I've found life to be much more enjoyable by intentionally avoiding people like myself. For highminded intellectual stuff there is plenty conversation to be had here on the net. Befriending and hanging out with a diverse group of misfits from all manner of backgrounds has proven to be much more fulfilling and while, yes, sometimes they can be stupid, and sometimes it is hard to find things in common outside of the reasons the group stays together, I've learned to see it as opportunities for further interpersonal growth.

If someone dedicates their life to filling their head with obscure knowledge they're just a nerd, no matter how much more intelligent they are than those around them. People may, collectively, be morons, but most individuals are surprisingly perceptive in at least a few areas, and while the prodigies in my life are indeed smart, I've spent enough time around them to know they would still be fish out of water for 90% of what life could possibly throw at them. I hope that your lamentations are formed after you've sussed these qualities out of the folks you lament.

Can't speak for the OP, but it's not attitude, it' acknowledging/accepting my own reality and circumstances, and the consequences of that. When people feel threatened by intelligence (or anything), then intelligence becomes "superior". Humans are still animals deep down.

For me, it's my mix of curiosity and logic. If I don't dumb that down people become really uncomfortable. I've only met a handful of people in my life who enjoy their snow globe worlds being shaken. I've developed this dumbed-down mask that I have to wear all the time; mix in some obsessive personality traits-- interactions with people are like walking around with an old, dry wooden stake up the ass. Im very stiff.

Even this simple question is complicated. Are you projecting an attitude because you feel threatened (or you remember how others felt threatened)? Is it an attitude if the OP is being their true self? Is it an attitude if the OP speaks factually about their situation? Is it an attitude when the ego attaches itself to ones words, and did you assume as much?

I generally agree with everything else you said. I think you are touching on intelligence vs wisdom (life experience) in your last paragraph. Can you point out other places on the net where intellectual people congregate?

If anyone who reads this is looking for some online comradery, shoot me an email. username to fastmail. Im working on undoing all the choices I made that created my isolated/independent life.

As for specific places, Slashdot used to have a lot of good conversation. Usenet too, back in its day. Nowadays I think most of the good talk happens on small, individually-run forums and, to a lesser extent, reddit. Personally I have thrown my lot in with the burner crowd, as the group's 'leave no trace' ethos and emphasis on independence, survivalism, sarcasm, sexuality, gifting, and performance art is right up my alley. (Plus we have excellent taste in music, if I do say so myself ;)

It increases the chance, but "implies" is too strong word here. High IQ doesn't magically overcome all obstacles.

How easily can you overcome isolation, that depends a lot on what opportunities you have. The same opportunities don't exist in every city, or every country. For a high-IQ kid it can make a lot of difference whether other high-IQ kids live in their neighborhood, or in their school.

For example, most of my teenage socialization was in a local math club. Well, it was a lucky coincidence that the math club existed in my city. (And another lucky coincidence that I knew about it.) Without it, I would have to settle for an option that would fit me much less. I know because I tried to find other places to socialize, and they just weren't as good for me.

Online communities can be great, but it's not the same as also having an offline community. Imagine a small forum you like. How much better would it be if those people lived next to you, so you could e.g. go for a trip together. Well, some of them probably happen to live next to people with similar interests, and some of them don't. Luck is an important component here. (Yeah, as an adult you could move to a different city. For a teenager this is less of an option.)

As to knowledge, it isn’t an ends in itself - but each mote builds a greater whole and reveals hitherto unseen patterns - and those patterns allow inductive and deductive leaps to new hypotheses, which may prove useful.

Sure, that is a smart thing to do. That way, you can always feel superior, if you do not meet intelectual equals in daily life...

(I know, you did not mean that. I was a bit self mocking, whether this was sub consciously a decision for myself, but may apply to you, too?)

Other approaches also have their problems. I was raised in a very egalitarian spirit, and thinking of myself as somehow better than others was a taboo for me for a long time.

As a consequence, I had a few blind spots. For example, I noticed that in some situations certain kinds of people become hostile to me, for reasons I couldn't understand. I didn't know what I did wrong, and when I tried to be nicer or more open towards them it usually just made things worse.

Then one day a friend with good social skills explained to me: "They see that you are better than them, so they feel threatened, and they attack you to feel safer. And when you respond with kindness, that makes them feel even more threatened, because it seems their attack didn'd hurt you at all (although it actually did)." My mind was completely blown, because I didn't see myself as better, so I didn't realize others could see me that way. But the explanation matched the facts, for example that the hostility usually increased after I have succeeded at something (even something unrelated to them).

Also, the theory is that if you don't tell your kid they are brilliant, they will attribute their success to hard work, which will motivate them to work even harder. What happened instead was that people around me who didn't perceive me as brilliant, attributed my success to pure luck (because they saw I actually wasn't working that hard). So no matter how often I won the math olympiad, I was always told that I am not really good at math, that I merely got lucky, but soon the regression to the mean would teach me my place (and that if I actually understood math, I would know what "regression to the mean" means, and I wouldn't argue back). This was very frustrating, because it seemed that no matter what I do, people will find an excuse because I do not fit their stereotype; and that thought definitely didn't motivate me to work harder. (Actually, only now as I write this comment, it occurred to me that maybe I didn't fit their stereotype because perhaps I was smarter than the usual math-gifted kids they used to work with.)

I would recommend telling your kids the truth according to your best knowledge. Manipulation can backfire, even well-intentioned one.

I like the Montessorie approach, "every child is a genius"

(does not at all mean, they are all the same, nor all have the potential to be rocket scientist. But it is a negation of the primitive evaluation approach of, this kid is very gifted, this kid is mediocre and this kid sucks. Societey needs lots of different talents, who can all be brilliant at what they do, but less likely if they got labeled as loosers from the start)

Saying that everyone is a genius just devalues the word.

The saying is "every CHILD is a genius". (not every burned out adult). Childs have a incredibly potential, than can grow in many directions. And the saying is also more intended to the teachers, opposite to the weeding out approach. So no, it is not meant literal, it has to be understood in a context. But yes, the idea is, that the teacher treats every child, as if they have the potential to be a genious. (and I actually do believe, most do, and it is sad, that so few actually get the opportunity to develope their potential and rather learn to sit still and repeat and behave and repeat what is demanded)

" but makes it clear that not everyone gets the same amount of points to invest into the skill tree"

Probably not, but I think it is hard to measure. It is also a question what skills you consider to be relevant. Some extreme example, I heard from my sisters friend who have a mentaly handicapped child .. which clearly did not have many skills .. but a big smile the whole time, that made people happy who interacted with him. Could be considered a valuable skill for society, too.

(but I don't know, if the parents smile the time, as he is probably quite labour intensive)

It's very hard to confirm if you're trolling or if you truly belong to /r/im14andthisisdeep, but let's assume the latter. Hiking to Machu pichu doesn't make you smart. Either you don't subscribe to personal responsibility towards global warming or you do but can't see the irony in smoking a few tons of carbon in the name of "enlightenment" which apparently you can only find half way across the world. Both ways, the lack of sophistication in your part shines bright. How exactly is hiking in a forest in a poor country different from going to Bangkok to get salvation from ping pong balls?

Several of your comments are in similar vein - everyone is not stupid, they just don't insticntually care about factual education; a good fraction of people are smarter than you in their own ways. Even if they're not, it behooves us to respect the average human with some basic respect (which would likely include not comparing them to lamps).

Perhaps you're a smart person and perhaps you're trying to cure cancer as several of my similarly smart colleagues kept insisting for years when I was doing my PhD. However, they just couldn't get their heads out of wherever to start seeing the bigger picture and I sincerely hope for your sake and the world's sake that you do. We will all benefit if smart people start becoming that much more humble. Assuming you really are 180 smart, whatever the triangle-inside-square-puzzle-hell that means.

It's huge in tech too-- plenty of people interview at companies whose names are effectively magic spells which will make them "good enough" for their parents stories to their friends.

And he's sorta right about the travel thing-- you can buy a lot of people's esteem by buying a plane ticket and being coddled by hotels and tour guides for a couple weeks. You can even call it an "adventure" and nobody will correct you. Narcissists are crazy about signalling their status with travel, so children of narcissists tend to hate it for that reason.

No narcissism here, mostly just self-loathing.

It's a pay-it-forward system where the kid gets stuck in the vice, with nobody in the system below him/her to pay it forward/downward to (you might have heard this as "shit rolls downhill").

So for the kid it's actual self-loathing, since there's no other candidate in the extended self to disqualify with high standards (like "just being normal"). This kid (it's usually just one of the kids) is called the scapegoat.

Read Pete Walker's book on cPTSD. I bet it will rock your entire world.

I’ll read it, thanks - perspective is always very welcome. Just read the synopsis and that alone speaks to me.

That’s the point of hiking. I travel overland almost exclusively, and only fly when there’s absolutely no alternative, and the journey is one of time sensitivity and necessity.

And yes, walking off the beaten track opens your eyes to far more than a beach holiday.

I am nothing but humble in my daily life, and my friends come from all walks of life, but I thought that sharing this experience might be insightful or helpful for some.

To add, travel is significantly inferior to embedding yourself completely in a state for at least six months. Travel can not replicate such experiences. I would never count my travels - no matter how off the beaten path - as experience comparable to living in a different cultural framework. Those instances, especially during formative years, are much more valuable.

We travel for long periods, ambling around a corner of the globe - the last few years have seen four months in Uruguay, six months in the stans, six months in the Balkan states, and six months pottering about the indochinese peninsula. This is why I view most people’s idea of travel with some disdain - showing up somewhere and banging around the sights isn’t travel, it’s stamp collecting.

I find it helpful, as it all provides context - and the different biases and beliefs people hold are just fascinating - particularly when you find them beginning to rub off on you.

And here is the rub. You should not hold contempt for people you perceive as less intelligent than you. Your value system places intelligence above all else, and conveniently that puts you nicely at the top. But, for example, have you ever spent meaningful time around people nicer than you? It's a great way to learn humility. Almost everyone has something to teach you, if you let them - the scale of human experience is wider than will fit into a single life.

I think that many intelligent people note that people instinctively dislike them, and rationalize it away as "threatened by my superiority". But in fact I believe it's far more often the case that intelligent people are just off-puttingly arrogant. They smell your contempt, better than you probably realize.

Be humble. Be nice. And magically you will enjoy spending time with people, and vice versa.

Unfortunately for young gifted people, there is no reciprocity here. It might get better with age and probably varies with location, but as a kid, if you act naturally smart other kids will bully you. If you later act dumb other kids will think you are condescending and will bully you. Either way you learn just to avoid everyone.

You need to give better advice than this to people when they're five, when they actually need it.

I learned early on that being right was no defense, and that no matter what happened I would always be blamed. These were the wrong lessons, but society at large was the wrong teacher, so I guess we're even.

This doesn't stop when we stop being kids. In the so-called "adult" world, people make some of the stupidest decisions imaginable on a daily basis, and refuse to acknowledge any errors in their choices no matter how they're brought up. Helping other people turns out to be an exercise not only in futility, but in masochism as well.

I've been called "justifiably arrogant" in the past. I've been condescending. I've come out the other side, and now basically think of myself as kind of mediocre. I used to look around at how people make much worse decisions than me about the important stuff and feel a little comforted by the idea that at least I'm doing better than them. Now, it just makes me sad, because I realize I kinda suck, but 98% of people make me look good by comparison.

I've learned to "go along to get along" to some extent, with people who don't matter to me. The people who do matter to me are the people with whom I can be honest, because honesty is a great way to get yourself in a lot of social trouble otherwise.

Mostly, what it comes down to, is that basically everybody sucks, smart or not, and everybody wants to believe "My shit doesn't stink." There's a grave injustice afoot when someone actually has a good idea, by way of applying some native intelligence and learned rationality to a problem, and gets punished for it, though -- and native intelligence helps people realize they're getting burned at the stake over someone else's superstitions, thus making "smart kids" bitter, dismissive, and lonely.

I'm generalizing a lot. Exceptions abound.

First, it reads as if you are horribly insecure and / or lonely. Your need to signal superior intelligence to convince us of your self-worth is a sad state of mind, and, from my experience (I am also "gifted" so this means something to you), denies you a lot of meaning and happiness. I also realize you seek to display your bitterness. It doesn't hurt us, though. Not in the way you think. Rather, it's just me being sad you had to go through all that and become all that.

Second, your need to insult or demean others makes you extremely unlikeable, even to people who would have something to offer to you and who would live up to being a worthwhile companion. There are probably more people like you around than you realize, but many would have little interest to engage with you.

Lastly, there are areas of life where I am sure you lack a lot of experience (I am not going to speculate what applies to you, but things like genuine love or being loved, sincere pain, war, near death, creating a human life, ending a human life, crushing poverty, decadent mind-blowing hour long intercourse and many more things may come to mind). Your standards, especially that quip about travel, may really seem laughable to someone else. Just so you know.

I hope you get better, sincerely.

Edit: My reading of your further comments make me think I should have written this less confrontational, but let it fill the urge you had. In any case, what I mean is that I sympathize. I do think you could get to a place where you're less trapped by your past.

As to experience, I have lived what feel like many lifetimes - I have loved and been loved (I’m married to a woman who challenges me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way), I’ve had the most spectacular pain, emotional and physical - the senseless deaths of dear friends, severe and life-threatening illnesses (writing a will at 26 thinking it’ll be needed imminently is a bag of laughs), I’ve lived in abject penury, while desperately trying to keep the lights on for my sister, after our parents split and both absconded, leaving us alone in the U.K. at 17 and 11, respectively. I took a life, accidentally, as a young child, and it haunts me still. I could create life, but I won’t, as I carry a fistful of genetic disease. Hour-long? You’re not trying ;)

I’m working on leaving behind my baggage, but like The Luggage it does rather like to follow me - therapy is helping, and this is actually part of it - I am under instructions to talk about this stuff, openly and honestly, and to see that people aren’t as judgmental as the wounded child within believes.

As to travel - slow travel opens the mind to so many possibilities, so many ways of living, what matters to people, how they differ, how they’re the same. The scenery is just the backdrop for the infinite theatres of human experience.

Oh, and I absolutely am insecure. Confidence oozes from my ears, as far as others are concerned, but inside its little but doubt, guilt, and shame.

Anyway. Thanks. I really do appreciate the reply.

In my experience, you should prepare to be disappointed. Judgementalism is how people survive in a world that rewards niarcissism; they judge others to be inferior to give themselves the strength to go on. It's an arms race.

Intellectually, I understand that people are mostly crap. Emotionally, I keep making the mistake of trusting people's supposed good intentions when I feel like I've gotten to know them, and finding out that, once again, they're judgemental assholes who will fabricate tales to tell themselves so they can absolve themselves of meaningful guilt.

There are good people, non-judgemental people, caring people, who can sympathize with you and who deserve your trust (assuming you're a well-meaning person, as I suspect from what I've read here). From your description of some aspects of your life, it seems you've found one or two, and I'm happy to hear it.

Mostly, people want to tell you fairy tales about the good in the world. Most of it is pretty mediocre; even middling is a stretch. It's not distributed evenly, though, and it's worth holding out hope. I was lucky enough to meet one of those rare lights in my early teens, and we're still in touch. I was lucky enough to meet several others along the way, and I charish their influences on my life. I'm lucky enough to live my life with one now, and for quite a few years up to this point. They make it all worthwhile.

By 7th grade I would ignore whatever was happening in class and read escapist fantasy fiction instead, while I was still bothering to attend school. The same year I decided school wasn't for me and refused to attend. My mother (single parent) didn't really know how to handle the situation, but after a lengthy conflict between us we eventually came to an agreement where I would be dual enrolled in high school and the junior college where she worked. I think roughly half way in to my first year of high school I walked off campus and never came back, and ended up enrolled in junior college full time. I ended up wasting years failing half the classes I enrolled in at the junior college, basically incapable of engaging with higher education. I was fortunately able to launch a career in tech. It began by working as a student assistant in the computer lab and working my way up from there.

I feel fortunate that I was born in the era I was born in and ending up in tech. I can't imagine what my life would have been otherwise without the internet or the tech world. Tech keeps me somewhat engaged and provides financial security which is such a blessing.

Tech also seems to be disproportionately populated with hard working and intelligent individuals, so it's easier to find others to befriend, relate to, and converse with. I've also come to value raw intellectual ability less and value outcomes more, which has been a useful lens to self direct how I engage with others. Telling someone their ideas are bad because $REASONS turns out to be remarkably counter productive, regardless of any factual basis. Unsurprisingly a lot of people don't want to work with someone that thinks they're stupid. I still struggle with how to engage with others though. I've tried acting as an educator but that seems to come off condescendingly, ending back at the same place of no one wanting to work with someone that thinks they're stupid. More often I find myself not engaging, hoping that some people might learn from experience, and otherwise just doing my own thing.

At any rate, thanks for sharing.

But being here doesn't help me too much because awhile ago I worked my way into independent/isolated situation where I can support my self working part time from home. I get to see glimpses of other big inner worlds here and it gives me hope I'll have a chance to meet them.

My parents did not want or love me. My grades fluctuated in high school as I was unfocused/depressed. Creativity was my escape. Ended up graduating with a B-, decided not to go to college. Have done a fair amount of traveling (mostly local) and car camping around the US. I would move into the mountains in a heartbeat if I wouldn't be completely alone there.

>"I remain convinced that the majority of people are idiots, with the equivalent of a flickering strip lamp for a mind" This gave me a good laugh, so true. But it really depends where you live. It seems like all the bright lights move to a city to manufacture mirrors :D

The slow/internet is my problem. I'm pretty close to living in the mountains apart from that.

Also, starlink and all that could really change things - although my telescope doesn’t love it.

And... I’ve found similar spirits in this endeavour - it takes a certain type to be willing to go try bootstrapping a homestead, and they usually have interesting stories and knowledge to share. Today I learned that motor oil is a good belt-and-braces wood treatment, and how to repair a dam, from a local farmer we’re getting to know.

Having a language barrier is pretty handy - it takes away a lot of the frustration I find in slow interactions by adding a bucketload of cognitive overhead.

It was hard to get conversation going there. I was the lead mod and I succeeded, but after I left, conversation petered out and it's rare for an email to show up on the list these days. (As far as I know, I'm still subscribed to that list.)

People have a super hard time talking about the sorts of problems you describe, but it's a really common story for highly gifted kids.

The easiest thing is to just be an island. There’s a reason that people like me are called “eccentric”, because too much time in your own company inevitably results in social drift.

They would act like they were good teachers because I knew so much and act like other kids were just lazy and should "be more like me and just study more" which wasn't at all fair or accurate.

In eighth grade, I was friends with a Hispanic boy. The class was given the chance to do a thing for extra credit and it involved decoding something. Not only did he speak English as a second language, he had no idea what the thing actually was.

I got in trouble for telling him it's a letter substitution puzzle. I didn't know because I was smart. I knew because my father did the Crypto quote in the newspaper every single morning and would drag everyone else into it when he couldn't do it easily.

It was an early lesson in how unfair the world is. He had no hope at all of getting the extra credit because he had too many things stacked against him.

Anyway, I had few friends at school and it was a toxic social environment. I gave up a National Merit Scholarship in part to escape the toxic BS and figure out who I was other than some toxic asshole as taught to me by the school system as a survival mechanism.

If you have no friends and everyone hates you, yes, you learn to Lord it over everyone that "at least I'm smarter than you" as the only defense mechanism you have.

I finally found a thing that explains that it's our strengths that limit us. I've had enough serious problems in life that I've gotten to escape the prison the school system actively built for me, but it wasn't at all easy.

Yes. You try to describe how you got hurt, and people think that you are just bragging. (How exactly are you supposed to describe the social consequences of your higher intelligence without ever mentioning the fact?)

Then they look at some dysfunctional mechanism you developed as a result of your pain, and they conclude that you are a bad person and therefore you actually deserved it.

I suggest you aren't surrounded by idiots but by people that are normal and mostly doing their imperfect best. The idiots are on the far other side of the bell curve and there are fewer of them. Imagine for a bit trying to survive as them with as little understanding as they have and the limited scope of perspective. You'd struggle and develop heuristics and tribes to survive too. I don't expect this to help much but perhaps you can find some grace when you interact. Speaking for myself, the frustration and anger I used to feel on that interface was corrosive to myself and I prefer the increased peace I have now.

I have found it an existence I would not consent to but I also care too much about some of the people in my life to opt out.

Two thoughts.

(1) I wonder if you could frame learning to communicate and get satisfaction from interactions with merely "quite smart" people as a challenge worth pursuing. You could brush up on negotiation, sales, rhetoric, poetics, etc. Perhaps slowly start converting those domains' messy forest of heuristics into some principles and equations, if your mind works that way. If you were able to, for instance, detect someone lying to preserve their own self-image around something they felt ashamed of, and then were able to navigate that to help them both renounce the lying without feeling bad about it and help them reintegrate their self-image around the concept — that sort of that is immensely cognitively demanding to be able to do, and it's pro-social (you might not care, some people do, but at least it's not pathological in any way)... in any event, that'd increase the amount of cognitive processing you'd be forced to do in any given interaction by an order of magnitude or two, which might make those interactions become enjoyable. You'd also rapidly become massively liked and trusted.

(2) With your intellectual horsepower, if you were willing to, you could absolutely seek out and cultivate a dozen or so people on your level cognitively. It'd take a while — you'd need to think through exactly what environments you navigate at what times and in what ways, how introductions get made to you, etc — but if you were to meet ~1000 people in a thoughtful thought-through way, then I'm sure you'd find at least a dozen or so close friends and peers to associate with. It'd be a multi-year project, but not incredibly time-demanding on any given day or week. I imagine it'd be worth it.

My two cents. Seems like it'd be terribly unfortunate and much less satisfying to not be able to fully actualize and explore all that raw capacity with other good people.

I find being stoned out of my gourd is a good way to slow myself down enough that I don’t find myself bored and frustrated. Typical, I know.

I do have a circle, but they really are scattered to the winds - and I think that works, as they’re similar in their lack of desire to spend too much time with people. I’m happily married to a woman who I think might actually be smarter than me, although her education was poor - but she doesn’t put me on a pedestal, and has no bones with telling me I’m wrong. It’s incredibly refreshing. I feed her knowledge, she feeds me ideas, and together we achieve things.

You say it’s a pleasure when someone makes an inductive leap, but I find that it usually pisses people off - instead, I leave one ear listening for anything unexpected in what they’re saying, let them say their piece while I delve through the topic with the rest of my attention, and then respond - although I do catch myself far too often finishing people’s thoughts, still - speech is just so slow.

As to the “soft” side of things - I was the CTO and sales lead at my business until I ran out of novel problems to solve, and left, as we’d built a self-sustaining machine - sold tens of millions of pounds of our software over the years, and it was my shoulder clients would want to cry on, as part of my curse is understanding people far too damn well - hence my analogy to lightbulbs, insulting as it may be - the psychology of others is generally predictable, en masse or singularly. I also write fiction, which to my shock and surprise got published late last year. Like most of my output, I saw it as no damn good - but apparently people like it enough to pay money for it. Bizarre.

Anyway - I appreciate the input!

Oh, I respect and empathise with everyone, even those I actively detest - but I also pity them, and can’t help but see them as poor fools who know not what they do - and as a result my politics sit firmly on the socialist side. I don’t think it’s fair that we have such ridiculously uneven distribution of intelligence, or wealth - and we can only address one of those.

I can’t claim that my psychology is either good or correct, but it is what it is.

As to “I think I have the world figured out” - I absolutely don’t. It’s an intractable and fascinating system, with more variables than one would believe possible. I’ll likely never have it figured out, and that’s ok - it gives me an indefinite wonder to contemplate.

I am, generally, quite happy being isolated - it saves me frustrating conversations with people who take offence at my observations, and is protective for my psychological well-being.

Fortunately, I have a partner who - in part resulting from their own childhood obstructions - is incredibly supportive, as well. It chills me to think of all the kids out there who feel trapped in an inscrutable world that doesn't seem to understand them. I like to think putting your words out there helps some.

Yikes