Many Bright to Very High IQ People Cannot Do Even Simple Things Well

I Wonder: Robert, I must be in the lower IQ range. Tried to send money through Pay/Pal. Kept saying info was missing even though I supplied full Visa information. Try again, later. I enjoy your blog, your writing style, sly wit, and the various subjects covered. I Wonder

Hi you may not be low OK at all. A lot of very smart people cannot navigate such things well. My Mom has a 150 IQ and for a long time, she was having my brother or I do a lot of online and computer stuff for her because she could never figure out how to do it. My Dad had a 129 IQ and he never bothered with computers apparently because he had no idea how to operate one. To be honest, he never learned how to operate a TV remote properly either! But even towards the end of his life, he was one smart guy! In their case, their generation simply never learned to get comfortable with gadgetry. The new generations coming up now are actually more intelligent in terms of IQ tests than the generations before them, especially the WW2 generation. This is known as the Flynn Effect which states that indeed people have been getting smarter with each generation for a long time now. Intelligence is not all genetic. If you grow up in a culture surrounded by gadgets, you will become more intelligent in visuospatial skills than someone who did not  grow up around such things. Also many of the WW2 generation never got comfortable with gadgets, so they feel helplessness, frustration and anxiety when they try to use them. Believe it or not, “If you fail, try again. If you fail again, try, try again,” is pretty much a fallacy. Everyone is supposed to have this sort of grit and stick-to-itiveness, but few do. The reasoning is simple. Humans have egos. Egos are designed to protect ourselves from unpleasant emotions and cognitions such as thinking you are a failure. If you take the idea, “People are trying to convince themselves that they are not failures,” and then plug it into your  world and then look at the people your world with this concept in mind, so many things will become clear. This is because a lot of human defensive behavior is wrapped up trying to convince ourselves that we are not failures. Those successful at lying to themselves this way can function pretty well. Those who are more honest with themselves tend to get depressed. Indeed, studies show that depressed people are more realistic than happy people. Lying to yourself is good for you! The WW2 people’s brains work about as well as ours do. They are about as fast and store and retrieve information just as well. So we are not smarter in terms of overall intelligence. But in specialized subsections of intelligence, indeed, there have been some marked rises in the past 100 years. Bottom line is that just because you cannot do some fairly simple thing, it does not mean you are dumb. You could well have an average all the way up to very high IQ. Doing relatively simple things especially technologies, is not a very reliable indicator of intelligence.

Please follow and like us:
error3
fb-share-icon20
Tweet 20
fb-share-icon20

10 thoughts on “Many Bright to Very High IQ People Cannot Do Even Simple Things Well”

  1. I could care less about cell phones, despite the popular trend – so I wouldn’t bother to try to learn to operate one – though I can.

  2. JASON
    One observation about Gen Y is how little they care for their own privacy and how social media dependent they are because of Bluetooth, I-phones, etc.
    Another is how their time-saving devices have distracted them from how wretched the course of their life has been. They were born in the booming 1980’s or 1980’s but came of age during War, Recession and Terrorism.
    More of them live at home than any generation before them. Racial tension, even with all the efforts of PC, are awful. Latinos, once the Southwest equivalent of Italians in New York who were essentially Americans with a Latin subculture, now seem ready to separate America from the Anglo-Sphere altogether.
    Yet they are so distracted by devices that they are not as angry as they would be. I cannot imagine how they could have function in the Analog era.
    But more than anything, and this is especially true of suburban so-called hipsters, is how soft and immature they are.
    The free-flow of information has, if anything, made them MORE ignorant.

    1. Right, definitely hate and nationalism is becoming a terrible thing everywhere in the world – including the US. Well, I mean I’ve noted the big beehive I knocked down when I decided, to be frank on Facebook about how – I really felt about small town idiots.
      Anyway, the only thing keeping many at each other’s throats is the opium provided by technology (as you noted) – an opium rivaling Marx’s portrayal of religion.

    2. Well, actually technology does make life more bearable, sort of a medicine for the whole massive decline in the economy that you, Jason Voorhees aka Trash, have noted. Possibly, it could be keeping the whole threat of revolution at bay.

      1. Jason
        Generation Y has some convenient hand-held devices but if you look at their overall purchasing power it is pretty low.
        They can barely make ends meet and many more of them live at home than we did but they have an I-Phone. Technology has sort of distracted them like crack cocaine.
        Most likely these same devices will be the source of a lifetime of chronic unemployment as the internet replaces retail, off-shores all remaining jobs, learns to write its own computer code, etc.
        Moreover, wages have stagnated for 20 years, or 30.
        Compare your life at twenty in 1994 with the life of a 20 year old today. You could leave home and work in Korea. You could have a job that allowed you to rent an apartment. A car.
        What can Gen Y afford besides an I-Phone.
        Its no surprise that pornography fuels the internet and Gen Y males jerk off in their bedroom in their parents house when they are 30.

        1. Actually, a person can still work in Asia and make money. That hasn’t changed. However, that person possibly can only get Asian jobs –
          while there is nothing back home but some situation of working yourself up to a fast food manager etc..

        2. It is sort of funny that so many online writing jobs are full of these really resentful white racist types. Obviously, they’re angry cause all they can get are crummy writing jobs and, of course, they’re in direct competition with Indians etc..

        3. Case in point, these racist writers love to write on subjects like Political Correctness etc.. Dead give away. HA HA NAZI … NAZI ALERT dead ahead. 😆

  3. In ancient India culture, the brahmin caste, the intellectual/spiritual caste, were required to be supported by other people. They were so lost in their own thoughts that they could not function on a normal daily level and thus it was the duty of the lower 3 castes to maintain them. In exchange the brahmins would impart their spiritual wisdom to the lower castes.
    As the system became corrupt, and people began claiming to be brahmins simply to live a lazy life instead of focusing on spirituality, the lower castes obviously began to resent them and we saw an outright rejection of the Hindu caste system with Buddhism. A couple thousand years later, Islam invaded India and converted many lower caste people and used the justification that the brahmin caste are oppressive and want to control the lower 3 castes.
    So we’ve been seeing a rebellion against the brahmin caste for thousands of years now. Of course it started with corrupt people falsely claiming to be brahmins and so the lower castes lost respect for the Vedic system.

    1. I suspect “Aryan wisdom” was something a ruse for the Veddic Caucasoid tribes from the Caspian Sea or Eastern Europe or Iran or wherever they were from to plant themselves at the top of a race-based social class system.
      That would have not occurred the same day Aryans stumbled South onto Harappan Civilization in the Indus Valley but it was probably something of a sham to ensure that the Aryans were the ruling caste.
      Islam of course was a reaction to this as was Christianity in the South down the road.

Leave a Reply to jason voorhees Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

error

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)