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Almost everyone is an outlier along some dimension and almost everyone has genius intellect if you measure their intelligence by what is important to them, but

Almost everyone is an outlier along some dimension and almost everyone has genius intellect if you measure their intelligence by what is important to them, but not to others. You can choose to interact with people based on what you have in common or you can choose to interact with people based on their relative shortcomings in the few things you're very good at. The latter approach, while quite tempting, often results in the kind of loneliness and isolation you talk about. You wrote earlier: "I've often found that groups proposing to be built of smart people are often as not built of over-opinionated pretentious people who've come to believe they are intelligent through one way or another. It's why I've avoided high-IQ societies and the like." Why are their reasons for believing that they are special invalid, while yours are valid? I think they came to believe in their own high intelligence much the same way that you have. It validates something and fulfills some need. Grownups talking incessantly about their intelligence are like retired athletes who never made it in the pros talking about their stellar scouting reports placing them above those who had successful professional careers. If they didn't make it, the scouting reports were wrong. Don't assess yourself like society assesses children.

bane 13y ago
> Why are their reasons for believing that they are special invalid, while yours are valid? A lesson I've learned, the hard way, many times, is that it's possible to appear intelligent when you aren't. For example, people often mistake excellent communication skills as intelligence, so people who speak and present well are lauded for their smarts. It's like Williams syndrome, which people find endlessly curious, because they have exceptional language skills, but are otherwise cognitively impaired. And it's not often immediately obvious if somebody just uses language well, or if they're genuinely intelligent. It can take weeks or months of observation, and probing to start to see their cognitive deficits. They might even be reasonably bright, but we're not talking about that kind of above average person. There are other similar phenomenon. The idiot-savant, who can't brush their teeth in the morning by themselves, but can then go and crack crypto over their breakfast of apple and carrot paste. Or the otherwise completely average person who puts 80 hours a week into violin practice and can perform with the best gifted soloist. Hard work can get you very far. Argh it's tough to explain because English hasn't really developed a reasonable vocabulary that allows for simple categorical descriptions of different kinds of intelligence. Imagine you go to a track and field camp, and it's made up of all the fastest runners from their respective towns. Except you and maybe one other kid are twice as fast as everybody else there. Even in that environment, where everybody else is fast, you're faster. Nobody there is slow, it's just that you and the other kid are in a class of your own. You didn't practice to become fast, you simply are. There are kids there who've dedicated their lives to being fastest, and some of them are quite talented. But it doesn't matter. They get upset at you for being fastest there with little effort. And on top of it, you can even play other events a runner wouldn't be good at pretty high levels. Your particular gift isn't in shot put, and you don't play that event, but you're enough of a natural athlete that you can figure out a way to place in the top 3 anyways. And to make it worse, instead of competing you in the all state sports camp final, they turn you into a team coach. But you don't really know anything about the process and particulars of what it take for a normal person to become a fast runner. You were simply built that way and nobody knows what to do with you. You've never been anything but kind and friendly to you, but they definitely feel a little threatened and jealous. So you end up eating meals alone, or maybe with the other fast kid, who it turns out you don't really get along with for normal social reasons like not having other shared interests. Eventually a few kids respond to your friendliness and you hang around for a bit, but their other friends can't accept you so given the decision to be your friend or go back to their old group of friends, they fade away. You can't begrudge them that, you understand, but it's the 10 thousandth time that happened to you. That's your life. I've been fortunate enough on occasion to end up on groups with other similarly gifted people and it's awesome. But like I said earlier, you don't ever really become friends, you mutually acknowledge each other's intellect and get about doing the task at hand. Eventually somebody is happy with the work your team is doing and thinks it'd be great to break the team up and spread the smarts around a bit, so it never lasts long.
- candybar 13y ago
  "A lesson I've learned, the hard way, many times, is that it's possible to appear intelligent when you aren't." But why isn't this true of yourself? You've created this elaborate personal definition of intelligence, one that doesn't seem to have much correlation with anything positive that is objectively observable. And you do very well according to this definition, while others who think they are smart don't do quite as well. You don't see a problem here? It would be quite easy for anyone to come up with some vague definition of intelligence that they personally do well on. At best, most personal definitions of intelligence held by the "gifted" tend to be extrapolated from attributes of children that are correlated with future success, especially in mentally demanding fields. We're interested in children's intelligence because it helps us project their future. But you're an adult, and not a particularly young one at that. There's no need to extrapolate. You are what you are. You're not judged by future potential, of which intelligence is one of many proxies. No serious scholar judges Nobel prize winning scientists by their high school test scores and no serious sports analyst judges professional athletes' careers by their pre-draft workouts. When you have the real thing, proxies become meaningless. At worst, such definitions are carefully constructed to match the strengths and interests of the person doing the construction, while avoiding the weaknesses or conveniently treating them as positives. This is where all kinds of interesting inversions happen, for example, common proclamations like I'm depressed because I'm too smart or I can't succeed at that job because I'm too intelligent. Not that reversals never happen in isolated circumstances, but intelligence only has meaning because it measures mental performance potential. Whatever quality one may have, if it tends to result in negative mental outcomes, calling it intelligence renders the term meaningless. I'm curious - you mentioned something about your wife being smarter. Does she suffer from all these problems you have due to being too smart? Does she share your disdain for those who aren't as smart?
  - bane 13y ago
    > But why isn't this true of yourself? You are absolutely correct in everything you ask here. If this were a discussion called "cognitive difficulties otherwise highly intelligent people struggle with" we'd be having a different discussion. We'd talk about overcoming dyslexia or dyscalculia, or other cognitive biases and issues that might be surprising. But this isn't that kind of discussion, this is a discussion about "the difficulties that come purely from being gifted". If one of those difficulties is finding other people as gifted to relate with, then isn't that valid? I'm not exceptionally intelligent in everything. Just in those few areas I was gifted in. I'm a pretty normal, beer drinking, average bloke to most people who know me. I'm not particularly physically gifted, I have my own cognitive deficits to deal with like anybody. I get along fine with most people and I certainly don't look down on them regardless of what you're reading into things. I get frustrated sometimes when dealing with normal folk, at where their ability to think on something ends. But I've met a few people who possessed truly superhuman intellects and I'm sure they got frustrated with me. Among the many difficulties that emerge with discussing personal experiences of being exceptionally gifted: social isolation, jealousy, fear -- is the lack of useful models, vocabulary and language to discuss the phenomenon. It's not common enough, and not well researched enough for there to be a convenient shared vocabulary we can use, especially one without such loaded words like "smart" "intelligent" and "gifted". It's not such a deficit to most people that it's really worth studying to be honest. Highly Intelligent people can usually figure out their own problems and go on to live productive enough lives. But it doesn't mean there aren't shitty aspects of the gift. As to how do I know I possess this one quality? It's not the hundreds of cognitive assessment tests I suffered through as a child. It's not people telling me "oh you're so smart". It's the experience of walking onto a team of smart successful people, the smartest in their field, and tackling an intractable problem in a few months that they, as a group have struggled with for years. It's cutting noise out of intensely complex problem sets and finding the core of the problem and an elegant solution (or knowing that the only solution is to brute force the problem). It's having that recognized repeatedly and then finding yourself on "hard problem" teams over and over again and ending up as the smart guy on the team of smart people. It's being the one guy with the right solution in a room of problem solvers over and over again. And then your approach or solution gets legs and you find yourself meeting new people you have no connection with and in an offhand comment they bring up something you worked on that solved major issues for them and they don't know you were the one who came up with it. But it's also about knowing when to stop and say "I don't know" or "I didn't know that" when you don't. It's knowing that some people are better than you are at their thing and letting them be better at it. And it's knowing where your gifts end and you turn into just regular folk. It's knowing you put pants on the same way, and go to the bathroom the same way as anybody else. And it's finding things that people are good at themselves, or better than you at, and enjoying and appreciating it as they talk about and practice their craft. Not getting jealous or scared of them for their gifts. I'll go back to the analogy I've used here, people of extreme height. Replace "intelligence" and "gifted" in your previous questions with words like "height" and "tall". How does an extremely tall person know they're extremely tall? They just do. There all kinds of ways to measure height and if all those measures add up to "extremely tall" they just are. It doesn't mean other tall people aren't also vertically gifted. It doesn't put the hormonal output of other people's pituitary gland or the particulars of their inherited gene expressions down, it just means they aren't as tall. >Does she share your disdain for those who aren't as smart? So an extremely tall person who's talking about the sucky parts of being extremely tall doesn't disdain shorter people. They just have a unique experience that they'd like to share that likely nobody else in earshot will have experience with. My wife is frequently frustrated with the cognitive limitations of others, and she also gets terribly lonely about making friends with normal folks. She finds their behavior odd and irrational and puzzling, but she doesn't put anybody down over it. She also works with excessively intelligent folks, and often ends up as the smartest kid in the room of smartest kids. Her gifts are of a very different nature than mine. But we don't often talk about them as we find it hard to relate to each other's gifts. Her gift is more of the: take a problem with steps A through Z. She can go from A-to-Z without bothering with B,C,D or any of the the others. She can even do it with very noisy problem sets and her external thinking process when she's using her gift is extremely chaotic and hard to follow, but the output is nearly always right. She did not pursue the field her gift is useful for though, a brief childhood prodigy experience scared her away and she switched gears to several other career paths. During college she was well known for her gift. People she didn't know from advanced classes she never took would come up and ask her for help understanding a section. She'd look at the chapter for a couple minutes, learn how to do it, and then show them. It was frequent enough that it often interfered with her own studies. I can probably say I saw it happen 50 or 60 times? (She's not a very good teacher though because it takes her a supreme effort to show the steps to somebody else. But she was always willing to give it a go to help them.) Beyond that, she shares most of the classic gifted curses: intense social isolation, fear, jealousy, dehumanization (being treated more like an appliance than a person), and the typical sort of laziness and lack of learned skills that curses many highly gifted people.

bane 13y ago

> Why are their reasons for believing that they are special invalid, while yours are valid? A lesson I've learned, the hard way, many times, is that it's possible to appear intelligent when you aren't. For example, people often mistake excellent communication skills as intelligence, so people who speak and present well are lauded for their smarts. It's like Williams syndrome, which people find endlessly curious, because they have exceptional language skills, but are otherwise cognitively impaired. And it's not often immediately obvious if somebody just uses language well, or if they're genuinely intelligent. It can take weeks or months of observation, and probing to start to see their cognitive deficits. They might even be reasonably bright, but we're not talking about that kind of above average person. There are other similar phenomenon. The idiot-savant, who can't brush their teeth in the morning by themselves, but can then go and crack crypto over their breakfast of apple and carrot paste. Or the otherwise completely average person who puts 80 hours a week into violin practice and can perform with the best gifted soloist. Hard work can get you very far. Argh it's tough to explain because English hasn't really developed a reasonable vocabulary that allows for simple categorical descriptions of different kinds of intelligence. Imagine you go to a track and field camp, and it's made up of all the fastest runners from their respective towns. Except you and maybe one other kid are twice as fast as everybody else there. Even in that environment, where everybody else is fast, you're faster. Nobody there is slow, it's just that you and the other kid are in a class of your own. You didn't practice to become fast, you simply are. There are kids there who've dedicated their lives to being fastest, and some of them are quite talented. But it doesn't matter. They get upset at you for being fastest there with little effort. And on top of it, you can even play other events a runner wouldn't be good at pretty high levels. Your particular gift isn't in shot put, and you don't play that event, but you're enough of a natural athlete that you can figure out a way to place in the top 3 anyways. And to make it worse, instead of competing you in the all state sports camp final, they turn you into a team coach. But you don't really know anything about the process and particulars of what it take for a normal person to become a fast runner. You were simply built that way and nobody knows what to do with you. You've never been anything but kind and friendly to you, but they definitely feel a little threatened and jealous. So you end up eating meals alone, or maybe with the other fast kid, who it turns out you don't really get along with for normal social reasons like not having other shared interests. Eventually a few kids respond to your friendliness and you hang around for a bit, but their other friends can't accept you so given the decision to be your friend or go back to their old group of friends, they fade away. You can't begrudge them that, you understand, but it's the 10 thousandth time that happened to you. That's your life. I've been fortunate enough on occasion to end up on groups with other similarly gifted people and it's awesome. But like I said earlier, you don't ever really become friends, you mutually acknowledge each other's intellect and get about doing the task at hand. Eventually somebody is happy with the work your team is doing and thinks it'd be great to break the team up and spread the smarts around a bit, so it never lasts long.

candybar 13y ago
"A lesson I've learned, the hard way, many times, is that it's possible to appear intelligent when you aren't." But why isn't this true of yourself? You've created this elaborate personal definition of intelligence, one that doesn't seem to have much correlation with anything positive that is objectively observable. And you do very well according to this definition, while others who think they are smart don't do quite as well. You don't see a problem here? It would be quite easy for anyone to come up with some vague definition of intelligence that they personally do well on. At best, most personal definitions of intelligence held by the "gifted" tend to be extrapolated from attributes of children that are correlated with future success, especially in mentally demanding fields. We're interested in children's intelligence because it helps us project their future. But you're an adult, and not a particularly young one at that. There's no need to extrapolate. You are what you are. You're not judged by future potential, of which intelligence is one of many proxies. No serious scholar judges Nobel prize winning scientists by their high school test scores and no serious sports analyst judges professional athletes' careers by their pre-draft workouts. When you have the real thing, proxies become meaningless. At worst, such definitions are carefully constructed to match the strengths and interests of the person doing the construction, while avoiding the weaknesses or conveniently treating them as positives. This is where all kinds of interesting inversions happen, for example, common proclamations like I'm depressed because I'm too smart or I can't succeed at that job because I'm too intelligent. Not that reversals never happen in isolated circumstances, but intelligence only has meaning because it measures mental performance potential. Whatever quality one may have, if it tends to result in negative mental outcomes, calling it intelligence renders the term meaningless. I'm curious - you mentioned something about your wife being smarter. Does she suffer from all these problems you have due to being too smart? Does she share your disdain for those who aren't as smart?
- bane 13y ago
  > But why isn't this true of yourself? You are absolutely correct in everything you ask here. If this were a discussion called "cognitive difficulties otherwise highly intelligent people struggle with" we'd be having a different discussion. We'd talk about overcoming dyslexia or dyscalculia, or other cognitive biases and issues that might be surprising. But this isn't that kind of discussion, this is a discussion about "the difficulties that come purely from being gifted". If one of those difficulties is finding other people as gifted to relate with, then isn't that valid? I'm not exceptionally intelligent in everything. Just in those few areas I was gifted in. I'm a pretty normal, beer drinking, average bloke to most people who know me. I'm not particularly physically gifted, I have my own cognitive deficits to deal with like anybody. I get along fine with most people and I certainly don't look down on them regardless of what you're reading into things. I get frustrated sometimes when dealing with normal folk, at where their ability to think on something ends. But I've met a few people who possessed truly superhuman intellects and I'm sure they got frustrated with me. Among the many difficulties that emerge with discussing personal experiences of being exceptionally gifted: social isolation, jealousy, fear -- is the lack of useful models, vocabulary and language to discuss the phenomenon. It's not common enough, and not well researched enough for there to be a convenient shared vocabulary we can use, especially one without such loaded words like "smart" "intelligent" and "gifted". It's not such a deficit to most people that it's really worth studying to be honest. Highly Intelligent people can usually figure out their own problems and go on to live productive enough lives. But it doesn't mean there aren't shitty aspects of the gift. As to how do I know I possess this one quality? It's not the hundreds of cognitive assessment tests I suffered through as a child. It's not people telling me "oh you're so smart". It's the experience of walking onto a team of smart successful people, the smartest in their field, and tackling an intractable problem in a few months that they, as a group have struggled with for years. It's cutting noise out of intensely complex problem sets and finding the core of the problem and an elegant solution (or knowing that the only solution is to brute force the problem). It's having that recognized repeatedly and then finding yourself on "hard problem" teams over and over again and ending up as the smart guy on the team of smart people. It's being the one guy with the right solution in a room of problem solvers over and over again. And then your approach or solution gets legs and you find yourself meeting new people you have no connection with and in an offhand comment they bring up something you worked on that solved major issues for them and they don't know you were the one who came up with it. But it's also about knowing when to stop and say "I don't know" or "I didn't know that" when you don't. It's knowing that some people are better than you are at their thing and letting them be better at it. And it's knowing where your gifts end and you turn into just regular folk. It's knowing you put pants on the same way, and go to the bathroom the same way as anybody else. And it's finding things that people are good at themselves, or better than you at, and enjoying and appreciating it as they talk about and practice their craft. Not getting jealous or scared of them for their gifts. I'll go back to the analogy I've used here, people of extreme height. Replace "intelligence" and "gifted" in your previous questions with words like "height" and "tall". How does an extremely tall person know they're extremely tall? They just do. There all kinds of ways to measure height and if all those measures add up to "extremely tall" they just are. It doesn't mean other tall people aren't also vertically gifted. It doesn't put the hormonal output of other people's pituitary gland or the particulars of their inherited gene expressions down, it just means they aren't as tall. >Does she share your disdain for those who aren't as smart? So an extremely tall person who's talking about the sucky parts of being extremely tall doesn't disdain shorter people. They just have a unique experience that they'd like to share that likely nobody else in earshot will have experience with. My wife is frequently frustrated with the cognitive limitations of others, and she also gets terribly lonely about making friends with normal folks. She finds their behavior odd and irrational and puzzling, but she doesn't put anybody down over it. She also works with excessively intelligent folks, and often ends up as the smartest kid in the room of smartest kids. Her gifts are of a very different nature than mine. But we don't often talk about them as we find it hard to relate to each other's gifts. Her gift is more of the: take a problem with steps A through Z. She can go from A-to-Z without bothering with B,C,D or any of the the others. She can even do it with very noisy problem sets and her external thinking process when she's using her gift is extremely chaotic and hard to follow, but the output is nearly always right. She did not pursue the field her gift is useful for though, a brief childhood prodigy experience scared her away and she switched gears to several other career paths. During college she was well known for her gift. People she didn't know from advanced classes she never took would come up and ask her for help understanding a section. She'd look at the chapter for a couple minutes, learn how to do it, and then show them. It was frequent enough that it often interfered with her own studies. I can probably say I saw it happen 50 or 60 times? (She's not a very good teacher though because it takes her a supreme effort to show the steps to somebody else. But she was always willing to give it a go to help them.) Beyond that, she shares most of the classic gifted curses: intense social isolation, fear, jealousy, dehumanization (being treated more like an appliance than a person), and the typical sort of laziness and lack of learned skills that curses many highly gifted people.