How Does It Feel?
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How does it feel?
An inquiry about intelligence
Copyright © 2022, Paul Lutus — Message Page
How does it feel?
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How does it feel?
This email may seem a bit strange but I simply couldn’t resist writing it. I recently visited your website again and realized you added a lot of highly interesting new things such as the 3D particle box or the James Webb tracker, just to name a few. A friend of mine, to whom I drew attention to the web pages was as flabbergasted as I was and replied:
“One can hardly imagine how rich the perceptual world of someone like him must be“. And I thought to myself: This sums it up nicely. It also triggered some questions which I now dare to ask. They are trivial to you and the answers to the question may be too idiosyncratic, but I actually don’t care, I am just curious. So…
- For someone as bright as you, how does it feel to live in a society (or should I say, world?) where, say, 90% of people are below your level in terms of cognitive capability?
I must start by saying there are some misleading elements at work here. When discussing an I.Q. at or above 130 or 132 points, (Wechsler for the first, Stanford-Binet for the second), fully 2% of a country's population meets the criterion. For a U.S. population of roughly 330 million (2020 number), that's 6.6 million people. That's enough people to fill a small country — with what would likely be very frustrated people (even if surrounded by similarly gifted individuals).
I put the partition at what is now called "very superior" only because measurements above that point are notoriously inaccurate. I think my I.Q. is moderately higher than that, but (a) I learned how to take I.Q. tests when I was young, at a time when psychologists seemed constantly to be applying them to me, so over a period of years my score kept creeping upward in a misleading way (even when adjusted for age and experience), and (b) at my age (77) my intellectual acuity has certainly declined.
So ... my point ... I'm perhaps not so special. :)
You probably know the quote by George Carlin: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that“. For you, it must be even worse, I suppose. Even for lesser talented guys like me, George Carlin’s 50% are hard to bear, something I had to learn the hard way especially during the last and still ongoing crises (and even while working at a university). I has never become so obvious to me, seriously. But for someone like you, it must be an entire different experience given that you have most certainly experienced that your entire lifetime.
- How does it feel when it costs you a fraction of the time to look through things it takes months or years to understand something?
Honestly? It makes me intellectually lazy. I expect to be able to absorb some new topic in a fraction of the time it takes average people, so instead of learning it in more depth, I may instead absorb it only to the level at which I can discuss it with people of average intelligence, impress them with my supposed intellectual acuity.
This doesn't apply to everything. If I find a topic particularly interesting, I may abandon my normal behavior and learn it in depth, which may serve as an escape from everyday reality, but at the same time may make it impossible to discuss the topic with someone else in a meaningful way.
You must have experienced this kind of feeling, or whatever we want to call it, from an early age on. So, how did you handle these state of affairs? And how did you experience these differences when you were a child? On a related note: How did you not despair?
Easily answered — my primary life satisfactions arise in personal pursuits, not activities that involve other people. When I was a child I quickly recognized and adapted to my rocky relations with average people by taking up hobbies and activities I could carry out alone.
While doing this I tried to avoid posturing as different or special, realizing that would generate pointless friction. But one day in elementary school, in gym class, the weather made outside activities impossible, so the teacher (who knew something about me) asked me to explain to the class how a radio worked.
I thought that would be fun, so to the sound of rainfall I filled the classroom blackboard with circuit diagrams and rattled off the basics of a modern radio receiver. Maybe I was smart, but not smart enough to realize what that lecture...