Appearance Disdain among the Very Intelligent

Originally Posted by globetrotter

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it is extremly hard to understand the perspective of a person who has an IQ of 20 points higher or lower than you do, almost impossible when that gap opens to 40 points or so - while there are some extremly successful people with very high IQ's most of them have been very strong in this ability to understand the perspectvive of the average person.

one of the "problems" of people with extremly high IQs is that they have trouble understanding the perspective of the vast majoirty of the world - they almost never enounter a person who has the level of intelegence that they do. this can create some extreme problems with social skills and the abilty to fit into society.

I'm not sure that I buy the whole "supersmart people can't understand non-supersmart people" angle. As far as I can tell, most people aren't good at figuring out people, no matter what the IQ. Intuitive and interpersonal intelligence is a different intelligence than would be measured on an SAT or IQ test, of course--but there's no reason why you would suspect that a person who has huge quantitative abilities is lacking socially. Intelligence is not a zero-sum game--you do not automatically become deficient in emotional intelligence if you're a math whiz.

It seems to me that smart people who fail professionally will have it blamed on their relationship skills, when they may be no worse at interacting with people than 90% of the rest of the world. Instead, I suspect that detractors would say something about "wasting their gifts", with the assumption that massive intellect should correlate to high social IQ.

I agree with the bolded point--that massively successful people almost always are socially adept. I don't see why your IQ has anything to do with that statement.

Originally Posted by mr. loverman

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someone with a 120 IQ with great social skills will be way more succesful than someone with a 180 IQ but poor social skills. the latter will end up working their ass off for the other people's benefit. think einstien. he got used.

I'm not understanding this analogy. You don't feel that Einstein was successful?

Originally Posted by mensimageconsultant

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What kind of highly intelligent person is generally least concerned with his (or her) appearance - for instance, math/science type or philosophy major?

I think that the difference here is not that social science people are more creative and thus more stylish as much as it is--social science people are much more likely to have members of the opposite sex in their classes/fields than others.

Originally Posted by LA Guy

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Of course, there are also remarkably stupid people in the world as well. Yesterday, I bought lunch at the cafeteria (really bad food, fyi.) I handed the cashier a twenty, and before I had time to give her the additional $1.75 so that I could get a ten and a five back, the cashier had rung me up. $13.43 change. Fair enough. I handed her the $1.75. Not so hard to figure out that now she ought to give me a five, and ten, and 18 cents, right? It's simple arithmetic. The dude at the newstand could compute the sum. This college student stood there for a full two minutes trying to add 13.43 and 1.75. I walked her through it, "13+1=$14. Then, add 75 and 43 cents. That's $1.18. Another way to add those two numbers is imagine 5 quarters, then subtract 7 cents." She still couldn't figure it out. Nearly gave me just the $5. I want to hack her little computer, so that if she is given an odd amount, say, $7.53, then the change will ring up as $100, every time. I could make a killing buying lunch. I'm not sure what her major is, but I really hope that it is nothing I ever have to rely on.

In her defense, working as a cashier is the most mind numbing job imaginable and those quick conversions can be more difficult than you'd think when you've been on autopilot the last four hours.

Originally Posted by nyf

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In her defense, working as a cashier is the most mind numbing job imaginable and those quick conversions can be more difficult than you'd think when you've been on autopilot the last four hours.

+1000(or is it 982.56??)

After ringing up customer after customer for 5 hours at a stretch, it's possible to do things like give people their own money back as change. I've done it before.

Originally Posted by Augusto86

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+1000(or is it 982.56??)

After ringing up customer after customer for 5 hours at a stretch, it's possible to do things like give people their own money back as change. I've done it before.

YOU can do it easily. Why would you want to stump someone like this? Shame on you.

Originally Posted by LA Guy

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Whatever. You are still in my "Dumb and bitter category."



I have met more than my fair share of objectively highly intelligent people. In this case, my use of the word "objective", I mean people who have analytical abilities far greater than the ordinary. Their abilities to recognize patterns, encapsulate and solve problems, draw inferences, retain information and acquire knowledge, are remarkable. I'm a reasonably intelligent and highly educated guy, and I find myself having trouble even keeping up with them in conversation.

That said, and again from my personal observations only, these people are often not particularly successful in their careers and relationships. Their failures seem to stem from several related factors. They are frustrated by the inability of others to communicate at the same high level as they can; they are unable to relate to others emotionally; and they become bored easily and find it difficult to find challenges that are commensurate with their abilities.

Of course, there are also remarkably stupid people in the world as well. Yesterday, I bought lunch at the cafeteria (really bad food, fyi.) I handed the cashier a twenty, and before I had time to give her the additional $1.75 so that I could get a ten and a five back, the cashier had rung me up. $13.43 change. Fair enough. I handed her the $1.75. Not so hard to figure out that now she ought to give me a five, and ten, and 18 cents, right? It's simple arithmetic. The dude at the newstand could compute the sum. This college student stood there for a full two minutes trying to add 13.43 and 1.75. I walked her through it, "13+1=$14. Then, add 75 and 43 cents. That's $1.18. Another way to add those two numbers is imagine 5 quarters, then subtract 7 cents." She still couldn't figure it out. Nearly gave me just the $5. I want to hack her little computer, so that if she is given an odd amount, say, $7.53, then the change will ring up as $100, every time. I could make a killing buying lunch. I'm not sure what her major is, but I really hope that it is nothing I ever have to rely on.



yeah, I think that selling high tech systems is mostly about trying to communicate between different groups of people that have no common language - most people have a lot of trouble understanding what the world looks like to somebody who is that much more of less intellegent than you are.

Originally Posted by nyf

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I'm not sure that I buy the whole "supersmart people can't understand non-supersmart people" angle.
.

I didn't say that, I said that most people simply can't understand the point of view of somebody with an IQ difference of 20, and when you make that 40, or 80, you are almost a different species to each other.

how many conversations have you had with a mentally handicaped person? now, imagine that everybody you talked to was mentally handicapped, and all media was aimed at the mentally handicaped, and that, maybe once a year, or maybe once every two years, you met somebody who wasn't mentally handicapped. how would your sanity last under those circomstances?

imagine that you are 5, and you find that you are a little brighter than your teacher, a little quicker than her. how would that make you feel? now, at 15, imagine that you have been in an education system where you have always been a little quicker than any of your teachers. how would that make you feel?

Originally Posted by globetrotter

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I didn't say that, I said that most people simply can't understand the point of view of somebody with an IQ difference of 20, and when you make that 40, or 80, you are almost a different species to each other.

how many conversations have you had with a mentally handicaped person? now, imagine that everybody you talked to was mentally handicapped, and all media was aimed at the mentally handicaped, and that, maybe once a year, or maybe once every two years, you met somebody who wasn't mentally handicapped. how would your sanity last under those circomstances?

imagine that you are 5, and you find that you are a little brighter than your teacher, a little quicker than her. how would that make you feel? now, at 15, imagine that you have been in an education system where you have always been a little quicker than any of your teachers. how would that make you feel?

What about, them apples?

Originally Posted by globetrotter

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I didn't say that, I said that most people simply can't understand the point of view of somebody with an IQ difference of 20, and when you make that 40, or 80, you are almost a different species to each other.

how many conversations have you had with a mentally handicaped person? now, imagine that everybody you talked to was mentally handicapped, and all media was aimed at the mentally handicaped, and that, maybe once a year, or maybe once every two years, you met somebody who wasn't mentally handicapped. how would your sanity last under those circomstances?

imagine that you are 5, and you find that you are a little brighter than your teacher, a little quicker than her. how would that make you feel? now, at 15, imagine that you have been in an education system where you have always been a little quicker than any of your teachers. how would that make you feel?

globe... some very smart people manage to do just fine. You're making it as people with high IQs are marsupialed. If you're smart, you find a way to communicate with the regular barbarians. As for being smarter than your teachers... I think that anyone who is considered "intelligent" is smarter than their teachers. It's not that big of a deal. If you play sports, have regular friends, then you'll be fine. It's parents who ruin kids, not their IQs.

You're now going on this thing about 80 IQ point differences because alledgedly your kid is the next john nash... stop placing so much value on IQs... it's just a test, it doesn't speak of experience, common sense, and it actually ignores other kinds of intelligence. It's not like someone with a 100 IQ can't interact with someone with a 160 IQ. I think you very much misunderstand the issue.

Originally Posted by Mustapha

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YOU can do it easily. Why would you want to stump someone like this? Shame on you.

Hmmm? Is this directed towards me? I wasn't trying to mindstump her. I just wanted to get a fiver back. It's not that difficult to do. I asked my eight year old to do the same sum afterwards (in his head, using the heuristic about quarters I outlined a little earlier) just to see if he could. It took him a minute, certainly slower than I did it (it took my wife, a mathematician, exactly 2 seconds to give me an answer). But he got it right. In about a minute, two at the outside. And he is a bright kid, but he is not a genius. And he is eight years old.

Originally Posted by Violinist

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You're now going on this thing about 80 IQ point differences because alledgedly your kid is the next john nash... stop placing so much value on IQs... it's just a test, it doesn't speak of experience, common sense, and it actually ignores other kinds of intelligence. It's not like someone with a 100 IQ can't interact with someone with a 160 IQ. I think you very much misunderstand the issue.

The deficiencies in IQ test notwithstanding, 80 points is a huge difference, and people with remarkably high IQs are remarkably intelligent in the senses I outlined earlier. Someone with a 160 IQ can certainly interact with someone with 130 IQ or even someone with 100 IQ or lower, but it is much less enjoyable, and the mental exertions that give most of us some measure of satisfaction do not do so for these people. The lack of adequate mental stimulation can be extremely frustrating for these people. Luckily, I am dumb, and even little things exercise my brain.

Originally Posted by LA Guy

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The deficiencies in IQ test notwithstanding, 80 points is a huge difference, and people with remarkably high IQs are remarkably intelligent in the senses I outlined earlier. Someone with a 160 IQ can certainly interact with someone with 130 IQ or even someone with 100 IQ or lower, but it is much less enjoyable, and the mental exertions that give most of us some measure of satisfaction do not do so for these people. The lack of adequate mental stimulation can be extremely frustrating for these people. Luckily, I am dumb, and even little things exercise my brain.

I agree but to me nature is as important as nurture. Let the kid go run in the mud and drink on weekends. Nerds come from nerdy parents. If the kid really is brilliant, his intelligence will shine later when needed. A real childhood is far more valuable because otherwise later in life, the genius won't be able to communicate his incredible findings with us plebs. Better to let him roll in the gutter a bit before he takes his place amongst the stars.

Originally Posted by Violinist

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globe... some very smart people manage to do just fine. You're making it as people with high IQs are marsupialed. If you're smart, you find a way to communicate with the regular barbarians. As for being smarter than your teachers... I think that anyone who is considered "intelligent" is smarter than their teachers. It's not that big of a deal. If you play sports, have regular friends, then you'll be fine. It's parents who ruin kids, not their IQs. You're now going on this thing about 80 IQ point differences because alledgedly your kid is the next john nash... stop placing so much value on IQs... it's just a test, it doesn't speak of experience, common sense, and it actually ignores other kinds of intelligence. It's not like someone with a 100 IQ can't interact with someone with a 160 IQ. I think you very much misunderstand the issue.
It's not about finding a way to communicate, it's about it wearing on you that most people are different than you and don't understand the way you see things. My group of friends in high school was a group of relatively smart guys (think SATs 1400-1550, taking Calc. II or 4 AP courses a year, not like Stephen Hawking smart), and we went to a magnet school with mostly other smart people or were at least all in classes of mostly smart people. They didn't take honors courses because our high school had a category they had created above that. We had one friend who was of the same intellect, but he went to a standard public school, wasn't in all AP and honors courses and was in classes with people of very average intelligence studying at their pace. He would vent all the time about how frustrated he was with the idiots in his class (with regular anectdotes), and how slow the classes went, etc. I met a lot of the kids that went to that high school, and they were a different breed than the average kid at mine. I wouldn't want to spend 7 hours a day with them, because they were often gratingly stupid with what they would say. Now you might say this is an elitist attitude, and it is what it is. But like Globetrotter said, when you exaggerate the difference between intelligence, it can be very frustrating for both parties, but the genius doesn't have the luxury of having the majority of the planet be closer to him than the average.

Originally Posted by Brian278

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It's not about finding a way to communicate, it's about it wearing on you that most people are different than you and don't understand the way you see things. My group of friends in high school was a group of relatively smart guys (think SATs 1400-1550, taking Calc. II or 4 AP courses a year, not like Stephen Hawking smart), and we went to a magnet school with mostly other smart people or were at least all in classes of mostly smart people. They didn't take honors courses because our high school had a category they had created above that. We had one friend who was of the same intellect, but he went to a standard public school, wasn't in all AP and honors courses and was in classes with people of very average intelligence studying at their pace. He would vent all the time about how frustrated he was with the idiots in his class (with regular anectdotes), and how slow the classes went, etc. I met a lot of the kids that went to that high school, and they were a different breed than the average kid at mine. I wouldn't want to spend 7 hours a day with them, because they were often gratingly stupid with what they would say. Now you might say this is an elitist attitude, and it is what it is. But like Globetrotter said, when you exaggerate the difference between intelligence, it can be very frustrating for both parties, but the genius doesn't have the luxury of having the majority of the planet be closer to him than the average.

I'm sorry but none of the kids I was friends with when I was growing up really gave a **** what went on in class. Your friend sounds pretty boring...

It's possible to be highly intelligent but also a normal person... at that age, that means getting unwanted boners every 5 minutes, thinking of playing sports, and everything but school. I don't know anyone I consider smart that actually learned anything of value in a high school class. Especially in an American one, unless you go to a top prep school, you're not super intelligent if learning at that level is a matter of being engaged in class. I only think these things really matter in extreme cases like what Globetrotter said. Unfortunately, the chances of having an ultra bright person like that are already quite low. Growing up, "smart" kids who couldn't interact with less intelligent people had problems other than the intelligence gap. It was the fact that their parents tried to tell them they were special, dressed them like a dork, didn't let them watch the Simpsons, and forced them to read literature that even the world's most brilliant minds can only absorb in their 20s.

Originally Posted by globetrotter

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it looks like we are having trouble understanding what intellegence is, and who are the "very intellegent", and I would suggest that part of that comes from the whole feeling that intellegence is good, so nobody wants to admit that they are less intellegent than somebody else.

intellegence is a measurable trait, to be more exact, there seem to be several separate traits that fall in to the basket of intellegence, and are measurable. we can tell who falls into low, average, high and very high intellegence. and, jsut because somebody is a geek doens't make him hghly intellegent, and jsut because somebody is highly intellegent doesn' mean that a person will be sucessful by our standards.



it is extremly hard to understand the perspective of a person who has an IQ of 20 points higher or lower than you do, almost impossible when that gap opens to 40 points or so - while there are some extremly successful people with very high IQ's most of them have been very strong in this ability to understand the perspectvive of the average person.

one of the "problems" of people with extremly high IQs is that they have trouble understanding the perspective of the vast majoirty of the world - they almost never enounter a person who has the level of intelegence that they do. this can create some extreme problems with social skills and the abilty to fit into society.

in my opinion, this is the root cause of most of those social issues that we notice - like the disdain of appearance.

Globetrotter, with the caveat that for every generalization there are exceptions, your post is consistent with my understanding of things.

Originally Posted by Violinist

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I'm sorry but none of the kids I was friends with when I was growing up really gave a **** what went on in class. Your friend sounds pretty boring...

It's possible to be highly intelligent but also a normal person... at that age, that means getting unwanted boners every 5 minutes, thinking of playing sports, and everything but school. I don't know anyone I consider smart that actually learned anything of value in a high school class. Especially in an American one, unless you go to a top prep school, you're not super intelligent if learning at that level is a matter of being engaged in class. I only think these things really matter in extreme cases like what Globetrotter said. Unfortunately, the chances of having an ultra bright person like that are already quite low. Growing up, "smart" kids who couldn't interact with less intelligent people had problems other than the intelligence gap. It was the fact that their parents tried to tell them they were special, dressed them like a dork, didn't let them watch the Simpsons, and forced them to read literature that even the world's most brilliant minds can only absorb in their 20s.

No one learns anything of value in four years of high school? Come on, now you sound ridiculous. U.S. Government/Comparative Politics, Music Theory, Psychology, Economics, English Literature, Statistics, all at a college level, has no value? If you have to spend 7 hours a day in a class, yeah, you give a **** whether the class is constantly going over things for 2 class periods what you pick up in one. You've got a pretty narrow idea of what a "normal" person is if you think that no normal person should care about this, never mind your assertion that caring about what goes on in class makes someone boring. He wasn't a bookworm, rather the opposite, and thinking for more than 2 seconds about school doesn't make you a nerd or exclude you from playing sports or getting boners.

And again, it's not about not being able to interact with less intelligent people, it's about the frustration with being surrounded with people with different perspectives based on their intelligence and the alienation that comes with that. It's not unlike being a much better basketball player than everyone at a pickup game, or being an advanced saxophonist in a band full of beginners---it's just often not enjoyable if it's not challenging, and if you're not relating on the same level.