People value intelligence and will apply that label to themselves even if it may not be true. It's a hard thing to measure though IQ does it reasonably well. To those who have a high IQ: what is it like? Can you pick up any book, read it, and understand the gist with minimal repetition? Can you infer solid and accurate conclusions based on a small amount of evidence? 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? 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.
There is no point to these questions other than curiosity.
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.
Yeah, that's what I meant. There seemed to be a few replies from actual smart people though, which was honestly the goal -- wheat from the chaff, etc.
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.
Since I asked this on the Internet knowing all of that, I'm assuming good faith in the responses that seem sincere. If somebody wants to dump paragraphs lying about their own capabilities...I value my own time more than that, at least