I'm glad I know, because it feels good to know I guess. But I don't think that making me take that test really moved the needle for me in terms of self worth or success or anything like that. I had to figure my shit out via other methods (while working with that therapist). I suppose the point of this message is only to say that I empathize with your situation.
Obviously, my teachers and parents were raising me the best they thought was possible, but I think they were mistaken with this strategy.
I read a blogpost that really spoke to me: NEVER tell a child that they are smart, or dumb. Frankly, it doesn't matter. If they are unable to do X, tell them "You are unable to do X", no if-and-or-buts about it. Tell them you expect them to be able to do X, but in a way that doesn't bring up "intelligence" or "general performance".
Its something I strive for with the next generation: my little cousins or nephews (no kids of my own yet) will be told what my expectations of them are, but I try to avoid the "intelligence trap" when talking with them.
We talked a lot about how literally no one on earth is capable of seeing an understanding your flaws as well as you, but also most humans on earth are infinitely less interested. The lens you view yourself with is totally unrelated to the lens with which the rest of the world sees you; you'll drive yourself insane if you think you and the world interpret you the same.
The point is, I think he did a phenomenal job at blasting my self deprecating brain into reality, but his initial spin of "Stop treating yourself like you're an idiot, because you're not and I can prove it" was just a slight misstep.
Obviously I'm just theorizing from my armchair and don't know more than you about this, or want to be agreed with, it's just that your post sparked my interest and I'd like to know more because my hunch is that removing excuses to not change oneself is generally a reasonable thing to do, even if it can hurt in the short term. In fact, it kind of worked for me to improve myself in the past (not regarding intelligence or academic/professional achievements, but other aspects of life). Maybe it depends on the particular person and situation?
It' might've helped things looking forward, but looking backward I think it wasn't great. As in, "I am so smart and yet thus far have accomplished nothing." So, maybe that's a debt to be paid, and once paid a person is able to move forward at a better trajectory than before? That might make sense to me.
What was the lesson you learned specifically from this?
You're aware of your flaws because they're a part of you, but that doesn't mean that anyone else notices them.
Thought this was just me...
I try never to reward results directly, only effort.
If the results are reward for effort then they are earns.
It too me a decade to undo the damage from always been told I was bright and never learning good habits for studying/persistence.
It’s just damn lucky that I enjoyed programming enough that I stuck with it and it became a career because otherwise I’d be earning a lot less.
Too much of that "focus on the effort" and you end up with a generation of bureaucrats - people that are good at miming processes and posturing but not capable of producing anything of actual value. Society doesn't care about the efforts, it cares about results. No matter how much neurosurgery you studied, if a patient dies at your table no family member will reward you for your "effort".
> It too me a decade to undo the damage from always been told I was bright and never learning good habits for studying/persistence.
The issue is not then about being result-vs-effort focus. The issue here is that unfortunately you didn't get people to push you for your best and to get out of your comfort zone.
The best things in life typically reward effort spent with incremental results, which come with their own dopamine rush. It's something I wish I had been made to understand at a much earlier age.
Here's a short list: - Cooking - Playing an instrument - Singing - Painting - Drawing - Writing - Learning (..a language, a new skill, etc) - Developing and maintaining valuable social and romantic relationships into adulthood - Any and all sports - Crafting - Raising children
The goal obviously isn't to maximize effort, it's simply to reinforce the link between effort and results and help the child understand that they can coast off their natural abilities (as we all have/do), but if they want to improve or excel in something that they enjoy then it will take real effort.
(Well, some bosses try to praise for effort but I’ve always found it to be really patronising or a barely-disguised attempt to get you to work overtime.)
To be honest I have been pretty successful despite that, but I don't feel like I'm as smart as people were always trying to convince me I was, or at least I have a different sort of intelligence from the sort of thing they were implying, and I definitely have a complex now where I don't like to expose myself to failure. I guess there was not much else to praise about me except for my apparent general intelligence, but I wish they'd come up with something. I was, I think, a friendly, creative, thoughtful kid? But that's not enough, is it?
I also have just a crippling fear of failure, so bad that I just never do anything that really tests my abilities. I failed an Amazon interview 10 years ago and I can't bring myself to give a fair shot to most tech companies.
It's also rough knowing as I type these words on this website that they may come back to haunt me, but I suppose in this moment I'm willing to commit to being honest.
Let me give you a kick in the ass. You failed an Amazon interview when you were 19? For me, the difference between 19 and 29 was the difference between being a kid with literally zero practical skills, in college but not studying anything with "computer" in the name, and being an adult with the ability to walk into FAANMG^[1] interviews, pass them, and survive mostly-happily in the caustic environments therein.
Though it will be work, and you may encounter setbacks, you are ready for your next step. I completely relate to the feeling that despite knowing you are smart, creative, and able to solve complex problems, you're somehow still not good enough to get hired, but it's all in your head. You should not be worrying about whether you can get hired, but rather where you want to get hired, if getting hired is even the thing you really want to do.
> It's also rough knowing as I type these words on this website that they may come back to haunt me, but I suppose in this moment I'm willing to commit to being honest.
I've found that "being vulnerable" can be an effective tool for building rapport, as long as you don't get too weird. Anyway, I certainly wouldn't worry about anything you've said here.
^[1] Not to say I attach any particular value to these companies, but their interviews are generally accepted to be on the challenging side.
I did pretty well on standardized tests (e.g. great
scores on SAT and ACT with no prep) and people were
always saying I was smart. Usually it was something
like this: I was obviously capable of doing the work,
so why didn't I?
Two explanations come to mind. I think both of them are probably true to some degree for many people.
1. High intelligence does not always equate to high executive functioning. Lots of smart people have trouble focusing on things they don't want to do, and that focus is generally a requirement for people who become "high achievers" by society's traditional standards.
2a. Those standardized tests only cover certain sorts of intelligence. My brother did well on those tests, but I did quite a bit better. Yet I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is at least my equal if not my better when it comes to smarts. It's just that those tests tended to cover things that weren't his strengths. In my case I feel like perhaps those tests may have painted a too-rosy picture of my intelligence since they catered to some of my strengths.
I go back and forth on it, though, because (as I mentioned) I've been successful in "real life" without any kind of psych treatment and looking back on my childhood "bad" decisions that were held up as evidence of my badness and the necessity of medicating me, e.g. neglecting my summer homework in favor of playing outside every day, I have to say that a lot of them (including that one) were great decisions. The worst thing was that the world was unwilling to let me be a child, and the best thing was that I said fuck you to the world and was a child anyway. Big thanks to mom and dad for not normalizing me with psychotropic drugs—I truly believe a lot of people can benefit from them, and I also believe they would have stolen something from me that could never be repaid.
What if the world had simply accepted me for the person I was? There would have been no need, then, to engineer some misguided praise in the hope of turning me into something that I wasn't. I don't practically expect the world to be fair, nor to supply a weirdly-shaped hole for every weirdly-shaped peg, but I'm not sure it's best to reach for the DSM-5 whenever such a peg appears.
Big thanks to mom and dad for not normalizing
me with psychotropic drugs—I truly believe a lot
of people can benefit from them, and I also believe
they would have stolen something from me that could
never be repaid.
I had to come up with tons of strategies to work around ADHD and/or anxiety or whatever the hell it was. Because I literally didn't know what those things were, and I went through school before ADHD diagnoses started to really boom. Would I have used ADHD as a crutch? I honestly don't know. I can honestly say I'd have been tempted to.
I wish that childhood had been easier, and I had known that I wasn't "lazy or crazy."
Frankly I wish I could have just had therapy and a life coach for that stuff, rather than meds. Teach me to fish, don't hand me a fish.
At a young age my parents were told by someone I did not have AD(H)D. I believed them. But later when I was living on my own I felt his methodology lacked credibility. (He was a person who called his treatment "turbo-drive psychotherapy" and dismissed questions about its effectiveness, calling them "pooh-poohing the next generation of technology". Not really someone who would want to hold an intellectual dialogue).
Looking back on it in the present I realized that if my parents were going to tell me I was or wasn't X or Y at that age, I was going to believe them - for as long as they were physically around to assert it. It had always felt wrong to disagree. For various reasons I had internalized that argument was not a means to find truth but instead an unreasonable risk when you could be locked in a closet for it.
I'm not sure what being diagnosed today would do for me since it wouldn't change any of that. Though it could give some more clarity to my past.
Maybe I was fortunate that my parents are also smart. My dad once shared that he completely understood that we (his kids) struggled so much with finishing university and finishing the stuff we worked on. He had many of the same problems (though he did finish his PhD). He never managed to teach me that discipline to follow through and get stuff done, though. But at least I wasn't judged and made to feel dumb for it.
My oldest son again has the same traits of high intelligence and extreme laziness. I'm trying to teach him better ways to handle this. I try to emphasize the importance of doing the work, doing homework, finishing projects, focus, and sometimes just doing what is necessary whether you like it or not. I try to de-emphasize intelligence without making him feel dumb. He knows he's smart, and he knows it a little too well in my opinion, but I try to praise him for the things he does, rather than for how smart he is. I try to challenge his intelligence, but also try to steer him towards things that aren't about IQ, like art or sports. (He's not interested though; he mostly just wants to play Minecraft and build beautiful houses and complex machinery there. Close enough, I guess.)
Children don't understand that. Children internalize everything. They blame themselves and you blamed yourself.
"You're so smart, why are you unable to do X ??".
Which only made me feel as if I was dumb.
You can be superintelligent in general, and bad at lots of specific things. Or even bad at most things! It's not a contradiction in the slightest.
I think that IQ has become less and less emphasized over the years, and that's a good thing. It has some utility, IMO, but a lot of care needs to be taken when it comes to applying it to... well, anything.
See : Modern society
But to make poor decisions on a scale that affects many others, you generally need the intelligence to rise to some level of power.
(There are of course exceptions, like starting a brushfire, etc)
People get really defensive around intelligence though. Everyone wants to be at least average if not above average. If they can't claim it in one area, they'll try to redefine intelligence to include themselves. And we do have the habit of mistaking institutional knowledge for intelligence.
Height is an objective and one-dimensional measure. It measures your ability to do a single thing: reach objects that are farther off of the ground.
I think we really do humanity a disservice if we define intelligence that way. The brain is capable of so many other things.
Surely you have known people who were bright (or brilliant) in some areas and lacking in others.
But for people who I would consider as intelligent, it's not a result of just knowledge. Or just skills.
I would trust their ability to "get" concepts they've been previously ignorant of relatively quickly. The wheels just spin faster.
And a lot like height, there's diminishing returns and what not. I can get a step ladder, then being tall is just a fact. Being intelligent can help you get a concept quicker, but once we both understand it, there's no effective difference.
But no one gets defensive about height. Or strength. Or anything with visible qualifiers. Which is funny, because intelligent people are better at thinking in the abstract and intelligence and the results of it are abstract.
I found that a lot of concepts of child-rearing overlaps with management, but with different labels. My grad-level Nursing Ethics class discussed qualities of a nursing leader, that employees need to made to feel personal worth. I made the link with ideas expressed by Mr. Rogers and on Sesame Street.
If anyone is into Yoga, or Yogachara, the way they put it is that internal formations (imagination or historic image/sound data/logging ala Parakalpita) represents one type of thinking (which everyone does not necessarily do) and analytical or "thinking mind" represents another type of thinking which everyone does, but may not be their primary mode.
From a few of my interviews about this topic:
- Old business acquaintance can visualize 2D seismic data in augmented reality 3D. He can literally see underground in his mind in front of him in his office.
- Musically inclined acquaintance (singer) can hear all the accompaniment music for performances in her mind.
- Guy who designed my kitchen can see my kitchen in his head.
"Mindset" by Dr Carol Dweck is probably the most important book (research) on this topic. A must-read for anyone pretending to educate kids, actually to anyone period.
invariably when a topic about intelligence gets posted we need someone to come around with an IQ around the 140 mark (I have no reason to doubt they are being honest fwiw) to tell us how because they personally failed, genetic intelligence is really unimportant (smarter rebuttals acknowledge that genetics plays a major role in intelligence, but that IQ is a really poor proxy of this, which is debatable).
this ultimately culminates in Almost Everyone Can Be Good At Almost Everything If They Try Hard With A Good Minset, The Growth Mindset. the science is weak. it's baffling how her book can be a "must-read".
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-grow...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/07/growth-mindset-4-growt...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/what-is-your-mindset
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism
edit: this article only addresses MENSA members, so i think this submission is bad. most well-adjusted intelligent people want nothing to do with MENSA. so even the claims of the submission are questionable.
The thing here is that many people are convinced that "I just cant learn X at all", so they wont even try. And when they do actualy try, they can become at minimum alright, probably decent and maybe good at X. You see that on both kids and adults.
That is where growth mindset comes from.
Will everybody be next Beethoven, Michelangelo, Knuth or win the olympic? No. Can healthy person learn to play piano, draw a portrait, write a python script or learn to swim? Absolutely yes.
I trust you've done your research so this isn't a rebuttal — merely a surprised observation. You probably have too much of it in the US (and indeed too much of even a good thing can hurt) whereas we have way too little of it in the EU (at least the "Latin" world).
100% agreed on Mensa (we don't have that here but even I know it's almost a scam).
The whole education system is built around the idea that everyone is the same and could success if they work hard enough, which has seriously bad consequences such as universities filled with people who don’t belong there (this is becoming worth and worth as the bar is lowered constantly in lower education). There is shaming about trade schools in most of the country, despite it being a way to succeed and filling jobs needed by society. There is specialized schools and sections for low IQ people but not for higher ones. You better be average to fit and "succeed" at school.
As a french, I would argue that there is "public" backlash - e.g. in newspapers, etc. - but in private life most people would agree with OP. France is by far not a socialist country - here are the last (2015) regional election results : blue is right-wing, black far-right, pink and red, left-wing :
The Japan example is true (although they do have serious social issues), but the fact is that European countries utterly dominate most list of the best places to live. See for example
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/best-countries-to...
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/quality-of-life-r...
https://ceoworld.biz/2019/04/11/best-quality-of-life-2019/
where most of the countries in the top ten are European, with special predominance of particularly leftist countries like the Nordic countries. And at least the first two are American sources (not sure about the location of the third one).
"It’s also possible that people who join Mensa differ from other people in ways other than just IQ."
ironic because you'd think that if buzzfeed was as bad as its reputation, being a left-leaning outlet, it would be reasonable to assume they'd be in favor of growth mindset.
In one world an individuals actions and decisions would largely determine their outcome. In the other world things completely outside of an individual's control would be the primary determining factors in their outcome.
One of these worlds would imply the need for systems directly subsidizing those who fail to achieve. In the other world, poor outcomes would be attributable in large part to poor decisions. The latter scenario doesn't necessarily preclude a subsidization of those who fail to succeed, but it makes it a much more tenuous proposition.
I reccommend checking the sources given in the blog post.
But you know, we do this too with other natural gifts. My exceptionally tall friends were constantly encouraged to enter sports like basketball. Tall people are built up emotionally through compliments that they receive on a daily basis from people. I would say it's not necessarily bad to compliment smart people for being smart.
I was a short scrawny kid growing up and I was bullied but I definitely took solace in the fact that I had a higher IQ than most people.
That is to say, I fucking hate having to say "no" every time (and it happens at least once every couple weeks) I am asked if or where I played basketball.
I'm also somewhere around 3 std dev above average IQ (mid 130s if I look at SAT equivalents, ~150 if GRE) and experienced the "but you're so good at school, why don't you like it" stuff.
In both cases, physical and... mental feels wrong, but it's the best word I've got, I feel as though I have wasted huge gifts. I don't take solace in any of it.
And since I'm full of anecdotes tonight, your bullying comment made me remember another. I had a target on my back for bullying due to my size I believe, everyone wanted to take a shot. I once got gang tackled by about 5/6 football players when I was 16 - the resultant slamming of my right knee into the tile floor means it will be my "trick" knee for the rest of my life. So, the size didn't give me a pass - if anything it made me stand out more. YMMV and all that.
A lot of people will just stream their consciousness in the case that they observe a trait that they wish they had. It's a projection, but it's also a tell.
Is it the anxiety that makes you feel wrong for receiving compliments?
Why? Why to do you think this? Could you provide your sources. Here's a source for the opposite: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/06/the-s-...
If you excel in any other trait, people will acknowledge it and praise you for it, especially visual traits. Beauty, height, strength, speed, endurance, etc. Intelligence, by contrast, is rarely acknowledged. It's not as easily discerned. Confidence is an important part of achieving your best potential. Learning to accept compliments with grace is an important skill for life. Giving yourself such compliments is even more important.
Obviously smart people need to understand that their intelligence does not protect them from being wrong or delusional or failure. That's an important part of growing up and maturing for any human though.
In practice and in the work place, the only thing that matters is if you get your work done or not. You can spend a lot of effort on things and get almost nothing done... I know programmers who spent 2+ years on custom unit-testing solutions (and I guess management never noticed this guy was spinning his wheels on something that has been solved in multiple github projects or something...)
Just because he put a lot of work in doesn't mean that other engineers respected his work or even he got anything done. All it means is that he wasted 2-years on the project.
That's real life.
Human civilization is advanced by working smarter, not harder.
I began to feel guilty for wasting my intelligence. I knew my older brother was at least as smart as me, and fell into an addiction cycle early on, so I was determined to not follow in his footsteps.
Granted, I still went on to slack off and spend 7 years as an undergrad, but it payed off in the end.
Sounds like you're smart enough to always find an argument for hating yourself :)
In order for this not to be a useless post, FWIW: most mathematicians that I know and that are highly regarded would not do well in IQ tests, I would think. The clever ones solve problems and move on; the pioneers are less clever, more committed and more random, idiosyncratic.
First of all at the tail of the IQ distribution, the normal approximation breaks down. Secondly, we get a big jump in mental development when we hit our growth spurts. So IQ at that age is not massively well-correlated with your IQ a few years later.
But that doesn't get into why it is actively detrimental. It turns out that children are motivated to seek confirmation of what they are complimented on. So a child who is told they are smart seeks easy tasks where they look smart, and tends to avoid hard tasks that might show them not to be so smart. While children who are complimented on their hard work and willingness to learn will seek out challenges to push themselves.
Research indicates that this effect sets in shockingly easily. And the two groups respond very differently to setbacks. The ones who are complimented on what they are gets demotivated. The ones who are complimented on what they do get motivated to tackle it again.
See https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/2009... for more on this and some verification that I'm not just making this up.
Your personal life is an anecdotal data point, but it fits perfectly. You were identified young as smart. It was drilled in enough that you know exactly how smart. But it sounds like you learned to coast on brains and avoid challenges, and are now suffering the consequences.
If this is true, I would recommend that you read https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Hurt-Me-Master-Your-ebook/dp/B07... for advice on how to build mental toughness. That can help you overcome life challenges which are in your way.
You still might be, unintentionally. This "praising kids for effort" is based on "mindset" research by Carol Dweck. Her Wikipedia page highlights a few criticisms of her work, in particular that the research isn't replicable and the interventions (in schools) don't produce results.
Outright telling them that "you like this" made them like the thing. Opposite made them dislike it. Including food and activities.
I think it's useful to substitute athletic talent for intellectual talent when thinking about this stuff. Does anybody discount the value of getting an athletically talented kid into a school with a good athletics program where they can be around peers and coaches who will enable them to be the best athlete they can be? Would anybody argue in favor of letting some kid with the athletic talent to try for the NBA flounder at whatever high school they happen to naturally feed into?
I think the answers to those questions are obvious. And yet we regularly have people arguing that somehow the same principles don't apply to intellectual talent. It's ridiculous. Let the mental prodigies be with their peers. It hurts no one and does them lots of good.
It's true that I was better at school than my peers, the pace of teaching was too slow for me and I got bored easily. But it was also true that in other aspects, especially social aspects, I wasn't more mature than my peers. And being smart and having different interests (say, computers, space or philosophy instead of football, etc.) doesn't exactly help socializing at school. I was always relatively unpopular (not marginalized, fortunately, as I did have my group of friends, but I did get my dose of demeaning from many others) and not very good in my advances with the opposite sex (when the age came to be interested in that).
Altogether, I think my school years could be called rather OK (taking into account that, as mentioned, people with "nerd" interests tend to not be too well-liked). But if I had skipped a year, and I had been in class with people one year older, with more social maturity, with everyone knowing that I skipped course, the girls seeing me as too young to even think about considering... I think it would have been hell.
I'm aware it's not exactly what you're talking about. You imply a specific school for gifted kids. Still, I think it wouldn't have been a good idea. When you finish school, or university, there's a point where you have to interact socially with "normal" people. Both at work and social life. I learned those interaction skills at school. I learned, for example, to fake interest when people talked about what I deemed to be trivial maters, like football, TV shows and the likes (or later, even to have some genuine interest and get off my high horse sometimes). I learned when I should switch off nerd mode (for example when trying to interact with the opposite sex, especially at the beginning) and when I could actually benefit from it. I think those skills were vital for my well-being. And I doubt I could have learned them equally well at a school where I weren't able to socialize with "normal" people.
You might find this study interesting. https://www.davidsongifted.org/search-database/entry/a10489
Second, non-athletic education and interests get lost in the process. And again, most kids wont end with that career as there are only few slots and many competing kids.
Which is one of the reasons I studied the board game Go for almost 4 years after I lost all hope of ever being good at it. At the time it was one of the few things I did despite being just good enough to teach complete beginners, but never any better.
The guy I was learning from was a really good teacher and was charitably amused by my lack of progress. I knew I was never going to find a gentler way to fail and be okay with it.
This is a surprisingly insightful blog post, which I wasn't expecting, considering the click-baity title. But I think I see now where my parents went wrong in raising me - the self-esteem movement, which the Gen Xers inherited, played too much a role in my rearing, methinks.
And why would anyone believe it should be? Do you really think a test with a relatively small set of questions, written by a biased group of individuals is going to be representative of human intelligence?
It baffles me that IQ is used as any kind of meaningful measurement beyond showing whether someone is mentally retarded or a prodigy.
First we should understand that IQs and life outcomes follow normal distributions and there's plenty of exceptions to the rule...but as a general trend, the relationship is indisputable. This has been studied for over a century. This suggests that IQ tests are fairly good at gaging mental faculties.
Height gives an advantage in many ways across human society. This is a physical attribute that we have little control over, yet it influences outcomes in jobs, social interactions, sports, dating, etc. Height also follows a normal distribution across populations. There is no reason to believe that mental faculties do not have similar physical mechanisms and that a normal distribution does not exist across populations.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120329142035.h...
Your IQ is correlated with your parents' IQ. But so is your social status, physical appearance and wealth.
IQ is not independently responsible, and it's covariant with other heritable traits.
'One study on nine groups of soldiers differing in job and reading ability found a correlation of .96 between the AFQT and reading achievement (Sticht, Caylor, Kern, & Fox, 1972)... Another study obtained reading scores for 17-year olds for those same ethnic groups and dates (Campbell et al., 2000) and found a correlation of .997 between reading scores and AFQT scores.' [1]
'Cognitive ability tests taken at age 11 correlate 0.81 with national school examinations taken at age 16.' [2]
Note that .96 and .81 are huge correlations. These results have been replicated across 100+ years of psychological research across cultural boundaries and across multiple disciplines.
Can you make up for lower IQ with higher work ethic? Yes, but like a shorter than average NBA player, you're going to be at a disadvantage. By no means does the existence of shorter than average NBA players suggest that you should expect shorter than average men to be just as likely to succeed as taller than average men.
---
[1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED101297.pdf [2] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intelligence...
While I don't dispute that IQ tests correlate with smarts, the argument that "The WW1 military was very motivated, therefore their decisions must have been rational" isn't a particularly good one IMHO - because there are a great many counter-examples.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fund...
“It has always seemed to be odd that we like to call the human brain the most complex known object in the Universe, yet many of us are still prepared to accept that we can measure brain function by doing a few so-called IQ tests,” Dr Highfield said.
I wonder, what is your opinion on Murray's and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve?
But not really. You pulled those numbers out of the air, and they aren't very descriptive.
Will someone with a 140 IQ fair better academically and economically than someone with 130 90% of the time?
140 vs 100, sure. But as the # of standard deviations converges, it's less meaningful. And there are still other covariant factors you are failing to consider, as mentioned before.
On average, people raised in poor environments who have higher IQ do better than people raised in poor environments with lower IQ. More likely to be more upwardly mobile, more likely to be more whatever.
And on average, people raised in good environments who have higher IQ do better than people raised in good environments who have lower IQ.
If you're a person of color, on average, you're going to do better if you have a higher IQ than if you have a lower IQ.
Same if you're a woman.
And 140 vs 130 is a bit unfair. You're talking about looking for meaningful differences between less than 2% of the population as compared to less than 0.1% of the population.
And just because there are diminishing returns with something like IQ, doesn't make it useless.
That wasn't the point. I would say the same for 100 and 110.
Some MENSA members in this thread seem very attached to their scores.
That's the other thing, you do have to look at the whole. Because there is likely overlap. But the trend of note is that IQ tracks through it.
If you sort people by earning potential, you'll find that as average income goes up, so does average IQ.
When you sort by health outcomes. As average healthiness goes up, so does average IQ.
Even the outcomes that are colloquially contrasted with intelligence actually correlate well. In other words, if you sorted people by EQ, you'll find that better average EQ means better average IQ.
IQ is the aspartame of psychology. So maligned that it's been probably studied more than other things. And just like aspartame is perfectly fine, IQ does what it says on the tin.
100 vs 140 will be a very strong indicator. 100 vs 110 will not; I would not trust 110 to yield a better outcome 80-90% of the time, as GP claimed.
Which is why the comparison of IQ scores at that coarseness is plain silly.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3248886/
"Childhood IQ and achieved education level were significantly and independently associated with upward mobility between the ages of 5 and 49-51 years. Only education was significantly associated (positively) with upward social mobility between 5 and 25 years, and only childhood IQ (again positively) with upward social mobility between 25 and 49-51 years. Childhood IQ was significantly negatively associated with downward social mobility. Adult height, childhood housing conditions, adverse events in childhood and sex were not significant determinants of upward or downward social mobility in this cohort."
I can tell you exactly how to refute those studies. Perform a controlled scientific study that disproves those results. Let me tell you, if you really believe in it, you could be a superstar academic and you sell a lot of books. Disproving such a large body of research would be a big achievement, especially one as unpopular as IQ.
So let's consider it psychometrically:
1. Does it measure something? Yes it does. This something is consistent across time as people's IQs do not vary dramatically. It is "stable". So whatever it measures is not spurious.
2. Ok so we measure an actual thing. Is the thing it measures distinct? Yes it is. It's been controlled for against every conceivable variable like education, socioeconomic background, and family health. Whatever it is measuring, it is definitely an independent thing, not a representation of something else.
3. Is the real independent thing we're measuring even important? Maybe it's just like fingerprints, real but essentially random and inconsequential. It turns out it correlates with all kinds of things. It acts as a predictor in all kinds of outcomes. It is the strongest predictor available in psychometry. If you could only administer one test to a subject, testing this thing is the most revealing test.
So, regardless of what IQ is, we know what it isn't. We know it isn't fake, unimportant, random, or a combination of other factors.
This is deeply unpopular and goes against many people's core beliefs about society and education, but the science is well-founded.
It can be refuted but it has to be refuted with science, not quotes, metaphors, and anecdotes.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fund...
The reviewers shared a 20-point critique of the paper prior to publication that was ignored by the publisher and researchers. In fact, their results clearly showed the existence of a general intelligence until they performed an unnecessary rotation which is mentioned in Appendix B point 7.
Whether or not IQ has human meaning, social value, or is the "end-all" are subjective arguments that are not within the scope of IQ study. Statistically we know that so far out of all the psychometric scores that have been invented it is the strongest one. Better measurements will most definitely be invented, but they haven't so far.
This is the point in the discussion where you should be rolling out some supporting evidence.
It is true though, that other factors can sometimes be much more valuable. Charisma, conscientiousness and attractiveness can carry people very far.
The GP comment isn't really about intelligence - it is about the measurement of intelligence & the impact of parental expectations (societal, self and partner ones too).
And very unfortunately it cuts both ways.
People who measure poorly at 7 years old might be kept out of challenging classrooms where they would actually discover their talents & flourish.
People who measure high are pushed until they burn out of their skulls trying to fulfill their "measured" potential - or alternatively placed in the company of the talented where they end up with an underachiever's ego[1].
As my sister once told me "Society doesn't want you in particular, anyone who will do what you could do will do". I often think about that at work - society can afford to burn thousands of bright minds on optimizing ads and their placement.
[1] - I remember chills watching the setup for Molly's Game.
The article exactly mentions that anxiety and depression are amplified in folks like yourself. You have to overcome them to use your pseudo-superpower to save the world... or not, who knows is it even worth saving? idk
Compound the extra psychological difficulty you face with the improbability of finding someone who understands you, with the counter-intuitive understanding of your situation as desirable by everyone less smart than you are, you're so lucky, I wish I was as smart as you, "no you don't, but you wouldn't understand" ...
It sets you up for a very lonely life. Isolation can lead to insanity.
What I'm trying to say is: What you are experiencing is normal for someone like you.
BTW, what's a SWE?
>When a child is dealing with anxiety/anxious behavior, it's better to treat the parents than to take the kid into therapy.
Something along these lines. It helped me realize or reinforce that, while my father has had and has anxiety/depression for most of his life, his legacy might not be as much genetically imprinted on me insofar that it's of learned behavior.
In other words, I recalled a rather generic memory (which means it probably happened multiple times): I was at home, minding my own business, when it became clear that someone was expected at the house - perhaps the cable guy, a plumber, or someone like that - and I remember watching my father _wait_ for this person. Like, he would be sitting on the couch, watching TV, but would go put on his shoes, then take them off, then pace around the living room, then open and shut the door, pace a little more, and sit down for a few moments, and repeat. And I recall wondering what was bothering him. And I think this was him dealing with his general anxiety and I notice this sort of behavior in myself (or at least the nagging urge to _do something_ in order to feel more comfortable somehow). So now I think I know why I get certain thoughts at certain times (and realize I don't have to respond to them in the way I think my father would).
This is probably the healthy sort of realization people try to discover in therapy. I have had the fortune of seeing a handful of decent-to-great therapists throughout my life, and I have tried to mentally stash away the best gleanings, so as to justify all the time, money, and energy spent talking to these people.
>BTW, what's a SWE?
I thought this was the acronym people used for "software engineer". Maybe I won't use it anymore. What I was trying to express was my, well, feelings of inferiority /slash/sour grapes due to my perceived lack of career/professional success at age 30, a sense which seems to get worse and more bitter as I get older, which I would _really_ like to nip in the bud, because every time I let it take hold, it always leads to bad/negative thinking, prejudice, poor self-image, envy of others, and those sorts of things. Maybe it's Perpetual Late Bloomer Syndrome?
Thanks again for your comments.
> neither necessary nor sufficient
So, bullshit.
Yes, some of those life outcomes are good and some of those life outcomes are bad. That doesn't make it bullshit.
What it most often means, if you have a high IQ, is that you have a choice and more often many choices, because you can see more choices and it's overwhelming and it's easy to give up and say fuck it all this is bullshit and SWE (I am so embarrassed to say I had to look up SWE even though I am a software engineer and one of the SWEs was smoke weed every day, ha!)
Which brings me to my point! If you have high IQ, you can be a SWE or SWE.
You know what I mean??
I highly recommend meditation. A helpful book I started with is called Wherever You Go, There You Are. I'm now getting into The Mind Illuminated, and I think it is also good. The subreddits /r/meditation and /r/TheMindIlluminated are informative, at the moment.
When you find the time, which can be difficult when you are working a job, try forcing yourself into social interactions. For example, chatting with people at cafe or at the train station, volunteering, and meetups.
Also, I found myself feeling like I've been Tom Sawyered just a little bit with the job thing. If I could go back in time and tell myself not to sweat the job thing so much, I would.
I like this advice. I just don't like following through with it because 1) I feel like a creep 2) I can't really tell if people are bothered by me and don't want to inconvenience them 3) I'm afraid I will say something wrong and the whole experience will bite me in the ass, so it's safer to do nothing.
I might be slightly on the autism spectrum, but never been diagnosed. Always been a bit of a loner and introvert. Back in high school, when classmates were out partying on weekends, I was hacking. Learning Z80 ASM the hard way with dead tree books and struggling to find info on random local BBS's (not much in Montana and not a long way to go before a BBS was long distance).
I started work on a masters in electrical engineering, but have never finished. Wanted it more than I needed it. Somehow (referral from a friend of a friend) landed a job in finance as a developer a year out of college, and been in the industry ever since. All of my current friends, and even my wife, I have due to working in the industry. Not that finance itself is responsible for it, just where I met everyone.
Also regarding networking, all of my early jobs were acquired via networking. After a decade of experience at a well known hedge fund, recruiters hound me all the time, and if I want, I can get several interviews within a week. Its worth not burning bridges.
100x this.
I hope you get on top of your personal issues. Seek help: I did, it was useful, if expensive; money only exists to be spent
it related to me more than anything else but everyone is different
- https://meltingasphalt.com/a-nihilists-guide-to-meaning/
- https://meaningness.com/preview-eternalism-and-nihilism
- https://meaningness.com/wrong-about-nihilism
- http://cook-greuter.com/9%20levels%20of%20increasing%20embra...
If the universe will die, and that establishes that anything which occurs within it has no meaning, perhaps meaning becomes entirely worthless as a concept. It distinguishes nothing. It becomes identical with mere existence.
I don't think you get depressed by thinking too much - you probably get depressed because you don't have what you want to begin with. You then just think about why you're in your unpleasant position, realize you're too crap to fix it, won't admit fault and change, and so then rationalize that inherently the universe is unfair and there's no point to anything anyway (just to make yourself feel better about how you're doing poorly). It's not that you're a piece of shit - it's the universes fault! I was made this way and there's no point to anything so I can still be a piece of crap human being! I'm too smart to be with the common man! They don't understand my deep intellect!
Might be for you, too.
Exactly. I personally know people who have become despondent and given up on life. Maybe a few people will take advantage of total freedom to learn and do, but if we're being honest here, most will watch net flicks and eat potato chips. It is still a net positive for _most_ people.
There are people who proclaim that death gives everything meaning. Nonsense, death neither gives nor takes meaning, it's as meaningless as eternal life. I'm an atheist to every religion I've ever encountered and couldn't imagine the existence of a god providing meaning, either. (I actually perceive that idea, meaning by higher power, to be even more absurd).
I have the believe though, that the question for meaning is a side effect of having a modern life. Did ancient tribes people think about meaning or did they simply hunt, socialize and view the world as connected in everything (the natural view of the world, as children have it) and never ever even thing about the concept of meaning of life? There are still somewhat "natural" living tribes out there, did someone ask them that question? I'm really curious about their reaction and answer.
Really, to me it seems, that the answer to the question about the meaning of life is to never ask it in the first place.
One day, I might stumble into a life where everything clicks together and the lack of meaning withers away. But that's not going to be a rational decision. "I conclude that this way of life is meaningful. 5 minutes later, I feel meaningful". Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?
But because nothing (incl. consequences) matters, it can also be a path to sociopathy, especially if your nihilistic attitude has deprived you of a normal social outlet.
Same with eternal life... how does something without meaning extended forever suddenly have meaning?
I guess I never got the connection with an omniscient creator and a feeing of having purpose.
I have plenty of purpose; experiencing the universe, taking it all in, seeing what happens next, loving deeply, sharing joy, experiencing pain. So much to life.
Eg http://www.newadvent.org/summa/5094.htm
It’s not clear to me that these are especially comforting things to think about, at least superficially.
It's not thinking too much, in that specific instance, that is the source of the problem at all.
The point (value or reason for) to the things they're claiming have no point, are provided by us, not the universe via magic assignment. That is the source of the mistake.
Pretending the value is externally assigned or innate is the source of the premise that there's no point to the big thing (existence, life, work and so on). In the process of being disappointed in the lack of innate value, they're actually mentally assigning low value to the thing in question (which is psychologically the entire point: it's about debasing the value of the thing, it's most likely a revealing indicator about the present state of mind).
For example: smart person thinks too much, they realize there's no point to life because we're going to die (or similar setup). The problem with that is, the point of life is decided by the smart person. They're in fact deciding to assign life less or little value in the act of saying there's no point, in that action they are actively determining the point: they're deciding there isn't much of one. They made a choice (with it being understood of course that a person may be in a mental place where for any number of reasons they can't clearly recognize a positive value to existence).
The old question: what is the point of life? Does in fact have a very obvious and very simple answer: you decide (which simultaneously does not guarantee good results, even if you decide what it means to you or what the point of your life is to be).
So we're back to needing a point to judge decisions by. The choice isn't enough, or the fact of choosing isn't enough. This is what creates the "whole life is pointless" reaction in the first place, because "you decide" can mean anything, and there has to be something that isn't solely "you decide" to give particular meaning to one choice over the other.
I mean you could choose that the meaning of life is to punch people in the face but you'll have to live with the reprocussions of that choice. That feels like you'll quickly come to the rational decision that it was/is a bad choice.
There might be a rational decision not to punch people directly into face but a purely rational psychopath can choose many other profitable avenues that are disastrous to society at large "in the long run" (fentanyl, global warming, etc etc). And we know what happens in the long run.
It all goes back to Ecclesiastes(and Job), you can be an "evil" person and prosper in this world.
If this tiny lifespan is all there is, this is quite distressing. And physically there is nothing else.
Apparently the best solution is to realize there are no rules but live as if they do per Voltaire(not necessarily Pascal).
Many people have realised things will die but aren't depressed as a consequence.
It's not about "I an so intelligent that being depressed is the only state of being I can be in"
Sorry for the bad news, but even pretty stupid people can figure this outcome out.
It's a vicious cycle really. Everyone has some idea of what they want out of life and whether or not they are "on track" to attain it. The further behind you are, the more this leads to increased depression, anxiety, anger, etc. At that point it's hard to effectively think or do anything at all, so the situation deteriorates further.
Sometimes something works out; you get a girlfriend, you get a good job, whatever it happens to be. You start to feel like you can make a come back, you start making progress turning your life into what you want it to be. The problem is if that initial pillar gets knocked out from under you (break-up, laid off, etc) things can go down hill really damn fast; I know this from experience.
You're right that largely speaking no one cares about a person having depression, or rather people say they care but their actions rarely line up with their words. That can be a very self-destructive realization though, because often times help is what you need.
Some people can push past these adversities seemingly without issue. Others like myself have a much more difficult time with it. Perhaps "thinking through" the problem is the problem, maybe that leads to analysis paralysis. Maybe that's why those with higher IQs have this problem. I honestly have no idea.
But fixing biologically-based depression is much harder and, even if you try to do it, it's not guaranteed to work. We don't have a solid enough understanding of the biology of biologically-based depression.
I was involved with The TAG Project because I was homeschooling my two 2xe sons. I basically believe that people with very high IQs have different nutritional needs specifically to support their weird brains.
My extra smart son gets really difficult to deal with when he's deficient in B vitamins, a vitamin class important to the brain. He easily gets deficient and there is no point arguing with him when he's deficient.
So if you are basically chronically malnourished because of special nutritional needs that are currently unrecognized, there's little hope of getting that issue redressed. It snowballs from there: nutritional deficiency causes poorer cognition and more mental health issues which suppresses your ability to cope and becomes a general downward spiral that the world currently can't even properly diagnose.
(The above is opinion based in part on being sort of a subject matter expert. Please don't ask me to "cite my source." My pro bono professional experience and personal experience is the source of my opinion.
I'm not writing a PhD thesis here. I'm having a conversation. Thank you.)
Therapy is much more costly.
Read : Epigenetics
Outside the formal anxiety sense, most people struggle with the negative feedback loop. The trick is that you can't simply turn it off - even if you're the best socializer in the history of humanity. For me, I set an informal timer (usually while journaling or in the shower) to intentionally introspect my interactions and pick one thing I felt I could have improved on ("I really wish I had said more than 'fine' when So-and-so asked me how my day was") and then move on.
One lesson that's hard, for me and I suspect others, is that while it's very important to be polite, it's not your job to make everyone else feel happy or complete - that's not an excuse to go around being a jerk, but also don't feel you owe anyone else something by default. It's enough to have a conversation about the weather or let the other person complain about their boss some and offer a bit of empathy.
I suffer from pretty intense social anxiety. It turns out I was comparing the way I felt to the way other people appeared, and felt like a failure for a long time. I finally shelved all the old ideas I could shed and wrote my own definition of success. I can’t speak for others but I couldn’t think myself whole because my perspective was all wrong. It took talking through all that garbage and getting to the truth before I started getting healthy and whole.
This :(
It is a hard truth but chances are that you are the only one that can improve your life.
My life has started getting better when I got off my ass and worked to make it better.
I got the job I wanted, started working out, started going out more (still working on that one tbh), went from being single to several long term relationships, etc.
None of it was easy, all of it was and is a struggle.
At some point, I realized that nobody else was going to work on all these things if I did not.
This is similar with many persistent mental conditions. Why not just tell an obese person to eat less food? Why doesn't someone with a phobia just stop being scared? And so on.
Exposure therapy works for phobias; people exposed to their phobia in a way that increases their anxiety, long enough for their brain to notice they haven't died and recalibrate its fear response, stop being scared.
Why not just tell an obese person to eat less food?
Because they enjoy eating food? Eating food isn't what they want to stop, being fat or sick is what they want to stop. Eating food is delicious, comforting, filling, reassuring, is it any wonder people resist giving that up?
It's not that their eat-less muscle won't respond to training, it's that they won't work their eat-less muscle because that involves eating less, and they like eating.
A depressed person would say, "Doing X will not improve my situation or make me happy." And he might be right.
That doesn't say his happiness muscle is broken and won't respond, it says he has unexplored reasons for preferring the status quo more. He gets more benefit from unhappiness than from doing X. Go explore those reasons.
Because in your mind, motivation follows naturally from logically deduced need. Motivation isn't so connected in most people's minds; it's an emotional thing, which isn't necessarily driven by rational thought.
I'm sure you've seen people doing something wrong even though they know it's wrong.
I think trauma and disappointment are far more prevalent than true sloth or vice, if such things as the later two exist at all.
The tool you're trying to use to fix the problem is itself failing in some way. This is part of the pernicious nature of depression.
Wise people could figure it out, but there's only a partial overlap between wise and intelligent.
Socially speaking things aren't that different: I've got to the point of faking being "normal", both at work or in social life, that is, I had the solution for a problem or something smart to say or do, but kept it for myself because I didn't want to appear different, and I also sometimes wanted to be invited at parties, so I totally understand your point. The only thing being intelligent helped a lot was finding the right woman (17 years together with highs and lows, mostly highs) but especially at young age one would rather find a wrong one each week than the right one for life. That's where being intelligent doesn't help at all: if you want to have fun, hide as much as you can that you belong in the right part of that gaussian.
BTW, I've got a bit more luck at finding jobs, but mostly because it was before the post 2k crisis; one morning I sent my (almost empty by then) resume to various companies and recruiters, and by lunch time I had like 12 or 13 job offers. That was just crazy; it didn't last long though.
Don't know my IQ but I grew up with a taste and habit of thinking and trying to solve problems, and in some workplaces people want to complain and not solve problems. Weirder than that, if I offer the solution free, they react half negatively (maybe insulted, or shamed ?), and later they may even complain that I stopped offering solutions.
Extremely damaging to my mind.
Then in some other rather corrupt places, money is made by dragging the solution ad infinitum or close to it, because penalties for missed releases are crafted in a way that makes delays still more profitable than finishing in time (easier when supplier and customer are "in the same bed" and money comes from the government), so that if you offer a quick solution you immediately see people looking at you like you were a bank robber. Oh the irony:)
There's a weird social dynamic that I don't fully understand.. maybe it's fatigue causing lack of desire to learn how to make your job easier and feel inferior .. who knows
Automating part of the process may reduce the drudgery, but there's an existential fear from some people -- that if a part of their job can be automated, they'll be made redundant. Or the boss will ask them to do more work, faster, for the same pay.
I don't like to see life as a game of trick.
[0] tbh people also have various emotions so I could have tried to take this into account but I was too ~immatureat the time
that said personal relationships have the same issue, you feel like something could be done but people resist even considering your inputs.. which gives me the idea that most people want to be heard first rather than have solution brought to them
People forcing their way into your problems are very annoying, again I know I do that at times but I've stopped doing that almost entirely and basically try to listen more than I speak.
I guess I’m somewhat confused because there was an earlier claim that one had no idea why anyone would be frustrated, but clearly you seem to have a good idea of why someone would seemingly refuse help.
Again we were all doing the same thing and I just suggested using my shit to go faster. One other idea is that there are a few layers of interactions, people prefer suggestions from those they trust, or those they respect. I didn't have that at the time somehow.
I would suspect it's only absurd because of one's personal lack of understanding of the situation. I can only speculate the full situation, but I can imagine a hypothetical situation where a bunch of accountants joke in camraderie about how much their accounting jobs suck, but when someone actually tries to resolve this, the "fixer" is actually trying to fix a non-problem due to lack of social insight and thus the fixer seems absurd.
This is also part of why I would never go anywhere near wrecking a relationship by being someone’s “other guy.” It’s too important to society to respect when two people are able to work through all the hoops society places against decent, healthy relationships to go around affecting them when they occur. Edit- Hell, I donate monthly to a charity that benefits single women and mothers to at least feel like I’m doing something for the women of the world that I’m likely to never share my life with.
Most IQ tests (especially self admi istered ones) are BS.
The proper ones are probably the most studied aspects of psychology there are and correlate with a whole lot of things in significant ways.
I haven't done badly in life, but I've always felt I could have done a lot better if I had better executive functioning. If somehow I could have traded some of my IQ points for better executive functioning points (is there such a thing?), I'd happily take that trade.
Conscientiousness, a factor in the Five Factor Model of personality, measures something like this. Specifically, the aspect of Industriousness.
However, it's very hard to measure, because virtually any test that measures a person's planning ability almost invariably ends up measuring IQ instead. Basically, the best way to test this right now is to ask a bunch of people around you how "hard working" you are and average the results. Still, it's accurate enough to be reasonably predictive of a lot of interesting phenomena.
I've tried a lot of things to improve my level of organization and productivity with...modest success. Some things that (I think) have helped me:
- Seek out and take on responsibility (work, family, community, etc.) It's painful adjusting at first, but I get used to it and the satisfaction of being depended upon is motivating.
- When faced with a stressful level of responsibility, remember that you will live through it. I used to procrastinate like mad because of a fear of failure. Keeping that thought in mind ("I will live through this") calmed my nerves somewhat. Now I still worry, and still procrastinate, but it's not as bad.
- Write down what you want your life to be like in 1, 3, 5, and maybe even 10 years. Come back to it every now and then. I did this 5 years ago, and while I haven't achieved everything, I've achieved some of what I wanted. I'll take it as a victory.
Basically as I see it, using every bit of rational intelligence to tame and condition the rest of their being (emotions, health, social, will, etc), develop all the other forms of intelligence.
The 'dark path' for most seems to be an ironic world view, which leads to a sarcastic mindset and ultimately nihilism if not contained. Hence a major lifelong requirement is to really learn what self-love means.
I have no idea what my IQ is, I just feel it's too much or too little for my own sake; case in point I finally stopped hating myself and learned self love at 34. Changed my life, like step 1 of a major transformation.
The only recommendation I'm certain helps everyone is Stoicism.
This is a perfectly fine coping mechanism for big-picture stuff (environ. protection, climate change, genotoxic materials, migration, politics); it only becomes highly problematic when you use it as the coping mechanism for everything.
> Stoicism
Depending on the construction stoicism can come quite close to nihilistic world views, actually.
About irony/sarcasm: I used to think exactly like you. I must say it was totally flawed. I don't know how to word this scientifically (and please understand I'm not religious): sarcasm hurts your soul, your heart, your mind, your spirit. It's like drugs: short term good but really bad long term.
It helps for some time and then slowly eats at you. A sarcastic person is in effect trading the possibility of hope for the comfort of accepting things. There is a way where you keep both, through forgiving, through understanding, with humility.
Humor gets a pass when it speaks of bad things, or in a bad manner, because it's a way of denouncing said things/manners. Certainly not to validate it. That's where sarcasm has its place IMHO: as a very bad manner that humor serves to show.
About Stoicism: that's true. Hence why I always preface with self-love, because the Stoic apparatus is quite unable to speak of this in modern terms. In general I agree with Ferris on this though: Stoicism is the best operating system for the human mind. Now that I know, I see it and find it in so many things, people, the good side of life (and it seems quite missing in many a miserable path).
After years of just understanding things with no effort and easily outpacing most peers, I was the worst (by far) person in the room at a mostly intellectual pursuit. I was lucky that this stuck, because a lot of people describe it as decreasing depression (there is a lot of physical content and group dynamic), you meet a lot of people so it helps with enhancing social skills, and the physical exercise goes a long way. Beyond that, knowing how to protect yourself gives you a lot of confidence with strangers, for better and worse.
I hate being the guy that shouts my religion to people who aren’t asking for it, but I really think a lot of people would benefit from this. It’s had such an impact that I donate to some charity that gives free lessons and uniforms to under privileged kids in Oakland. Check out a martial art, it’s a more thoughtful way of exercising, and you may hate being the worst person in the room enough to learn how to get better.
Learning how to not be a dick about being intelligent was probably the most valuable thing I learned at school.
Problem is, I thought I was just 'smart'. If there were things I struggled to understand, it was only natural for others not to get it unless I could unpack it for them.
However I also had this notion that when I understood things immediately that I was just 'faster', that in five, ten, fifteen minutes they would figure it out and we'd all be in agreement and everything would be great. Everything was not great, and I would get visibly agitated with people for not getting these completely obvious things.
These are not realistic expectations and certainly are not attractive behaviors.
Very high IQs can only be accurately assessed at an early age by a qualified professional. So many people will never have an accurate score.
This has always bothered me about IQ tests. I mean, how smart is the person who comes up with the test? If your IQ is 120, how could you come up with a question that verifies someone's IQ is 180? Maybe the 180 IQ person would have an answer that is different than yours for reasons that you didn't think of.
1. Tests are tools. By themselves, they tell you nothing of real value. They are useful in the hands of a qualified professional.
2. Tests are game-able. They try to keep questions and tests under wraps because studying for the test or memorizing answers invalidates the test results.
3. Bright kids are horrendously hard to assess, especially if they are 2xE. They have trouble giving the canned "correct" answer.
This is something my son calls "guess the teacher's password." In other words "what inane thing do I need to parrot word for word to get the teacher off my back."
Example from email list discussion:
"Who discovered America?"
Teacher's password: Columbus.
Gifted kid's reply:
"I'm not sure. Columbus was trying to find India and thought he had, which is why Native Americans were called Indians. But it wasn't called America until years later when Amerigo Vespucci traveled to the continents now named after him...(blathers on about more history)...um, what was the question?"
4. Only certain tests can be used to assess IQs above 145. They were having trouble developing and validating an updated test for the higher IQs.
5. You basically can't be accurately assessed by someone with a lower IQ. Smart kids are routinely given hell by adults of more average intelligence who interpret their behavior as bad behavior and can't accommodate them.
Canned correct answers are only required for knowledge questions (like your example), which IQ tests avoid since knowledge and intelligence are different things.
> Only certain tests can be used to assess IQs above 145.
Most modern IQ tests report up to 160; accuracy (as assessed by test-retest consistency) at 145+ isn't great, though, on any.
> You basically can't be accurately assessed by someone with a lower IQ.
That's baloney.
> Smart kids are routinely given hell by adults of more average intelligence who interpret their behavior as bad behavior and can't accommodate them.
Smart kids routinely are bored and engage in actual bad behavior in situations not optimized for them, but that doesn't prevent adults of adequate but non-exceptional intelligence from being able to apply intelligence tests to them and get the same results as any more intelligent adult would. IQ tests are not limited by the IQ of the test adminstrator.
In most cases why would you bother trying to accurately gauge a student over 145? A student with an IQ of 145+ has very different educational needs compared to a 100 IQ student. Do you need to know if it's 145 verse 155?
This was an actual anecdote from a discussion with a parent of the child in question. The child in question was probably between four and seven years old. They were being assessed by a professional one on one, not in a classroom setting. They were neither showing off nor in possession of the social skills you assume they surely had to have.
I will add that imposter syndrome is common among adults because it's quite hard to figure out where we stand in relation to other people, so smart adults frequently feel they must be "average" because this is "normal" for them. Children are at substantial disadvantage compared to adults.
Do you need to know if it's 145 verse 155?
Possibly. The standard deviation for IQ tests is just 15 points.
More importantly, a test that only goes to 145 cannot distinguish 145 from 180. Both will likely score 145 or close to it.
I know what these kids go through. I was that kid myself. I know I was very aware that I wasn't "normal". You're correct that in the age range 4-7 a child wouldn't know to give the "expected" answer. It won't be much longer though until that child can use his/her intelligence to work out the expected response. At my school, it wasn't socially acceptable to show intelligence so maybe I learnt to hide it earlier than most.
I don't know my IQ. I've had to take tests a few times as an adult for work and every time I land "most likely somewhere in the top 0.1%" according to the psychologists. I don't really feel it matters if my tests show 145 or 160. A large school with 800 kids is only going to have a single child in that range.
You can either move that child up some years, or you can give them a customised workload. A child that is 180 IQ is very different from a child that's 145 but the approach of attempting to find them an appropiate workload would be a good start.
Using it wasn't intended to suggest a classroom setting for the story in question, just a standard answer that someone more knowledgeable about history might not spit out as The Answer without being inculcated to do so.
There are more than 10x as many people at 145 than 155, that ratio is larger than between 135 and 145, because the curve is exponential. If we’re talking about how to “best” educate someone who’s abnormally smart, and if we agree with you that someone at 145 needs to be taught differently than someone at 100, it certainly might matter to know if it’s 145 or 155.
1. Time. Each test question have 1 minute to answer. The test author took 4 hours to write the question (before having an organization put it through a battery of tests and analyses to validate it).
2. Group effort. Test authors work in big teams; many brains makes for easier insight.
3. Children's IQ is normalized to their age scale; a 7-year-old with IQ 140 isn't cognitively equivalent to a 35-year-ld with such IQ.
This is what led to the Flynn Effect [1]. It was the initially extremely surprising observation that raw IQ scores over time were increasing. In other words somebody who scored a 100 in 1970 was actually scoring substantially higher than somebody who scored a 100 just a few decades prior. Not so fun fact: starting sometime around the mid nineties, raw IQ scores started declining, at a substantial rate, in many and potentially all developed nations. In other words somebody who scored a 100 in 1995 is scoring worse than somebody who scored 100 in 1975. The reason for this is unknown and controversial (as all things even potentially genetic nowadays), but the effect persists even when controlling for things such as immigration.
Per Wikipedia, most IQ tests have a highest-reported standard score of 160 [0]; that's also consistent with the highest range for Stanford-Binet 5th Edition and Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children topping out at 160 (the SB5 top range starts at 145.)
For example, one serious official test I did included a timed test where you had to decode a string of symbols to text based on some key. I ended up being fast enough at decoding that I was effectively limited by how fast I could scribble down the decoded texts and turn the page back to the code, not by the mental calculations. I imagine others would have had similar issues, making this particular test at best capable of indicating a wide possible range of mental ability, a range which should be particularly inaccurate around the higher ranges as the ratio mentalTime/mechanicalTime decreases.
There also just aren't enough high IQ people to really effectively study the accuracy of these tests above those levels. There are no good baselines to compare these people and no real ways of checking whether the differences actually matter in any meaningful way.
Afaik, that's not a “designed to be usable by everyone” thing; there's test-retest consistency gets progressively lower beyond that point on IQ tests, period.
> There also just aren't enough high IQ people to really effectively study the accuracy of these tests above those levels.
If that was true, we wouldn't have reliable information that accuracy breaks down in that area, which we do.
We can study the accuracy in that range, we just haven't found a way to fix it.
Very high IQ is fundamentally flawed because IQ is resistant to precise measurement.
You're right, someone who seems average (or totally unknown to social systems), but is actually super genius, might not get tested. It's the "genius in the rice paddy" argument and yes, those exist. Srinivasa Ramanujan was one.
That doesn't mean IQ is fundamentally flawed. You don't need to know if someone is 99th percentile or 99.0004 percentile to know they are probably the smartest in the average room of a hundred people and that's what we use IQ to determine.
Now I'm in my second year in a PhD program in a biomedical program.
Point is: a lot of us start to feel like we made a mistake and it's too late to fix.
At age 30, started comp sci at uni. Best decision I ever made. It fixed the "mistakes" I made in my life choices
For many things it makes you less understandable (and vice versa) and this is necessarily going to have a socially ostracising effect.
Which then of course leads to anxiety, and thence mood disorders.
The other side of this is 'lazy as shit' - in terms of psychometric measures, you're largely describing conscientiousness, one of the five OCEAN traits. IQ and conscientiousness both correlate with income, but it's their combination that really makes for economic high achievers. Sounds like you have half the triforce, as it were.
You may very well be highly intelligent but not conscientious. There are lots of people like this, it's not a sin, just a personality. I will say that conscientiousness is probably more valuable than IQ in many ways, but IQ is nothing to scoff at. Imagine being in the same situation as you, but being dumb as well.
>But we grew up in the world told we could do anything we wanted!
You can do anything you want. The trick is that 'wanting' here doesn't mean 'I want to have the results of having done that long arduous risky focused effort'. It means 'I want to go through that long arduous risky focused effort'. Most people don't want anything like that, though.
To say "You can go to the gym," is not the same as saying, "You're entitled to be jacked." It just means you're allowed to strive.
I do, so I started ignoring it. Up for a corner kick and the ball is headed clear for the opposing forward to only have to clear our one defender held back and 1 on 1 the keeper? I sprint the whole way. Almost every time, I get there from across the pitch in time to help.
It's the same with emails or projects or objectives. There are critical periods and when it's critical you've got to push through. I've realized I've always known when it's critical. I've just not committed in that moment. Now I know.
Interestingly, this means you can spend lots of time off the throttle. I'm pretty sure intelligence is common. There are lots of smart people. I think the combination of that plus this is killer.
Btw if you want to see what this feels like at work, try Adderall.
I'm reminded of that quote from Good Will Hunting about serving the douchebag Harvard guy's kids fries at the drive thru. "Maybe. But at least I won't be unoriginal"
IQ is not bullshit. It's quite good at what it does: measuring intelligence.
Maybe you were referring to the idea that being smart will inevitably make you successful, which is indeed bullshit.
I'm wondering how good you considered yourself in memory and retention? If so, did this allowed you to excel at academic tests?
I remember in school understanding and mastering subjects without much trouble and work but once a subject got too hard it was time to move to something else. So for most of my life that has been my method of operating. Unfortunately,for me, that makes it impossible to get far in any career.
Hard work and the ability to work through adversity is what's needed for a successful life. I wish school and parents would stop using IQ as a measure for future success. It's not a good predictor.
Fortunately college was a kick in the pants for me. First year I went in with the same attitude as high school, that I can just study the night before an exam and ace it. Didn’t go so well in college and I barely passed first year. I got scared enough that hunkered down and really tried for the rest of college. College grades aside I think that experience of having to stick with it and work through adversity really helped me later in life.
I went through gifted programs and thinking back, I probably could have learned calculus by middle school if my education had adapted to my learning rate, but it didn't. We still had the same text books as every other 4th grader, we just covered more of the material in a year.
Now I'm a comfy SWE. I've been spending a lot of time reading to try and give myself the tools to resolve the various neuroses I developed as a teen, and it's going well. I still don't know what my score on that test was and I don't really care.
I've just started doing that and within a week I have started to feel a lot more energy.
It's a workout without realizing you're doing a workout, and it helps to get some of that good feeling dopamine running around your body.
The upside to it is that i have gotten through it. Somewhat. I've got a decent job, and I'm not worrying about losing it all the time anymore. I've got family, and who knows -- one day I might actually feel confident enough to make friends with someone.
But yes, it can't be said enough. Discipline, social skills, connections AND self-confidence are much more important than IQ.
It's a challenge with a child with any extraordinary ability. They start getting praised for the simple existence of the gift rather than any work. So the first time something seems like work, the child thinks they're just bad. It then becomes a kind of learned helplessness.
You also learn to not try because trying is the first step to failure.
Anyways, this makes a good argument why IQ is largely inconsequential in the real life: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
You mention anxiety, depression, and that you feel lazy. Is part of the problem that there's nothing you want to do right now?
> IQ is bullshit, and discipline, social skills, and connections are priceless
Of the four qualities you list, you already have the one that's mostly innate. The others you can develop.
Yes. On one level _want_ to earn a Security+ certificate or do a coding class part-time. I can't say for certain that they'll change my life for the better, but they seem like the _right_ thing to do for someone who has had 10 jobs but unable to begin a career.
>Of the four qualities you list, you already have the one that's mostly innate. The others you can develop.
I suppose you have a point, but I really lack the confidence and faith that if I keep trying to improve these things, then I'll see results. Because of my warped mind, moving myself in the direction of bettering myself =/= positive results, but rather new FUD, new failures, faux pas, doubts, and decline. Maybe IQ is innate, but I don't really use it, and I think I'm losing it. Depression makes my brain feel swollen and hard to grasp the right word and formulate plans. And yes, I have taken many, many medications. Most recently Buproprion and Fluoxetine. Now I've been taking 40mg Fluoxetine daily for a few months, but it doesn't help with any of the aforementioned problems. I think I continue to take it to show that I'm trying to do _something_ about this. Perhaps I should give therapy another shot. I just feel terrible and selfish spending money on it, when I think just saving a few hundred dollars a month would do more for my mental health than bawling to a shrink about my troubled teen years...
Sorry to ramble. Thank you for your reply. I will try to reconsider what I can develop.
It’s one of those things where when it’s taken out of context or on its own it’s really useless. Then people assume things based on a single measure and you’re screwed.
People misinterpret what it means, instead of "I can do what I want" it means "nobody knows what you will do, anything can happen".
In any case I wish you well. I have some similarities in my background including high scores, isolation, and depression, and trust me it can get better.
But what you actually said is that IQ is perfectly valid but not magic and that anxiety and depression are serious problems.
I never did homework in school, and got by on a talent for math and science (until we got to integrations, and I was unable to derive and remember the standard primitives, which saw my grades tumble into failing grades; I graduated with a good grade for math only because geometry (which is very intuitive for me) was a third of the final grade). So I managed to get by with never doing any homework, which meant that in university, I got completely stranded at the many classes that really required serious studying, and I focused mostly on the more intuitive logic/programming oriented classes that I could still ace without any real work. I couldn't graduate without the other classes, though, so I dropped out.
(I've never completed a proper IQ test that I got to see the results of; as a teenager I did one from a book that I didn't finish and still got 136, and I got 139 from one on TV that maxed out at 141, so I assume I'm somewhere near 140. I was tested for motivation problems at school as a teenager, which apparently showed I was smart, but my mother didn't want to share the results with me. Clearly I was smart, just not good at actual work.
So I'm lazy as shit, or possible struggle with motivation, but who can tell the difference? But I've been lucky to roll into a field that I have a talent for (software development), and I'm doing pretty good there. I was single and not dating at all (too insecure to even try) until 32 (yes, virgin until then), when I tried online dating and eventually met my wife, who has been great for me and my career (and I apparently for hers). So convinced me to quit jobs where I wasn't happy and find something better, and the financial stability she provided helped a lot in the step to become a freelancer. I'm still constantly distracted by online stuff (I should be programming as I'm typing this), and I wonder if I would have been an amazing programmer if I could keep my focus on programming for the whole day, but my work is generally good enough to get by. At least as long as I'm interested in the project; on boring, repetitive projects that are no different from any other, I start out great and after a couple of months I lose interest and I need to do something else. My longest job ever was almost 4 years, and that was 2 years too long. These days I work as a freelancer on projects from 6-18 months, and that works about right for me. Team mates tend to love me during the first few months, but get tired of me after about a year.
My current project is more interesting than usual: I set up the first prototype and the team developed around me. I get to focus on the interesting stuff that I care most about, and there's interesting stuff with graph databases, complex data modeling, and I get to refactor the structure on the project simply because I say it's necessary. Other people have recently been added to the project to pick up the more boring stuff, and for the first time I feel like I'm getting recognition for the stuff I'm best at. This is an amazing feeling and I can see myself working here for much longer than usual, but we'll see how things look after another half year (I've been here for nearly a year now).
But again, I know I've been lucky, as I haven't actually worked for any of this; I was just lucky to roll into something I have a talent for, was lucky to meet my wife, and got lucky with some of the projects I worked on. But I could easily see how my life could have taken a different direction. 20 years ago, nobody would have said that I would be the successful and happily married one among my friends.
It's still hard to believe, especially when I see so many people who are just as smart as I am, and most likely working harder, often more knowledgeable about technical topics, still struggle with so many aspects of life. I feel like I never really earned the easy life I've got.
Entirely correct. Therapy is effective. Meditation will help. There is a Chinese old saw about "treasures that you carry within you and which none can rob nor destroy but you".
And get yourself a girl friend.
[p.s. when you get your act together, you know discipline, social skills, and making connections, your 139 will put you way ahead of those who merely have those skills, so cheer up.]
>And get yourself a girl friend.
As much as I would love to snap my fingers and make this happen, I really have no idea how to go about this. I met my last serious girlfriend at a bus station in Minsk, just struck up a conversation (in English).
Whereas here in the US, I have been in $BoringTechCity for 3 years, and haven't had a woman so much as smile at me. I'm very much a skinny George Costanza, and I freak people out. I also abstain from dating apps and am at this "squishy" part of adulthood where I enjoy staying in, making Indian curry and playing Red Dead, and can't imagine doing anything social in the evenings after work. (I did, however, perform stand-up comedy twice last week, at two different venues. Both times went pretty well, but I don't feel compelled to do it again anytime soon.)
So this is key. Start using your God given high voltage brain and start imagining. Then plan. Then implement.
Looks? Effendi, you see the most gorgeous women with the most unlikely males all the time. I wouldn't worry about that even a tiny bit.
> I did, however, perform stand-up comedy twice last week, at two different venues. Both times went pretty well, but I don't feel compelled to do it again anytime soon.
A sense of humor is one of the most attractive qualities in a man to a woman. You are already set. You are smart, you are funny, you have a fucking job.
Have you considered you are ungrateful to the Universe or God or the Spaghetti Monster? :-)
I might generalize this to "put yourself in position where you have a responsibility to other people". The expectations that other people have of us can be a burden, but they can also help us pull together enough motivation to get stuff done.
I walk everyday. I prefer a pair of 1461 Doc Martin over my $170 Asics.
IQ is only valuable up to a point, the rest is seduction
>Anyway, what I'm trying to say is IQ is bullshit, and discipline, social skills, and connections are priceless
100% agree.
But we grew up in the world told we could do anything we wanted! I think it's that sort of expectation that is screwing with us (at least those of us that didn't become comfy SWEs).