with frustration. I also have about as much athletic ability as a rock. So, I mean take whatever aptitudes I have and decide for yourself if I’m smart or not.
Edit: Oh and I use my memory as a crutch. People around me know that when I say I remember something I AM right, always. There’s no ambiguity in my mind. Either I remember in detail or I don’t. Anything else, I’m lying. Yes, I often lie about things I actually remember, because sometimes the level of detail I remember would freak people out. Take my memory away, and I’m a shell of my former self.
I'm just thankful I'm not stupid. But I do keep my high IQ to myself - as it makes it more fun to surprise people (especially beating them at games)
There are just so many aspects to intelligence in my perspective that I think it is pretty difficult to articulate (maybe I am stupid lol)
Working in a niche IT field and being respected and lauded by peers definitely helps me think I am at least more intelligent than average.
I enjoy life and while it is despairing at time to see how braindead, drooling, mouth breathing retarded other humans are, but I don't want to be them. I just try to live my best life and use what I have in the best way I can, which I think lines up with intelligence as well.
I have a reasonably high IQ, and I don't feel smart. I pick up on some things easily, other things I struggle with.
It's more that a lot of other people seem very stupid.
Pattern recognition and seeing how issues connect, I suppose. But I don't think of that as an innate consequence of intelligence, I tend to think that most people simply refuse to do it. It's not that they can't think, it's that they don't. Which is frustrating.
To be clear, the really frustrating part is realizing how stupid the supposedly "smart" members of society are. The ones who are convinced of their own infallible intellect. The midwits.
Stupidity isn't the problem. Dumb people can be smart. The problem is the veneration we as a society have for people who are utterly ill-equipped to be making any sort of meaningful decisions, whether because they're innately stupid or simply refuse to use their brains correctly.
The people who are smart enough to feel smart, but not smart enough to be smart are the true retards of society. And they are the cause of a great many of its issues.
Confusing
I guess I'm what's considered "smart" in general. Didn't try the first time in school, but crushed math and physics when I returned and ended up with studying nanotechnology in post secondary.
It doesn't really 'feel' like anything to me, as it's all just normal for me. I have a hard time understanding why other people do things the way that they do sometimes though, and people get frustrated with me for doing things in unusual ways sometimes. It's hard to fit in, but I also just don't try that hard.