People with High IQ are dumb.
They lack intelligence in everything except what they love and are narzisstic about.
People with high IQ and high EQ and many others might be awesome, as you can pull out lots of social patterns, wisdoms, etc. But only for those who had good experiences in Life and are a bit older.
What am I? Idk. I think I have a high IQ because of various diagnoses, but lots of mental issues are blocking any motivation to understand Math as fast like other People in University. There are incredible fast learners, but I see in them no experience or memory of pain, suffering, etc. Like, its the “fun” that steers us to learn. Becoming distracted pretty fast like me is pain. Its like I have only a High IQ when the Moon shines perfectly.
I believe that I have a good amount of EQ, because I too often only think about lives of other people and even wasted money to help a broken new friend, just to see the money never again and him either. I suffer just from the imagination of a friend who suffered. I could be the smartest person by being the dumbest Person. Meaning that when I would only see the world centered around me like an egoist/narzissist, I would be happy, because I would lack the intelligence to simulate another World of another Person. I would only know what I need like a dumb Person. I would lack a lot of intelligences.
Having an High IQ without anything else, makes you a very dumb Person is my Opinion. I feel like the word “IQ” is wrongly labeled, because you dont really measure “Intelligence” by it.
Lonely isn’t the right word, because I’m not upset about not having a large group of people I consider myself close to. It’s somewhat disappointing that I can’t deeply relate to more people, though. I’d like to meet more likeminded folks, but I’m also less and less willing to tolerate draining relationships as I get older. Being particular about where you invest your time and energy tends to be socially limiting.
Skimming through this post, people actually believe in IQ?
IQ is not a good measurement of intelligence. It is at best one single measurement of pattern recognition, and it is not set in stone either, as you can get better or worse at it.
There’s multiple types of intelligence it doesn’t measure and honestly, I don’t believe anyone should take it serious.
I don’t know.
its awesom
Instead of being bad at everything I’m good at a few things
You wouldn’t understand
Jk, I’m dum af
It’s very tiring having to start off every conversation by letting people know that I’m more intelligent than them, but it is necessary.
I just laminated a bunch of cards that say Wile E. Coyote; Super Genius and hand them out. Saves time.
E: ducking autocorrupt
It vastly depends on everything else.
You can be a dude with a normal life, who just makes conclusions faster and you’ve learned that everyone likes how smart you are and you enjoy this.
You can be a restless mess, because you’ve known all your life that there’s nothing to compete with and it’s difficult enough to find someone to even have a somewhat decent conversation on your level with. These people come with or without the arrogance you’re thinking of right now. Some are just genuinely kind and thoughtful, but always a step ahead without even really appreciating their ability much.
You can be an absolute underachiever, because being smart was never rewarded in your life. Maybe you even learned that “You’re not special” so much so, that you punished others for not being able to draw the same conclusions as you in the same time, because you always thought they were just being lazy on purpose.
You can be entirely unaware and may say funny things like “I don’t think we’re all that many really smart people in $techplacewithclearlysmartpeople. I talked to most of them and I don’t struggle at all”.
Source: High IQ myself, working with other people who increasingly talk to me openly about this and their overall situation. So much of who we become is about what our parents do to us and if there’s understanding and love and support on that end.
Obviously there’s the whole spectrum thing as well. I don’t think a higher IQ means “more autism”, as someone suggested. I think it increases your chances of struggling with a regular (neurotypical) kind of life, for example because you are supposed to be interested in 1 subject (to make a career), but - similar to people with ADHD - may care for all the subjects.
If you think about what is neurotypical though, you can classify people with a particularly high IQ or people with particularly high sensitivity as neurodiverse in just the same way you do that for people with Autism or ADHD. Now if you think about humanity as a whole, we may all to some degree be diverging from the norm in any or all of these ways, but still be more or less free of struggle, because it’s not by much, while for the more extreme cases, they stand out for better or worse.Frustrating.
The rate at which I absorb information is disgusting. Yes please finish your sentence I already have a response why are you taking so long. How did I learn that? I picked up the manual and did it. Developing new skills? Learning Rust right now and its going well, failed out of highschool because I learned too easily and didn’t need the homework to learn (so it didn’t get done).
It comes with imposter syndrome: I knew the problem, I had the pattern figured out, why did I still fuck everything up (plot twist I probably didn’t).
It comes with a superiority complex: I learned this in 10 minutes from looking at a Sci Journal, why has it been hours and yallvstill don’t get it? 🙄
It comes with accidentally hurting people: frequently I say things thinking something hould be obvious when it is not, while unintended, it often hurts my partner who is usually in the line of fire when I let some dumb shit outta my mouth and insult someone’s intelligence.
Anyway I hate it I’d rather be dumbsauce ignorance is bliss
It’s being like you
The details of my life are quite inconsequential, but since you asked…
Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we’d make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds, pretty standard really. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it’s breathtaking, I suggest you try it.
I have a high IQ as well as ADHD and Autism.
Out of context, scoring as high as I did really meant next to nothing. In the context of the diagnoses I received later in life, definitely made sense, and helped color a picture painted in two solid days with a psychologist.
Somehow, I think it’s important that the IQ test I took was not called an IQ test to me until after. Like, I knew I was in for tests, but more broadly told what things were about.
As a student, I had a science teacher who had been teaching many years, tell my mother he had never seen a student think in the manner I did. I was doing exceptionally well in class, but did not exceed in the fashion that would get me into an ivy league school, which at the time was supposed to be a goal. My father graduated MIT.
There are times when it’s great. When I can focus on something, I can learn a lot and get very good at it. However, I spent decades with two obstacles I could never get myself past: the inability to keep that focus or control it, and the inability to even understand other people enough to try to get along with them long-term.
The result is I am just now, at 41, starting to figure out what I want to do with my life after way too long in a profession I should never have entered, and burned out of twice. And by burn out I do not mean tired and sad, I mean hospitalization.
In summary, it can be pretty great, but in my case it’s fraught with difficulty as well.
Thanks for your response.
It’s interesting to see your story in relation to other stories I’ve heard or people I’ve met.
Before I describe them, it’s important to say that you don’t strike me as unkind. I wouldn’t want you to compare yourself to the people I’ll mention and conclude that you’re somehow bad. I’m taking the time to say this because I don’t know if the difficulties you’ve mentioned are a sore spot.
Alright. The people I’ve met. I’ve met people whose identity was tied to their IQ and it became painful for me to wonder what I meant to them. For sure I was not close to their IQ; they needed to take multiple tests because they were off the charts. But I always wondered if they liked me as a person, based on my values and how I did things.
I’ve also met very relaxed and kind people who went on to study at the schools that were supposed to be a goal, people who made me realize it’s possible to be wicked smart and simultaneously kind.
When you mention that it was important that you weren’t told that the test you took was an IQ test, I think about teenage me. Back then, I learned that people could judge me based on my IQ. I made the mistake of reading white supremacist bigotry, and read that they evaluated whether people were worthy of living based on things like IQ. I knew the whole white supremacy discourse was pseudoscience and bigotry, but I was scared of bigots in power evaluating my existence. I became terrified. I became very distrustful of people who I should’ve trusted, wonderful people who would’ve never had such narrow and mistaken views. That has changed, now that I have a clearer sense of self and more perspective. But I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if I wouldn’t have mistrusted wonderful people. I guess the discourse around IQ can really change the way you look at the world and what you do.
Is it too nosy to ask a couple of follow up questions? If not, here they are: you mentioned ADHD and the obstacle you could never get yourself past, the inability to keep your focus and control it. Is the diagnosis recent? Could medication help? Could any treatment help with the ADHD? As to difficulties understanding other people, do you know about relational frame theory, the self component of ACT, and the PEAK and AIM programs?
As far as medication, I have not decided yet. This is all recent, within the last year. Therapy has been helping a lot for my current state, but ADHD isn’t the focus. Recovering from burnout is.
I haven’t looked into anything you’ve mentioned.
I have been described as, and willing describe myself as, a good person with a capacity for kindness. I am not nice in much of what that means.
I think my political stances sometimes highlight that. I will willingly punch nazis given the chance. No, that’s not hyperbole. I have no tolerance for bigotry. I lost a good friend who became a cop, and then said some questionable but not outright hateful things in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.
A flawed but not altogether useless analogy is I am not the guy who waves someone on at a stop sign when it is that person who is supposed to yield. I have no patience for it, nor do I have patience for it happening the other way around.
When I recognized that a now good friend wasn’t so harsh to me out of spite or hate but out of personal struggle, I wanted to know more, and now we not only became good friends, but we are to each other among the very few people we talk openly with about therapy and how it’s really going. We both understand and respect the need to break down the stigma of seeking help with mental health. We had both peered into the void.
But in public, I wind up ignoring a lot of people simply from wearing headphones and wanting nothing to do with any of it.
“How does this (dress, shirt, whatever) look on me?” My wife gets the truth, like it or not.
I could go on, and am willing to try to answer any questions.
IQ is skull measuring nonsense. how good you are at taking a standardised test is in fact not a remotely good “measure of intelligence”. if you care about education you should discard the notion of IQ.
how good you are at taking a standardised test
Not even that, how good you are at taking a standardised test on a given day. We also know people who are traumatised by poverty or individual adverse life events have lower success rates on these tests, making them even more useless at best and vicious at worst.
Scores are stable over time. This can be determined by statistics. It’s called test-retest reliability.
I think it would be hard to isolate exactly how much of our daily lives we experience as a direct consequence of our IQ and how much is a consequence of other things such as personality, emotional predisposition, environment, and luck.
My IQ is pretty average (around 115 I think? I tested ages ago and I can’t even say the test was reliable). Some people insist I must be somewhat higher than that but I don’t know. I feel dumber every day.
My father though, he does have a higher IQ (I think 135 iirc) and it’s obvious to anyone that he’s a brains guy. Always top student in his youth and later a decent researcher, engineer and programmer. And yet he still makes dumb mistakes like everyone else, and his temper and personality will often turn a mediocre day into a bad one. He has a tendency to overcomplicate things unnecessarily, and sets high standards for others around him- you’d think being smarter would mean he wouldn’t do this, but as I said, intelligence doesn’t work isolated. I remember asking him how it feels like being smarter than most of his peers and his answer is always “bah!”.
So I don’t know if this answers your question, but there’s my two cents for you.
115 is not “average” lmao
By definition, it is. 85-115 is the 1 standard deviation range for IQ and encompasses ⅔ of the population (roughly). So, 115 is “average” or “high average”.
115-130 is above average, while 70-85 is below average (“mild intellectual delay” used to be the term I think? Not sure if that’s still current). 145+ was “genius” and 160+ was “super genius”, back in the day; I assume those terms aren’t used anymore, but I haven’t looked into it. IIRC, about 97% of the population is 70-130 IQ.
My brother is a “genius”; I am not. (I was never told my exact score on the IQ test found for me as a child, but I know the range, and in both our cases came from a psychologist).
I’m more “successful” by most standard measures of success, but that might have more to do with his (undiagnosed and unsupported) autism than his IQ. (Career , house, family, etc.) In math, for example, he could get 100s without effort, until university. I could get 100s with significant but not extreme effort, or coast and get 80s-90s until university. We both got top scores on math contests at the local (academic) school level.
I don’t really think IQ is very valuable for having a “good” life. Emotional regulation, introspection, mindfulness, and other soft skills are more important, imho, and I’m actively working on trying to build more capacity in those areas, and they’re leading to more success for me than my speed at learning a narrow subset of things (what IQ measures).
I’m dealing with a lot of harm from how constantly being labeled “smart” was damaging for me, paired with my at-the-time undiagnosed ADHD. I struggle with a lot of imposter syndrome, need for external validation, and oscillating sense of self worth.
TL;DR: “Emotional intelligence” trumps IQ for life skills and general happiness, equanimity, and “success”.
So I don’t know if this answers your question, but there’s my two cents for you.
It does! This is precisely the kind of stuff that I’m interested in! I agree with you, in that it’s possible to think wrong thoughts even with a higher IQ. I see IQ as the speed of thought, and you can very quickly arrive at wrong conclusions. Similarly, if there’s a thought that your skill tree hasn’t unlocked, then you’re left with thoughts that are maybe not ideal for a particular situation, thoughts that could make someone “overcomplicate things unnecessarily” or “make dumb mistakes”, as your dad or anyone on planet Earth would.
I think it’s especially hard to isolate IQ when there are many thoughts or behaviors that we don’t typically associate with high IQ. “Ah yes, the violin is a sensible instrument for a learned man” or whatever people may think. That’s partly why I asked my question. If someone leads a life not typically associated with a high IQ and yet have a high enough IQ that manifested in their life, how did that look like? Of course, I’m not looking for wild stories. I’m looking for genuine stories, and I’m glad that I got an interesting answers like yours!