IQ Test

[loutfard]

Was wanting to take a break this afternoon and I took the Queendom. Scored 138...which I'm 99.9% certain is vastly inflated.

Exactly the same here. Though my aphasia probably made me score slightly lower on the more visual parts. Also, I found a lot of US centered cultural aspects in that test.

Gun to my head I would have guessed ~110-115 based on 34 years of calibrating myself compared to others. I think this range is more realistic.

I'd guess I would be in a similar range. Took the mensa one Jacob linked and scored around 110 or so. Quite a difference, even if the circumstances then were rather suboptimal. It definitely felt somewhat more neutral, but also heavier on visuals.

[guitarplayer]

That Danish test doesn't do colour blind people a favour I must say! But I think it represents pretty accurately Raven's progressive matrices.

[xmj]

That Quora text is quite brutal! My takeaway is the links.

Yes, she makes very good points and those four links were truly excellent.

[jennypenny]

I believe the military won't take anyone with an IQ of less than 80. Which excludes about 20% of the population.

How could we increase the average IQ of the species ? And would this be a desirable goal ?

It would still be a bell curve though, and the bottom 20% will always have limited opportunities.


Not to get into color coding again, but didn't Beck talk about the issue with communication? I thought he said that even if a person is yellow/turquoise (color?), the smartest learn how to function like a christmas tree, where they turn different colors on and off depending on the situation. Couldn't the same be done for other metrics like IQ and MBTI?

I know it's hard feeling intellectually lonely though ... maybe because high IQs understand exactly why they're lonely and feel they're destined to be lonely? If one feels MBTI is hardwired, that's another cosmic strike of loneliness for INT*s who are also high IQ.

Still, statistics show that a preponderance of people are lonely so only the cause is unique, not the feeling.

[chenda]

It would still be a bell curve though, and the bottom 20% will always have limited opportunities.

That's true, it would always be relative.

[7Wannabe5]

I’ve recently been muddling adjacent to this topic myself. I am theoretically fairly high IQ, and so are some of the other members of my family, but there’s also an associated thread of mental illness. That’s why I asked Jacob if he would rather associate with moderately high IQ “shit together” tribe or higher IQ “shit not so together tribe.” So, for instance, I wonder whether I am motivated to help my adult son through his current crisis, not just because I am deeply emotionally attached to my own biological offspring, but also because he is somebody in my life with whom I can talk to about books etc., because he is INTP who theoretically has 141 IQ.

Also, I recently binge-watched “Normal People”, based on the novel by Sally Rooney, which concerns itself with the relationship between a socially-isolated/ridiculed, wealthy, high IQ, INTJ girl and a socially popular, working class, high IQ , INFJ boy. I had previously read another Sally Rooney novel, and had the thought that her characters, who are very IQ, but more interested in the Arts/Humanities, aren’t as well represented on this forum as science/tech nerds. It’s not just humans with low IQ who go glazed eye when the topic of network engineering is introduced into conversation. IOW, nerd does not equal geek, and to some extent vice-versa.

I also recently read the rather compelling, semi-terrible in parts due to 1940s perspective on social issues, dystopian collapse novel “Earth Abides” which Jacob recommended. The protagonist is a male INTJ in his late 20s, who ends up mated to a woman and surrounded by a tribe of others who are not his intellectual peers after a virus kills off vast majority of humans. One of my thoughts was how typical for a guy to hook up with lower IQ woman for the sex, comfort, and cooking and then be disappointed when all but one of his 10 kids turn out to be rather dim.

Finally, I was skimming through a book entitled “What About Me Can’t You Teach?”, which provided a very large list of phrases that might describe the sort of student some might consider “unteachable”, such as “inner city” or “mentally-impaired “, and I chuckled out loud when I came to “gifted underachiever”, because from my current perspective I could so easily picture the sort of teacher who would have been absolutely frustrated/baffled by young me.

[AnalyticalEngine]

I am theoretically fairly high IQ, and so are some of the other members of my family, but there’s also an associated thread of mental illness.
...
her characters, who are very IQ, but more interested in the Arts/Humanities, aren’t as well represented on this forum as science/tech nerds.

This reminds me of some statistics I read once about achievement in the Arts/Humanities and mental illness. Something like 90% of Noble prize winner in literature had a diagnosis of either depression or bipolar disorder. It also reminds me of David Foster Wallace, who is absolutely brilliant and his works are incredibly deep works of literature, but who had severe depression and committed suicide at age 46. Indeed, if you read Infinite Jest with knowledge of DFW's background, the entire thing sort of just reads like DFW trying to talk himself out of his own depression and alienation.

The protagonist of Infinite Jest, Hal Incandenza, seems like a prime example of the high intelligence/high alienation problem. Hal is a tennis prodigy who's also an academic genius, but he ends up with this condition where he's perfectly capable of observing/taking in information, and is still a total genius, but has lost the ability to speak or write so that everything he says sounds like garbled nonsense to other people. There's this line in the book that I always remember:

'Hal here is provably competent. Credentials out the bazoo, Bill. The boy reads like a vacuum. Digests things.'
I simply lie there, listening, smelling the paper towel, watching an espadrille pivot.
'There's more to life than sitting there interfacing, it might be a newsflash to you.'

Which if this isn't an apt metaphor for the genius's own ability to understand but not be understood, I don't know what is.

The thing about alienation is it's not just intelligence that can make you alienated. Anything that's not "normal," that separates you from the fat part of the bell curve, can make you alienated. And the more of these traits you have, the worse the problem is. These traits might include things like intelligence, personality type, cognitive style, MHC, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, minority race status, certain religious backgrounds, medical conditions, really anything. The more "rare" your life experience is, the harder it is to connect without serious effort.

The problem is further compounded by the fact loneliness is a growing problem in modern society. More and more of the activities in modern life are something we can do without needing direct contact with other people. Connection used to be a side effect of how society was organized, but now, much like physical exercise, it's become a goal separated off from everything else. Hence, more people are falling through the cracks.

As someone who has struggled with alienation a lot, I've found the way past it is to really just try and internalize the fact world and even my own experience are just not about me. It's not useful to cling to alienation as an identity, indeed, it's not useful to cling to any personal trait as an identity, because your traits and identities are all relative to the environment you're in. Alienation can be dangerous because it makes you turn inward and focus on how you or other people are the problem. But just accepting the fact that my experience isn't other people's experience and I may never find my "subjective experience soulmate," but also this just does not matter because none of this was ever about me has helped. I've found it's easier with this mindset to just accept other people and myself as flawed or imperfect and maybe not in perfect subjective alignment, and that's fine.

Also I think sometimes alienated people get this idea that normies are out there having a great social time where everyone is their BFF and understands them perfectly, and I just don't think that's how most relationships work. Most relationships are "weak ties" that are mediated through activities or community/social organization, and "weak ties" are not "subjectively aligned virtue friends." It may be less that normies are all subjectively aligned and more that they focus on things other than subjective alignment in relationships, ie, drinking and sports is fun because it's drinking and sports, not because everyone at the bar cares about your divorce.

[Ego]

I know it's hard feeling intellectually lonely though ... maybe because high IQs understand exactly why they're lonely and feel they're destined to be lonely? If one feels MBTI is hardwired, that's another cosmic strike of loneliness for INT*s who are also high IQ.

It's not useful to cling to alienation as an identity, indeed, it's not useful to cling to any personal trait as an identity, because your traits and identities are all relative...

Also I think sometimes alienated people get this idea that normies are out there having a great social time where everyone is their BFF and understands them perfectly, and I just don't think that's how most relationships work. Most relationships are "weak ties" that are mediated through activities or community/social organization, and "weak ties" are not "subjectively aligned virtue friends." It may be less that normies are all subjectively aligned and more that they focus on things other than subjective alignment in relationships, ie, drinking and sports is fun because it's drinking and sports, not because everyone at the bar cares about your divorce.

^^
I have been pushing back on this because I believe that while there is quite a bit of truth that high IQ folks experience some alienation because it is harder to connect at higher levels, I also believe there is an element of harmful self-sabotage going on as well. We become the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

I just finished a 10K "run" with my 74 year-old friend who was running at 15min/mile pace. I generally do some out and back sprinting when running with him but mostly I just plod along next to him because the conversations we have together are so very interesting. I guess I could be resentful that I have to pretend to run in order to spend time with him. I could resent the fact that I have to build a scaffolding so he can understand anything technical or provide perspective on most non-military related topics because his world has revolved around the military for his entire adult like. As AE said above, we don't mesh perfectly. But we do have some loose overlaps and those make it worthwhile.

It seems to me that refusing a connection like that because the costs are high is like cutting off ones nose to spite ones face. I believe that refusing connections simply because they are not perfectly matched or profoundly meaningful is a form of culturally induced self-harm.

In this case the culture doing the inducing is the Mensans who get together to commiserate with one another about their intellectual loneliness. Suddenly they found their tribe. They bond over their long history of profound alienation. That profound alienation is itself the proof that they belong. If they somehow found a hodge-podge of regular people who could help assuage their desire to connect, their intellectual loneliness would go away and that would be a repudiation of the identity they have been building since they were young.

As AH and JP said above, everyone is struggling with connectedness. It may be somewhat easier for the normies because there are more of them. It may also be easier for them because they have not built identities that undermine the making of connections.

ETA: I just reread this and realized it comes across as if I may be talking about someone here. I am not. We had someone in our lives who was actually a Mensan and was a textbook case of what I described above. It did not end well.

[Western Red Cedar]

It seems to me that refusing a connection like that because the costs are high is like cutting off ones nose to spite ones face. I believe that refusing connections simply because they are not perfectly matched or profoundly meaningful is a form of culturally induced self-harm.

Approaching life and relationships with humility usually puts one in a position to learn quite a bit about life, others and oneself.

[jacob]

@Ego - Think of it in terms of traveling. These are the variables and considerations.

The farther the destination, the more costly the ticket.
Introverts have a finite budget which is painful to exceed.
Extroverts get paid to travel.

(Obviously none of these are black and white binary conditions. An extreme introvert will have a much smaller budget. A hyper-intellectual will have far higher travel costs. And so on. Most people are somewhere in the middle where costs or rebates are low and distances are short.)

The question for the introvert is therefore one of whether it's worthwhile to make the journey in terms of what they find at the destination. It is certainly something I consider when it comes to getting to know other people. This is not a matter of arguing whether "every conversation has positive value" (extrovert position) or "every person has something unique and worthwhile to teach" (postmodern position). This is allowing for the fact that some people judge these values on a scale. Not everybody is an extrovert or a postmodernist.

Viljanen makes a very good point that the communication range is far more qualitative than quantitative. If the range is large, people are interested in different things; more precisely, they are interested in different aspects of the thing.

(For example, both may be interested in politics, but the average person will usually be interested in repeating a bunch of one-liners and slogans that blame the other party for their personal misfortunes, whereas the intelligent person will generally be more interested in policy implications or alternate forms of government, say. Heck, both may be interested in WWE, but the average person will interested in the story lines and the action whereas the intelligent person will be interested in whether kayfabe can be used to explain or model politics. The scant attention they pay to the other's aspects of interest in what is technically the same thing is mutual.)

Now, it may be that the intelligent person is also a spiral wizard or has an interest in psychology or anthropology or human stories in general and therefore enjoy blending into groups and listening to any kind of person, personality, or vMeme. However, one does not automatically become interested in wizardry or applied street-level anthropology just because one is 2sd+ more intelligent than the average. One might just be interested in history or architecture or whatever instead. Intelligence just makes it easier and faster to understand the concept that humans are different with different needs and desires... but it doesn't automatically fill in all the blanks without effort. And the person might not be interested in expending that effort relative to spending it on something else.

I'm therefore pushing back on your all or nothing argument. The economics changes in your favor when you have "loose overlaps". In that case, engaging is not a guaranteed one-sided loss for you. Rather, you judge that the conversations are interesting enough to pretend to run in order to have them. Whereas I judge it to have "no overlaps" and so I stay away to something more rewarding. Insofar you understand why you choose not to read a book about climate change and do all the end-of-chapter exercises, you'll understand why I prefer not to talk with Ann and Bob about how "the high gas prices is the fault of the other party" or "how little they paid for their house back in 1992".

The ~3 periods in my life where I have made an effort to connect with the Anns and Bobs of the world by learning their ways, that is, the kind of aspects they're interested in about a given subject, it's always been enormously disappointing and unstimulating to me to actually engage with it. Elanor Roosevelt quipped about how great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people. Regardless of the arrogance of that quote, learning a repository about "what this person did to that person" and "what she said and what he said" in order to gossip with a "hodge-podge of regular people" only made me want to disconnect again as fast as possible. (Yes, this also goes for hearing people's personal stories about that time they did something to someone somewhere---events.) Asking for an intellectual connection [about ideas] with the Anns and Bobs is the same as asking for an emotional connection with a brick. It doesn't work because while I may be interested in such, they're not.

The irony is that regular people easily make the same conclusion as I have made. This is why they usually(*)(**) don't bother to "study up" on some idea or theory in order to have a discussion with me on my terms. It's not worth it to them to come to me. Just like it's not worth it for me to come to them.

(*) There are rare exceptions. I treasure those people.
(**) There are also extroverts who don't really care about the response. They just want to hear themselves talk and so they'll ask questions w/o caring about the answer. Since it's actually costly for me to talk, I'll shut down those attempts at conversation very fast.

So I bought the expensive ticket. I made the journey. And I found there was nothing for me to enjoy at the destination. Thrice.

There are simply things to do with my time that has a much higher expected payoff than spending my time figuring out how to be someone who can talk with everyone. As such it's basically an allocation problem and an economic decision. Is it worth it to me to listen to people's stories or talk about how they are feeling today? No it is not. (This doesn't mean it's not worth it to you.)

Obviously I haven't sworn off humans completely. You might have noticed how I've set up a website on the internet intended to attract people with interesting ideas. You might also have noticed how I've put a moat around the place to ensure that the place doesn't get overrun by a hodge-podge of regular people. The feeling of alienation doesn't happen when I'm away from those people. Rather, it happens when I for some "mandatory" reason find myself surrounded by them under some cultural expectation that I'm supposed to have fun and enjoy it.

[mathiverse]

ETA: I just reread this and realized it comes across as if I may be talking about someone here. I am not. We had someone in our lives who was actually a Mensan and was a textbook case of what I described above. It did not end well.

According to the articles linked in the Quora post, most Mensans are more likely to be socially maladjusted than the average human being and they are more likely to be socially maladjusted than high IQ people who are not Mensans.

Most high IQ people are not Mensans by far. Mensa allows in anyone who would score in the top 2 percentile on a certain set of tests, but there are only 134,000 Mensans out of the ~160,000,000 who are eligible in the world (0.08375% members out of eligible people).

[jacob]

According to the articles linked in the Quora post, most Mensans are more likely to be socially maladjusted than the average human being and they are more likely to be socially maladjusted than high IQ people who are not Mensans.

Yes, the high IQ societies are kinda considered places of last resort for those who haven't been able to find some niche in society where they can thrive and get their "fix".

[Ego]

1) The feeling of alienation doesn't happen when I'm away from those people. Rather, it happens when I for some "mandatory" reason find myself surrounded by them under some cultural expectation that I'm supposed to have fun and enjoy it.

I hear what you are saying and I think this is relatively common problem. Many people feel alienated in very social environments. I used to be one. I learned how to not be one. I was able to do that because I did not have the second problem, one that I think makes you extremely unique...

2) Whereas I judge it to have "no overlaps" and so I stay away to something more rewarding.

An exceedingly small group of people truly have no overlaps with regular folks. How many people on the forum have zero overlaps with most regular people? One or two others?

Here on the forums the smart kids are the cool kids. How many convince themselves that they have no overlaps because they want it to be true? How many read "stay away to something more rewarding" and believe that to be the prescriptive solution to problem one above? How many conflate problem one with problem two and stay away but have nothing more rewarding to engage them?

[jacob]

@Ego - The smart kids ARE the cool kids in much of grown-up society. However, there are places in grown-up society where the popular kids are still cool and their popular arts are still practiced such as parties, high school reunions, family gatherings, sports bars, small talk, gossip,... and maybe a few jobs like sales or politics. Yet in most of society, it matters more what you can actually do than how good you are at making conversation. Yes, conversation matters, but knowing how to get things done matters more.

I suggest reading this: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html ... and keep in mind it's not "no overlaps", it's "no worthwhile overlap compared to the alternative". I realize that people who like to talk don't like to be informed that they're not interesting enough to talk with. That whole spiel about humility. Of course, it also takes a certain kind of arrogance to presume that everybody must enjoy talking to them and a certain kind of conceit that they have something interesting to say. So we don't say that part out loud. We just politely decline the invitation or get out of the small talk as fast as possible before too much mental energy is flushed down the drain.

I doubt that the inability to carry out small-talk is the excuse why some would rather sit and draw robotics diagrams. As the various "high IQ" commentators have repeatedly said. Of course they can do small talk, say things about sportsball (there's an app for that), get correct change at a gas station, or have professional conversations at a job. It's just that these interactions are not as meaningful to them as they are to others. So why would they do them if they don't have to do them?

I mean many people feel alienated in very technical environments. Despite that some of them learn how to do math, righty-tighty a bolt, and operate a computer. This does not mean that those people actively find hacking and programming meaningful activities. They do them when they have to, but they don't seek them out.

The general source of frustration is strictly when people are compelled to engage in non-meaningful activities in order to conform to sociocentric expectations. In short, doing things they don't actually want to do in order to fit in. Whether that's a very intelligent person being forced to have a dull conversation because it's polite, or a number phobic person being forced to make a budget to get a car loan... It's fine to do it occasionally. The unhappiness comes when it happens ALL THE TIME AND EVERYWHERE. The reason why some people join high IQ societies is to escape that.

I will grant that possibly maybe a meaningless activity can somehow be turned into a meaningful one, perhaps by a change of perspective. But why?????? Like Schopenhauer said: "You can do what you want, but you can not want what you want". I certainly don't believe that some kind of conversion therapy can make people want to want something they don't want. I think such things only serve to screw them up or alienate them further.

[ebast]

A patient once spoke of feeling of always having to walk on stilts. Is somebody who always has to walk on stilts not bound to be constantly envious of those who can walk on their own legs, even if they seem to him to be smaller and more "ordinary" that he is himself? And is he not bound to carry pent-up rage within himself, against those who have made him afraid to walk without stilts? Thus envy of other things can come about as the result of the defense mechanism of displacement. Basically, he is envious of healthy people because they do not have to make a constant effort to earn admiration^, and because they do not have to do something in order to impress^, one way or the other, but are free to be "average."

I haven't decided yet if that quote is quite right for this thread, but it's relevant. I like this book to the extent that she has a knack of setting up mouth-watering scenarios and irresistible premises after which point she'll suddenly go flying off askew in the analysis, at least in my view. (It's always off to the interpersonal/social relational domain, with you, Alice, isn't it?) I am trying to decide if she's at all right for this thread or completely off-base: Do they feel they must walk on stilts or discover themselves atop them? 'Pent-up rage' & envy, a bit strong--but then what? And, a constant effort to earn admiration? Are you sure? And, from whom?

But first, one point on the stilts: If you ever wanted a metaphor for intellectual scaffolding or framework granting benefits of a greater view and access to another level (in this case 'above' the social stratum of the average-heighted faces around you) as well as being flexible and mobile to dynamically apply to other domains, well, you could do worse. (they also do not go unnoticed in a crowd and are helpfully popularly associated with juveniles and circus freaks.)

So in the quote where she asks (rhetorically) if stilt-walkers are not "...bound to be constantly envious of those who can walk on their own legs?" Well.. no. Certainly not constantly and even for more measured claims an obvious defense would be that the stilts are not for your relation to the crowd below but for the view; any social valence you care to infer is an inarguable result of but not intended effect of them.

She knows a thing or two about defenses, so a Test: suppose you, stiltwalker, see across the way another stiltwalker, in form and moving express and unfathomable, gliding effortlessly amongst the crowd. Hobbling over to catch a glimpse you notice her stilts, arcing works of laminated mahogany something between a jai alai xistera and a bird's wing, which at the base have attached wheels and a thoughtfully placed toe stop allowing her in a graceful melding of ice-skating and cross country skiing to leap and lutz and skate by the marvelling crowd. And circles around you.

What do you do? Thrash your kreg-jigged pine embarrassments in the nearest wastecan and go home? Thrash hers? Rush home to put wheels on yours? Or stagger, stumbling, over to catch her to get tips on the right camber for that sweet spot of stability still with hockey turns or maybe her thoughts on raising the clearance if one wanted to put on off-road tires...?

I would argue as you lean toward the latter options you are revealing a motivation deviating from Miller's explanation around admiration and toward enthusiasm. I would also argue that you please answer the question from empirical observation not introspection, as at least if I think of the last few times I was fortunate to be in such a stilted situation, my actions did not agree as much with my introspections as I might publicly report.


So if it's not an effort to earn admiration, what is your relation toward "..healthy people" (says she; I call them undiagnosed)? She says envy. Well, isn't that rather exactly what's been pointed out in this thread? The feelings of being left out, examples of normie entitlement assuming a shared conversational interest in dross, not being bullied in school, not having to make the communication effort half way, as if being a left-hander in a right-handed world, a nerd at a party; or even rarer than that. Isn't that envy of being average and wanting to do whatever common people do?

I don't know if pent-up rage results, but there's something in that direction, at least when I've been there. I might call it aggravation or impatience: "I would like to run fast here but because you did not do the homework I have to pop the stack eight levels, double back and explain the concepts you should have learned ten years ago. Concepts, which I might add, you don't even feel bad for not knowing."

You know, impatience, from patior: to suffer.


Now, I generally make a practice of not challenging strongmen arguments. (Especially this analogy given late capitalism's myriad spectra of consumer choice in gyms ranging from franchise-extorting membership-swindles with Monday night pizza curls to those old cinderblocked gray and sweaty places with all the before and after pics on the window I'd be scared to toe in. If the birkenstock'd pizza curlers over at Mensa aren't your thing, there are surely options out there... or I've heard--they don't invite me.) But at any rate, in Miller's example, her patient is admonishing himself to strive to be above average. Jacob's strongman starts that way. How he got there we don't know. But any polymath deciding on a foray from theoretical physics, say, to psychology and social dynamics will need to do a fair bit of work to get there. Even the strongman in the example is doing what--not playing to the admiration of the crowd via feats of superman strength, leaping over buildings in a single bound or monetezing repeated lifts of 50lbs for fame and fortune--but he is looking for a gym: he would like to get stronger yet. Embedded in the examples is that drive Miller talks about: I want to get better. I have to get better?

Why? To be admired might say Miller. Funktionslust might say Jacob.

Or are you trying to impress yourself? In the quote try putting in "earn admiration from themselves"/"impress themselves" which I think is not what Miller meant, but that starts to get interesting to me.

[7Wannabe5]

This reminds me of some statistics I read once about achievement in the Arts/Humanities and mental illness. Something like 90% of Noble prize winner in literature had a diagnosis of either depression or bipolar disorder.

David Foster Wallace is ENTP on crack. His use of footnotes does a fair job of replicating how the ENTP mind always tends towards going sideways. Reading him sometimes induces a mild manic state in me.

Many high achievers in Science/Math are also in the cuckoo-bananas tribe. By happenstance, my DS34 (whose realms of interest/expertise are linguistics, philosophy, the classics, history, and geography*) was just telling me about how Kurt Godel died of starvation after his wife died, because he would only eat food cooked by her. John Nash, Wolfgang Pauli, Claude Shannon, Richard Feynman...all more-or-less cuckoo-bananas. IN my experience, high IQ is so well associated with mental illness, if/when I meet somebody with very high IQ who claims to not suffer from any form of mental illness, I simply assume that they are suffering from a form that limits their degree of self-awareness.

*I erred on the side of laissez-faire** parenting style, so I didn't know he was in the state finals for the National Geography Bee until the day before we needed to road trip there. It was the funniest event to watch, because the parents wanted to root for their kids, but didn't know the answers themselves.

** For instance, it is likely that my children would report that I said something to them along the lines of "I breast-fed you to 30 lbs. and taught you to read, what more do you want from me?"


Something that annoys me about the Paul Graham essay Jacob linked is its tacit, yet oblivious, assumption that nerd culture is male. This may be in part a generational issue that has somewhat been resolved, but it's so clear to me that when I was a girl, the ability to completely remove yourself from social functioning to focus on just nerdy interests, was a form of masculine privilege. When I was in elementary school, my parents and I were called into a meeting with my teacher who informed them that I read too much, and didn't socialize enough with the other girls. I was already reading at an adult level, and my peers were playing hop-scotch and giggling about their tiny purses. It's acceptable for a boy to be less than well socialized. It's not acceptable for a girl, so the girl nerds of my generation were forced to expend the energy necessary to rise to the level of social acceptability, because you weren't even going to be welcomed at the exclusively male D&D playing lunch table. Therefore, my second sister (whose IQ is slightly higher and physique is slightly scrawnier than mine, so suffered literally pushed around by kids who called her Jane Brain) and I actually did make a plan for how to be popular. Unfortunately, it involved a certain amount of shoplifting and pot-smoking, contact lenses for her, and boxes of peroxide for me. It worked so well that we could almost pass for "normal" until our SATs were published. and it was revealed that we scored higher than all the arrogant Ivy League Hopeful Smart for a Jock Young Republicans*, and all the stereotypical D&D playing male nerds at our high school. The third highest scorer was a very depressive, artsy girl who was also our friend, and later our housemate in college.

*In a "WTF" senior year moment, I asked the most attractive member of this group (whose muscular calves I had not infrequently gazed upon during boring class periods) to dance, and he said to me in a not very nice manner, "I've never danced with a genius, before, heh...heh...heh..." I'm quite certain he subsequently entered into a highly successful career in some typical smart-for-a-jock realm such as Finance.

[jacob]

Or are you trying to impress yourself? In the quote try putting in "earn admiration from themselves"/"impress themselves" which I think is not what Miller meant, but that starts to get interesting to me.

Curiosity. To see what's there! Looking under the hood, I think it's rather that the [intelligent] brain is trying to surprise itself. The higher the degree of crystallized intelligence, the more it takes to create a surprise; the more understimulating engaging in mundane interactions becomes.

Maybe it's an addiction to acetylcholine (or its effects)? Just like how extroverts need more dopamine to feel happy, those with more/faster neocortex wiring/receptors need more acetylcholine (or its effects) to feel happy.

[7Wannabe5]

An exceedingly small group of people truly have no overlaps with regular folks. How many people on the forum have zero overlaps with most regular people? One or two others?

Is it okay if the overlaps are akin to I am willing to listen to him talk about his divorce, because O1 (he has nice biceps/I like nice biceps) and O2 (he makes good money doing something boring/I like when somebody else pays for dinner) ?

The higher the degree of crystallized intelligence, the more it takes to create a surprise; the more understimulating engaging in mundane interactions becomes.

True, but sometimes you can even get an old mechanical engineer, to say something interesting if you prod him hard enough. For instance, one of mine said "You know, OCD is just a hobby with me." the other day. Also, they come in handy when you need help with your car.

[Ego]

The general source of frustration is strictly when people are compelled to engage in non-meaningful activities in order to conform to sociocentric expectations. In short, doing things they don't actually want to do in order to fit in. Whether that's a very intelligent person being forced to have a dull conversation because it's polite, or a number phobic person being forced to make a budget to get a car loan... It's fine to do it occasionally. The unhappiness comes when it happens ALL THE TIME AND EVERYWHERE. The reason why some people join high IQ societies is to escape that.

I am not doing a good job making my point.

My point is that you are the alpha here and are largely responsible for modeling ideal sociocentric expectations for forum members. You are also an outlier, even here. Others will follow because they want to be like you. But the model you have created is very unique to you. Maybe one or two others here on the forum could follow it and have similar success. Everyone else would be, to varying degrees, broken by it.

Membership here skews higher than average IQ so people here tend to benefit from the positive attributes a high IQ provides but also suffer the shortcomings.

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2018/0 ... elligence/

The smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalizing and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view. After all, people in the “spin room” in a political setting are generally pretty smart for a reason.

In 2012, psychologists Richard West, Russell Meserve, and Keith Stanovich tested the blind-spot bias—an irrationality where people are better at recognizing biased reasoning in others but are blind to bias in themselves. Overall, their work supported, across a variety of cognitive biases, that, yes, we all have a blind spot about recognizing our biases. The surprise is that blind-spot bias is greater the smarter you are. The researchers tested subjects for seven cognitive biases and found that cognitive ability did not attenuate the blind spot. “Furthermore, people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” In fact, in six of the seven biases tested, “more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” They have since replicated this result.

They are better than normies like me at convincing themselves of the things they want to believe. In this case that they are close enough to JLFIQ that they should follow his lead.

[AnalyticalEngine]

I will grant that possibly maybe a meaningless activity can somehow be turned into a meaningful one, perhaps by a change of perspective. But why?????? Like Schopenhauer said: "You can do what you want, but you can not want what you want". I certainly don't believe that some kind of conversion therapy can make people want to want something they don't want. I think such things only serve to screw them up or alienate them further.

I may be getting out in the weeds here, but I've come to see the ability to choose the paradigm or perspective you're operating with as a skill, and one that you cultivate with increased life experience. Being able to change paradigms/spiral expression/etc opens up your world. In other words, you learn to use a paradigm rather than be limited by a paradigm (Kegan5). And because your paradigm/narrative/perspective largely determines how you see and experience reality, this can have a very strong impact.

Now when you get in the habit of choosing paradigm, it's not like you just suppress everything else about yourself. I think that's a common misconception people have when trying to move from Kegan4->Kegan5. Rather, it's about seeing how expressions of yourself and your own experience change as the paradigm and situation changes, and using this to navigate situations in a more congruent manner.

Because who you are and who normies are changes by context, no one is ever the same in all situations. And because of this, you can change contexts or changes paradigms in order to change the interaction you're having with other people.

As an example, I tend to get overstimulated easily. I am never going to be the type of person who does crack cocaine at a rave and dance naked. This doesn't mean I can't interact with people who do do these things, but the context we're operating under might overdetermine our experience. I'm probably going to be pretty cranky at a rave and I know this, so I don't go to raves. But I am a writer, and I've found asking people about their experience through the context of "how would I write this?" lets me talk to them about their crack cocaine rave in a way that's interesting to them (they get to share their experience) and to me (I get to think about how I'd write something like that in a book). And even in the event I do get dragged to a rave, I can make the experience more tolerable for myself by observing my own sensations/thoughts during the event for future use in fiction.

On the other hand, if I tried to go into this conversation from the perspective of "why would anyone do drugs, that's so bad for your health," we're probably not going to have a great time talking.

In both these instances, my innate preference (getting over stimulated easily) can either be turned into something useful (learning to write an interesting character) or something problematic (getting into an argument about whether raves are fun). And because there's nothing fundamental, atomic, or unchanging about how my tendency to get overstimulated manifests, which of these paradigms I use becomes an active choice.

(An aside--yes, I do end up interacting with a lot of Kegan3-type people in these contexts who find me incomprehensible, but I no longer really care about this. People's opinions say way more about them than they do anything about me or the nature of reality, and I just sort of shrug this off irrelevant. Everyone is in a different place in life anyway, and when you understand Kegan/MHC/paradigms, you start to just see this as a consequence where they're at. It can be interesting in a metaparadigm-sense, as one learns to see the meta-function/patterns in how any paradigm is constructed.)

Now maybe one can argue that I'm less analytical than other people or that my desire to write an interesting novel is my strongest innate preference, and sure enough, maybe that's true. But using paradigms and writing in this way has genuinely opened up my world a lot more than I otherwise would have if I had remained stuck inside the silicon-valley-tech-bro paradigm that dominated my 20s.