5 ms·

Heavily debated making this post, will not make it on my account due to courting accusations of showboating, but in all earnestness this article struck a chord

Heavily debated making this post, will not make it on my account due to courting accusations of showboating, but in all earnestness this article struck a chord with me in a major way. I ask here only because I respect this community and consider the inhabitants peers, and I genuinely want an answer. What can one do about it? I quite literally feel like an alien trapped on a planet full of people that alternately infuriate and bore me. Has anyone successfully addressed these issues before? I believe that my growing misanthropy and detachment does not serve my interests in the long run.

tokenadult 17y ago
I'll give your question a serious answer. Growing up, I knew I had a high IQ score (my parents actually lowballed in hinting what my IQ score was, but I found out the actual score in adult life from my schoolteacher who referred me for testing), and I read in a story by Philip K. Dick that high-IQ people feel social distance from most classmates, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy for me. But later in life I lived in east Asia as a student of the Chinese language, and I discovered that Confucian philosophers expected smart people to use their smarts to get along with everyone, summed up in the saying of Confucius, "三人行，必有我师焉" "Wherever there are three persons walking, my teacher is surely among them." I learned from my experience overseas that I could appreciate other people for their abilities, and expect to learn from most people of my acquaintance, whatever their IQ scores. Since then, I have been more socially comfortable with a wider variety of people, and have felt less isolated. I still devote a lot of my free time to activism on behalf of gifted learners, which provides me with a social circle of people who understand my personal background.
- shadowaccount 17y ago
  I've already adopted a general philosophy of attempting to benefit from interpersonal interaction as much as possible, I try to figure out how a person works on their own level, including if I could assist them in any way, and if in doing so I may be setting up a mutually beneficial arrangement. In some cases, this works, but these cases are few and far between. It seems the majority of people, if one were to pursue this philosophy, ought to be left to oblivion. Entanglement with them will only result in encumberance rather than advantage, even if you were to attempt to selflessly better them without regard to the benefits to yourself, typically they would be incapable of making use of your assistance. What then is the purpose of humanity at large, those who fall outside the sphere of which can be of any advantage to you and are more valuable avoided than utilised?
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    It seems the majority of people, if one were to pursue this philosophy, ought to be left to oblivion. Entanglement with them will only result in encumberance rather than advantage, even if you were to attempt to selflessly better them without regard to the benefits to yourself, typically they would be incapable of making use of your assistance. If you seriously go through life with that much of a sense of superiority, it would be no surprise at all to be socially isolated. I don't think that way. Most people are important and useful to humanity at the individual level. My default is to treat all people as if they are, and that default assumption is generally born out in my interaction with people in many settings. I don't merely seek PERSONAL advantage in dealing with people, but the broader advantage of a better human society for all.
    - shadowaccount 17y ago
      Making the world a better place is promoting a personal advantage, so long as you're not dragged down too much in the process. My point is that by and large this is simply not the case. I think if you believe it is then I'm wondering if your target population is truly representative of humanity at large or simply those who you interact with most commonly within some social sphere which you have found to be agreeable with you. It isn't even that I feel superior, I simply feel utterly different, as I said, alien in the extreme. I believe this inhibits me when trying to understand why other people behave as they do because all I have to work off is a bunch of simulations of human behaviour in the past that I have observed / heard of.
      - shadowaccount 17y ago
        The pattern that I am seeing here and after having meditated on this myself is this: My conclusions about humanity at large are mostly correct, but this ought not discourage me from interaction in general due to one critical point. There are many great people despite the mass being largely useless. Further, if one actually attempts to follow rational principles it would not be all that difficult to find these people and maximise one's interactions within this sphere. Isn't that in fact exactly what I'm doing here? The first place I have ever actually felt mostly socially comfortable in my life? All the examples of positive social experiences that I can think of I could logically have concluded would likely have ended up that way based on the guessed at characteristics of the groups in question, the trick to human interaction is not to optimise your communications for the mean, but to optimise your communications for the groups whom with which you wish to interact. Thanks to those that responded.
sunir 17y ago
It's great you are aware your pattern is harming you. When I was very young I had similar feelings too. That which you oppose you maintain. You are trapped by your misanthropy. The article makes this point. You can only move forward by finding another path that is positive for both halves of the equation. You have to begin with empathy. I have a rule of life: my next set of friends are the people I dislike the most. It's amazing how much you can learn from other people that you would never have guessed. Negative feelings create blindness. I don't understand all these people obsessed with IQ. Life has more to it that logic and rationality. Tell me how much IQ you need to appreciate a hot dog at the carnival on the first beautiful day of summer. Live beyond this single measure of you.
- shadowaccount 17y ago
  This is exactly what I'm referring to, I simply don't connect with what you're trying to illustrate. I understand you're trying to draw a scenario that has some supposedly appealing emotional quality to it, but I'd just be thinking I'd rather be doing something useful than going to a carnival and I don't like hot weather. This is not simply a case of a single example that would not hold up under a barrage of alternative options, simply put I want to learn, discover, build and create and passive experience holds little to no value to me.
  - pmichaud 17y ago
    Heard of Sifter.org?
    - shadowaccount 17y ago
      I hadn't, I had a brief look and my curiosity is aroused, are there archives of the list content?
  - sunir 17y ago
    Well folks like you aren't uncommon. I see someone posted sifter.org. One thing to note. You have all these negative feelings to people but positive feelings to your work. I suggest you can kill your negative feelings if you realize all people enjoy something the same way you enjoy your work. We just all like different things. In the way I don't understand why people enjoy experimental jazz but I can appreciate they must find something in it for them and thus I do not judge them, you can at least teach yourself to not look down on others for what measures of joy they take from life. No sense polluting yourself with misanthropy. Instead be happy for them and happy you are clear what makes you happy.
notauser 17y ago
No matter how brilliant one is are there are people out there who make one look like rather like a badly shaved monkey. Obviously this is not true at the limit, but unless you happen to be Hawking posting incognito that consideration is probably not applicable to you. If that doesn't provide an appropriate perspective then I suggest that you consider that in an infinite universe everything is essentially pointless and the small graduation between your brilliance and their interest in reality television is so small as to be immeasurable.
- shadowaccount 17y ago
  In the scales of which this article speaks, I am at the limits. The conclusion you draw at the end would result in an embrace of nihilism in the instance that you assume that this is an unchanging fact or transhumanism in order to widen the gap and make it significant on a cosmological scale. I'm wholeheartedly in favour of the second option, certainly. My humanity already feels more a shedding skin than a fitting glove, long ago I had wished I could move beyond it's constraints and push the limits of possibility.
  - antonovka 17y ago
    You sound like an indulged child, not a misunderstood genius. I am at the 'upper bounds' as well, but I don't attempt to batter others over the head with my vocabulary and pride, and I've learned that I'm just as vulnerable, alone, and human as anyone else. Setting yourself apart on the basis of a standardized test is just sophomoric justification for misanthropy and depression.
    - shadowaccount 17y ago
      That is expressly why I made this account, to avoid suggestions that this might be my motivation. I have nothing to gain here from grandstanding, nobody knows who I am and I neither gain nor lose karma from the exchange, it's simply an attempt to objectively engage with a potentially touchy subject which by nature practically begs to be painted as showboating. The response I made was only as venomous as that made originally. I was annoyed by what was a generally helpful exchange being punctuated by what still appears to me to be little more than an attempt at justifying the poster's own disagreement by directly accusing me of mental illness.
hegemonicon 17y ago
You have psychological problems. Go see a psychologist.
- shadowaccount 17y ago
  You lack the capacity to spell sheer, your attempt at philosophical hegemony is quaint. Go see an educator.
  - antonovka 17y ago
    Your demonstrated antisocial behavior validates the original poster's opinion. Moreover, how is his opinion of your clear anti-social pretenses an attempt at 'hegemony' (specifically, the dominance of one state/region/political group over the other)? Is it because you feel that you are persecuted as an 'outsider' by the 'normals'? (This is also evidence of a psychological problem. If this is genuinely worrisome to you, you should see a shrink.)
    - shadowaccount 17y ago
      His opinion as expressed alone here is not the basis of my comment, it irritated me as I believed it was oversimplifying and snarky, but any time I think such a thing I very carefully examine the content of what provokes it, so I read his blog for quite some time before posting the conclusions I shot back with. He is constantly talking about argumentation, very prone to being unable to understand that other people may see things differently to him, and even makes extensive comment on the fact that he has no formal logical path from a prior assumption in the vast majority of cases for the conclusions he reaches, merely that "he knows they're right". So, yes, that did strike me as an attempt at philosophical hegemony, and this particular interaction was just one more data point on that plot.
      - hegemonicon 17y ago
        I'm sorry you didn't like my blog (though I feel you're a bit uncharitable in your summary), and that you felt I was making some sort of attempt to foist my ideas on you. My moniker is actually derived from the greek word 'hegemonikon' which translates roughly to 'that which guides' - it was what the greeks believed was the guiding part of the mind or soul. But I digress. I probably should have elaborated more to avoid the 'snarky' interpretation. As best I can tell from your comments, your intellect more or less prevented you from learning to socialize, and so now you handle most social interaction with gloves and forceps. This is the sort of thing that builds up over years and is probably rooted deep in childhood experiences, and can't be undone by simply reading a forum comment telling you to 'be more empathetic' or 'recognize the values of others'. Subconscious processes are stubborn and resistant to change. If you really want to change your outlook, I'd imagine you need a long period of careful deconstruction of what produced it, followed by building it back up out of the thought processes you already have (along with a few new tools). Since this seems to be more or less what it is that psychologists do, seeking one out could be helpful. Just my 2 cents of course, so take it with a grain of salt - you weren't wrong when you told me to go see an educator :) I don't share your particular circumstances, but I know social isolation all too well - I wish you the best.
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I've been on HN for almost three years. Do you have ANY idea how many "I'm smart and nobody-understands-me/I-dont-like-people/life-is-pointless" articles I've had to put up with? Yawn.
nkurz 17y ago
The article strikes a chord with me as well, although I'm probably not as much at the limits as you describe yourself. Your responses herein strike similar chords. Ignore the hecklers. So far as I can tell, your conclusions are correct. The mass of humanity isn't up to your standards, being far more interested in 'having a good time' than 'doing something useful'. The problem is that this mass of humanity is practically the only tool you have to work with. How do you decide what's useful without considering how it will be used by other humans? For me, the answer is something like 'produce tools that others can use to further their own goals'. Some of their goals I'll agree with, others will seem like a waste. Time will tell which are really which. In the meantime, it's nice to meet others who share similar goals. Surround yourself with the best people you can find, according to whatever standards you establish. Be kind to those for whom you lack respect, but don't let them set your direction. Iterate rather than trying to figure it all out in advance --- better to die trying. I'd be interested in knowing what your other account is, so I can follow your posts in the future: <nate@verse.com>.

tokenadult 17y ago

I'll give your question a serious answer. Growing up, I knew I had a high IQ score (my parents actually lowballed in hinting what my IQ score was, but I found out the actual score in adult life from my schoolteacher who referred me for testing), and I read in a story by Philip K. Dick that high-IQ people feel social distance from most classmates, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy for me. But later in life I lived in east Asia as a student of the Chinese language, and I discovered that Confucian philosophers expected smart people to use their smarts to get along with everyone, summed up in the saying of Confucius, "三人行，必有我师焉" "Wherever there are three persons walking, my teacher is surely among them." I learned from my experience overseas that I could appreciate other people for their abilities, and expect to learn from most people of my acquaintance, whatever their IQ scores. Since then, I have been more socially comfortable with a wider variety of people, and have felt less isolated. I still devote a lot of my free time to activism on behalf of gifted learners, which provides me with a social circle of people who understand my personal background.

shadowaccount 17y ago
I've already adopted a general philosophy of attempting to benefit from interpersonal interaction as much as possible, I try to figure out how a person works on their own level, including if I could assist them in any way, and if in doing so I may be setting up a mutually beneficial arrangement. In some cases, this works, but these cases are few and far between. It seems the majority of people, if one were to pursue this philosophy, ought to be left to oblivion. Entanglement with them will only result in encumberance rather than advantage, even if you were to attempt to selflessly better them without regard to the benefits to yourself, typically they would be incapable of making use of your assistance. What then is the purpose of humanity at large, those who fall outside the sphere of which can be of any advantage to you and are more valuable avoided than utilised?
- tokenadult 17y ago
  It seems the majority of people, if one were to pursue this philosophy, ought to be left to oblivion. Entanglement with them will only result in encumberance rather than advantage, even if you were to attempt to selflessly better them without regard to the benefits to yourself, typically they would be incapable of making use of your assistance. If you seriously go through life with that much of a sense of superiority, it would be no surprise at all to be socially isolated. I don't think that way. Most people are important and useful to humanity at the individual level. My default is to treat all people as if they are, and that default assumption is generally born out in my interaction with people in many settings. I don't merely seek PERSONAL advantage in dealing with people, but the broader advantage of a better human society for all.
  - shadowaccount 17y ago
    Making the world a better place is promoting a personal advantage, so long as you're not dragged down too much in the process. My point is that by and large this is simply not the case. I think if you believe it is then I'm wondering if your target population is truly representative of humanity at large or simply those who you interact with most commonly within some social sphere which you have found to be agreeable with you. It isn't even that I feel superior, I simply feel utterly different, as I said, alien in the extreme. I believe this inhibits me when trying to understand why other people behave as they do because all I have to work off is a bunch of simulations of human behaviour in the past that I have observed / heard of.
    - shadowaccount 17y ago
      The pattern that I am seeing here and after having meditated on this myself is this: My conclusions about humanity at large are mostly correct, but this ought not discourage me from interaction in general due to one critical point. There are many great people despite the mass being largely useless. Further, if one actually attempts to follow rational principles it would not be all that difficult to find these people and maximise one's interactions within this sphere. Isn't that in fact exactly what I'm doing here? The first place I have ever actually felt mostly socially comfortable in my life? All the examples of positive social experiences that I can think of I could logically have concluded would likely have ended up that way based on the guessed at characteristics of the groups in question, the trick to human interaction is not to optimise your communications for the mean, but to optimise your communications for the groups whom with which you wish to interact. Thanks to those that responded.

sunir 17y ago

It's great you are aware your pattern is harming you. When I was very young I had similar feelings too. That which you oppose you maintain. You are trapped by your misanthropy. The article makes this point. You can only move forward by finding another path that is positive for both halves of the equation. You have to begin with empathy. I have a rule of life: my next set of friends are the people I dislike the most. It's amazing how much you can learn from other people that you would never have guessed. Negative feelings create blindness. I don't understand all these people obsessed with IQ. Life has more to it that logic and rationality. Tell me how much IQ you need to appreciate a hot dog at the carnival on the first beautiful day of summer. Live beyond this single measure of you.

shadowaccount 17y ago
This is exactly what I'm referring to, I simply don't connect with what you're trying to illustrate. I understand you're trying to draw a scenario that has some supposedly appealing emotional quality to it, but I'd just be thinking I'd rather be doing something useful than going to a carnival and I don't like hot weather. This is not simply a case of a single example that would not hold up under a barrage of alternative options, simply put I want to learn, discover, build and create and passive experience holds little to no value to me.
- pmichaud 17y ago
  Heard of Sifter.org?
  - shadowaccount 17y ago
    I hadn't, I had a brief look and my curiosity is aroused, are there archives of the list content?
- sunir 17y ago
  Well folks like you aren't uncommon. I see someone posted sifter.org. One thing to note. You have all these negative feelings to people but positive feelings to your work. I suggest you can kill your negative feelings if you realize all people enjoy something the same way you enjoy your work. We just all like different things. In the way I don't understand why people enjoy experimental jazz but I can appreciate they must find something in it for them and thus I do not judge them, you can at least teach yourself to not look down on others for what measures of joy they take from life. No sense polluting yourself with misanthropy. Instead be happy for them and happy you are clear what makes you happy.

notauser 17y ago

No matter how brilliant one is are there are people out there who make one look like rather like a badly shaved monkey. Obviously this is not true at the limit, but unless you happen to be Hawking posting incognito that consideration is probably not applicable to you. If that doesn't provide an appropriate perspective then I suggest that you consider that in an infinite universe everything is essentially pointless and the small graduation between your brilliance and their interest in reality television is so small as to be immeasurable.

shadowaccount 17y ago
In the scales of which this article speaks, I am at the limits. The conclusion you draw at the end would result in an embrace of nihilism in the instance that you assume that this is an unchanging fact or transhumanism in order to widen the gap and make it significant on a cosmological scale. I'm wholeheartedly in favour of the second option, certainly. My humanity already feels more a shedding skin than a fitting glove, long ago I had wished I could move beyond it's constraints and push the limits of possibility.
- antonovka 17y ago
  You sound like an indulged child, not a misunderstood genius. I am at the 'upper bounds' as well, but I don't attempt to batter others over the head with my vocabulary and pride, and I've learned that I'm just as vulnerable, alone, and human as anyone else. Setting yourself apart on the basis of a standardized test is just sophomoric justification for misanthropy and depression.
  - shadowaccount 17y ago
    That is expressly why I made this account, to avoid suggestions that this might be my motivation. I have nothing to gain here from grandstanding, nobody knows who I am and I neither gain nor lose karma from the exchange, it's simply an attempt to objectively engage with a potentially touchy subject which by nature practically begs to be painted as showboating. The response I made was only as venomous as that made originally. I was annoyed by what was a generally helpful exchange being punctuated by what still appears to me to be little more than an attempt at justifying the poster's own disagreement by directly accusing me of mental illness.

hegemonicon 17y ago

You have psychological problems. Go see a psychologist.

shadowaccount 17y ago
You lack the capacity to spell sheer, your attempt at philosophical hegemony is quaint. Go see an educator.
- antonovka 17y ago
  Your demonstrated antisocial behavior validates the original poster's opinion. Moreover, how is his opinion of your clear anti-social pretenses an attempt at 'hegemony' (specifically, the dominance of one state/region/political group over the other)? Is it because you feel that you are persecuted as an 'outsider' by the 'normals'? (This is also evidence of a psychological problem. If this is genuinely worrisome to you, you should see a shrink.)
  - shadowaccount 17y ago
    His opinion as expressed alone here is not the basis of my comment, it irritated me as I believed it was oversimplifying and snarky, but any time I think such a thing I very carefully examine the content of what provokes it, so I read his blog for quite some time before posting the conclusions I shot back with. He is constantly talking about argumentation, very prone to being unable to understand that other people may see things differently to him, and even makes extensive comment on the fact that he has no formal logical path from a prior assumption in the vast majority of cases for the conclusions he reaches, merely that "he knows they're right". So, yes, that did strike me as an attempt at philosophical hegemony, and this particular interaction was just one more data point on that plot.
    - hegemonicon 17y ago
      I'm sorry you didn't like my blog (though I feel you're a bit uncharitable in your summary), and that you felt I was making some sort of attempt to foist my ideas on you. My moniker is actually derived from the greek word 'hegemonikon' which translates roughly to 'that which guides' - it was what the greeks believed was the guiding part of the mind or soul. But I digress. I probably should have elaborated more to avoid the 'snarky' interpretation. As best I can tell from your comments, your intellect more or less prevented you from learning to socialize, and so now you handle most social interaction with gloves and forceps. This is the sort of thing that builds up over years and is probably rooted deep in childhood experiences, and can't be undone by simply reading a forum comment telling you to 'be more empathetic' or 'recognize the values of others'. Subconscious processes are stubborn and resistant to change. If you really want to change your outlook, I'd imagine you need a long period of careful deconstruction of what produced it, followed by building it back up out of the thought processes you already have (along with a few new tools). Since this seems to be more or less what it is that psychologists do, seeking one out could be helpful. Just my 2 cents of course, so take it with a grain of salt - you weren't wrong when you told me to go see an educator :) I don't share your particular circumstances, but I know social isolation all too well - I wish you the best.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

I've been on HN for almost three years. Do you have ANY idea how many "I'm smart and nobody-understands-me/I-dont-like-people/life-is-pointless" articles I've had to put up with? Yawn.

nkurz 17y ago

The article strikes a chord with me as well, although I'm probably not as much at the limits as you describe yourself. Your responses herein strike similar chords. Ignore the hecklers. So far as I can tell, your conclusions are correct. The mass of humanity isn't up to your standards, being far more interested in 'having a good time' than 'doing something useful'. The problem is that this mass of humanity is practically the only tool you have to work with. How do you decide what's useful without considering how it will be used by other humans? For me, the answer is something like 'produce tools that others can use to further their own goals'. Some of their goals I'll agree with, others will seem like a waste. Time will tell which are really which. In the meantime, it's nice to meet others who share similar goals. Surround yourself with the best people you can find, according to whatever standards you establish. Be kind to those for whom you lack respect, but don't let them set your direction. Iterate rather than trying to figure it all out in advance --- better to die trying. I'd be interested in knowing what your other account is, so I can follow your posts in the future: <nate@verse.com>.