11 ms·

I've met a handful of people across my life that i'd call truly brilliant. Like, holy heck how in the world is this person this smart? Two things I've noted abo

I've met a handful of people across my life that i'd call truly brilliant. Like, holy heck how in the world is this person this smart? Two things I've noted about really smart people are (usually mutually exclusively) 1) Sometimes they do not realize how smart they are, because it's simple to them, or because they know the subject they assume everyone else, say with a computer science degree, knows and recalls and understands all they do. I've had friends who go off on crypto related maths and I'm like "I passed that class, but know that I do not really know the subject you just talked about" ... And 2) There's the people who it's painfully forefront of mind that they're smarter than most everyone around them. Some of them are jerks, some of them are exhausted by being surrounded by relatively "stupid" (again, relatively...) people. For the latter group i have some sympathy. Imagine walking through life and everything is clear, obvious, easy to process and having to watch humanity make stupid choices over and over and over again when the answers have been long known...

Havoc 4mo ago
And then you’ve got a third problem - that well north of 50% believe themselves to be in that last sentence of yours
- functionmouse 4mo ago
  It seems that way sometimes but maybe we're just biased as we tend to hang out among intelligentsia
  - Havoc 4mo ago
    Oh we can call that the 4th problem. The bias of the people perceiving the bias
  - booleandilemma 4mo ago
    [dead]
- TonyStr 4mo ago
  Some people are very good at working with complex abstract ideas, but are terrible at signaling that intelligence to others. And some are fantastic at signaling intelligence and steering conversation toward domains of knowledge that they've studied (many political commentators come to mind), but don't seem to have processed those ideas very deeply.
thegrimmest 4mo ago
It's lonely being an outlier, especially in a trait that's so fundamental to how you see the world. Despite best effort, it's hard to relate to most people, and they especially find it hard to relate to you. The delta of lived experience is quite wide, often insurmountable.
- blanched 4mo ago
  I feel like this could be said about most human traits, on both ends of those traits’ axis. I’m not sure if that makes it insightful or obvious :).
  - andai 4mo ago
    >on both ends of those traits’ axis. I somehow suffer from both simultaneously!
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- nomel 4mo ago
  My smart friend said it's like everyone around you is slightly drunk.
conductr 4mo ago
> Imagine walking through life and everything is clear, obvious, easy to process and having to watch humanity make stupid choices over and over and over again when the answers have been long known... I don’t claim to be book smart or have a high IQ or whatever but I feel this way about small things that I feel are common sense. It’s maddening to me to watch people fumble around. Or do X when obviously it will result in -Y a bad thing. I really have learned to just not vocalize it, most of the time. It’s especially unhealthy for my close family relationships as I just see so much of it that I could nag them to death.
- pjm331 4mo ago
  i feel fairly certain everyone has some set of activities or tasks they feel this way about my wife and i have two non-overlapping sets haha you can imagine how that plays out
  - conductr 4mo ago
    Same wrt my wife and I. She’s quite clumsy and to my assertion doesn’t always think things through. So it’s a bad combination for “accidents” to always happen which I think are very preventable and quite obvious to occur using her approach. A lot of it is just mental errors that I don’t make, but it’s not that I’m perfect I probably just make different mistakes (I think less volume too ;) Yesterday she literally failed miserably at a single task. Her mission was grocery shopping. She drove to grocery store, shopped, and came home and left the groceries in the car. Didn’t realize it until she was making breakfast the next morning and there was no milk. I see this two ways; 1) I would never make that mistake 2) I know her quite well, partners for over 20 years now, and this kind of thing is just her normal par for the course type of “oops”. The second part is what frustrates me the most, I like to learn from my mistakes and she treats it as a given that she’s just spacey/dimwit by nature and leans into everything being an “accident”. Obviously not healthy if I treat her like a child so I just watch her fumble through life and try to have a sense of humor about it all.
    - TonyStr 4mo ago
kilroy123 4mo ago
Yup, I've known and met such people. However... NONE were "the 10x developer" who built up a huge mess. Which a team and I had to spend months and months cleaning up after.
- hamdingers 4mo ago
  The 10x developer believes deeply that they are #2, but they are usually incorrect.
Yokohiii 4mo ago
> painfully forefront of mind that they're smarter than most everyone around them Many devs choose to just do their day job or decide to follow a cargo cult. Probably not every dev can have the same output, but if you decide to keep thinking beyond what is the cultural average, then everyone could be smart in their own way. Most people don't realize they can do that.
throw4847285 4mo ago
I would say there are two explanations for group 2. The first is that you aren't as smart as you think you are, because if you actually understood the people around you in any real way, you would instantly find them less frustrating. But instead you are using flawed heuristics, built out of your own insecurities, to interact with the world. Possibility two is that you are smart, but you have developed a malformed coping mechanism whereby you take all your negative traits (social ineptness, anxiety, impatience) and treat them all as simple the nature outgrowth of your prodigious intelligence. This is a common coping mechanism, and the neat thing is, it has nothing to do with intelligence. You can be dumb as a brick and still feel like you're in a world of morons who are inferior to you. In fact, I suspect these two explanations are one explanation.
- yCombLinks 4mo ago
  Or perhaps there is a 3rd explanation, spending all of your time with people much less intelligent is frustrating and unsatisfying, and being such an outlier, it's how most of your time is spent. Someone with a 142 IQ is to the 100 average in the same way that 100 average is to someone with a 70 IQ. We don't expect people with average IQ to spend all of their days with 70 IQ people (in a peer situation). (BLAH BLAH BLAH Multiple intelligences, IQ isn't a good measurement, etc)
  - throw4847285 4mo ago
    If you're so secure in your intelligence relative to your peers, why are you responding to me? Personally, if I had to choose between a world of people with "low IQ" who are self-aware and one of people with "high IQ" or are extremely un-selfaware, I would choose the former every time.
neonstatic 4mo ago
IMO if the person doesn't understand the ethical and practical benefits of humility, they are not that smart.

Havoc 4mo ago

And then you’ve got a third problem - that well north of 50% believe themselves to be in that last sentence of yours

functionmouse 4mo ago
It seems that way sometimes but maybe we're just biased as we tend to hang out among intelligentsia
- Havoc 4mo ago
  Oh we can call that the 4th problem. The bias of the people perceiving the bias
- booleandilemma 4mo ago
  [dead]
TonyStr 4mo ago
Some people are very good at working with complex abstract ideas, but are terrible at signaling that intelligence to others. And some are fantastic at signaling intelligence and steering conversation toward domains of knowledge that they've studied (many political commentators come to mind), but don't seem to have processed those ideas very deeply.

thegrimmest 4mo ago

It's lonely being an outlier, especially in a trait that's so fundamental to how you see the world. Despite best effort, it's hard to relate to most people, and they especially find it hard to relate to you. The delta of lived experience is quite wide, often insurmountable.

blanched 4mo ago
I feel like this could be said about most human traits, on both ends of those traits’ axis. I’m not sure if that makes it insightful or obvious :).
- andai 4mo ago
  >on both ends of those traits’ axis. I somehow suffer from both simultaneously!
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
nomel 4mo ago
My smart friend said it's like everyone around you is slightly drunk.

conductr 4mo ago

> Imagine walking through life and everything is clear, obvious, easy to process and having to watch humanity make stupid choices over and over and over again when the answers have been long known... I don’t claim to be book smart or have a high IQ or whatever but I feel this way about small things that I feel are common sense. It’s maddening to me to watch people fumble around. Or do X when obviously it will result in -Y a bad thing. I really have learned to just not vocalize it, most of the time. It’s especially unhealthy for my close family relationships as I just see so much of it that I could nag them to death.

pjm331 4mo ago
i feel fairly certain everyone has some set of activities or tasks they feel this way about my wife and i have two non-overlapping sets haha you can imagine how that plays out
- conductr 4mo ago
  Same wrt my wife and I. She’s quite clumsy and to my assertion doesn’t always think things through. So it’s a bad combination for “accidents” to always happen which I think are very preventable and quite obvious to occur using her approach. A lot of it is just mental errors that I don’t make, but it’s not that I’m perfect I probably just make different mistakes (I think less volume too ;) Yesterday she literally failed miserably at a single task. Her mission was grocery shopping. She drove to grocery store, shopped, and came home and left the groceries in the car. Didn’t realize it until she was making breakfast the next morning and there was no milk. I see this two ways; 1) I would never make that mistake 2) I know her quite well, partners for over 20 years now, and this kind of thing is just her normal par for the course type of “oops”. The second part is what frustrates me the most, I like to learn from my mistakes and she treats it as a given that she’s just spacey/dimwit by nature and leans into everything being an “accident”. Obviously not healthy if I treat her like a child so I just watch her fumble through life and try to have a sense of humor about it all.
  - TonyStr 4mo ago

kilroy123 4mo ago

Yup, I've known and met such people. However... NONE were "the 10x developer" who built up a huge mess. Which a team and I had to spend months and months cleaning up after.

hamdingers 4mo ago
The 10x developer believes deeply that they are #2, but they are usually incorrect.

Yokohiii 4mo ago

> painfully forefront of mind that they're smarter than most everyone around them Many devs choose to just do their day job or decide to follow a cargo cult. Probably not every dev can have the same output, but if you decide to keep thinking beyond what is the cultural average, then everyone could be smart in their own way. Most people don't realize they can do that.

throw4847285 4mo ago

I would say there are two explanations for group 2. The first is that you aren't as smart as you think you are, because if you actually understood the people around you in any real way, you would instantly find them less frustrating. But instead you are using flawed heuristics, built out of your own insecurities, to interact with the world. Possibility two is that you are smart, but you have developed a malformed coping mechanism whereby you take all your negative traits (social ineptness, anxiety, impatience) and treat them all as simple the nature outgrowth of your prodigious intelligence. This is a common coping mechanism, and the neat thing is, it has nothing to do with intelligence. You can be dumb as a brick and still feel like you're in a world of morons who are inferior to you. In fact, I suspect these two explanations are one explanation.

yCombLinks 4mo ago
Or perhaps there is a 3rd explanation, spending all of your time with people much less intelligent is frustrating and unsatisfying, and being such an outlier, it's how most of your time is spent. Someone with a 142 IQ is to the 100 average in the same way that 100 average is to someone with a 70 IQ. We don't expect people with average IQ to spend all of their days with 70 IQ people (in a peer situation). (BLAH BLAH BLAH Multiple intelligences, IQ isn't a good measurement, etc)
- throw4847285 4mo ago
  If you're so secure in your intelligence relative to your peers, why are you responding to me? Personally, if I had to choose between a world of people with "low IQ" who are self-aware and one of people with "high IQ" or are extremely un-selfaware, I would choose the former every time.

neonstatic 4mo ago

IMO if the person doesn't understand the ethical and practical benefits of humility, they are not that smart.