Answered on Quora.
We don’t mind at all. It doesn’t make us feel bad that we are a lot smarter than they are, if we are. It’s no big deal to me to be smarter than others, and I am smarter than 99.9% of the population, which means I am smarter than almost everyone. I have to be OK with this, or I will be miserable, as 99.9% of the people I meet will be less intelligent than I am.
But I don’t feel shy or ashamed about my brains. I rather like them actually.
On the other hand, very high IQ people have some special problems that a lot of lower IQ people will never understand. Once people get two standard deviations below me (30 points), they simply don’t understand the little difficulties that go along with being a cerebral outlier. They will just get angry and say my being smarter doesn’t make me better or something dumb like that or more or less tell me to shut up.
One of the problems is that I have a difficult time having relationships with women who are three standard deviations below me (45 points). Indeed studies show that at 30 IQ points difference, communication becomes difficult and in some cases impossible. Functional relationships fall apart due to lack of connection. For instance, a group will often not accept a leader who is more than 30 IQ points above them. They think he is too smart, and the connection necessary to be a leader is severed.
I date women who misspell common words or don’t know what Latin is. They might be 45–55 IQ points below me. I am also very educated. As you can see, it’s just not going to work. She won’t understand what I am talking about half the time.
I used to hang around mostly with people 3 SD’s below me. They were my dearest friends, but I was always frustrated because there were so many things I could not talk about with them. So there was this continuous sense of frustration running through our relationships. I don’t think friendships or relationships work very well when you get to 3 SD’s difference. 2 SD’s is more workable, but you are still explaining yourself a lot. If you like the teacher role, it’s OK.
One thing that is important is that if you are a cerebral alien like me, you are not supposed to talk about your brains to people who are ~25+ points lower on the scale. They will take it personally as an insult, and they won’t sympathize.
Very high IQ people can befriend other high to very high IQ people well, and you can talk about your brains with them a lot because most of them are very into their brains too, and they will often be awed or pleasantly impressed by your brain. Fast brains tend to be respected more by others with fast brains. People will slower brains are typically not very impressed for some reason.
Exceptional people like their talents. Gifted athletes, artists, and musicians enjoy their gifts and like to talk about them. Intellect is no different. A fast brain is often cherished by those who have one.
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There’s a downside to being a Rainman as there are downsides in life.
Robert, I see to big differences .
1) Gifted athletes, artists or musician, are generally successful, like a gifted professional. If you are only gifted, you have the talent but without the recognition, so there is not much tangible objective benefit. It should be compared to beauty or voice .
2) the second difference is that of your beautiful, most people will see it. The same if you have a beautiful voice . But for IQ, you can’t notice the IQ of people who are more intelligent than yourself. They seem to you like fuzzy and going to fast through important thing and spending too much time on insignificant details. So if you have an IQ of 145, no people with less than 130 will really be able to notice. So it means that it’s like a beauty that could be seen by only 2% of the people. At the same time, for 0.003%, you wouldn’t be able to understand their thought process, but the probability of meeting them is very low …. There is an exception. If there is a problem you be been thinking about for a while and ask someone to solve, you add 15 points to your IQ perspective and can feel the higher speed of’tjd Individual, just for the time when you are in known land.
So I would say very high intelligence is like perfect pitch. It’s a strange objective world but with objective limitations due subjecrivity.
I totally agree with your paradoxal analysis that clever people loves to speak about intelligence.