Asklemmy

Very depressing. We're social animals, and being highly literate and informed while also socially apt, you really realize just how far apart you are from others, which is alienating, frustrating, and tiresome.

Frustrating.

The rate at which I absorb information is disgusting. Yes please finish your sentence I already have a response why are you taking so long. How did I learn that? I picked up the manual and did it. Developing new skills? Learning Rust right now and its going well, failed out of highschool because I learned too easily and didn't need the homework to learn (so it didn't get done).

It comes with imposter syndrome: I knew the problem, I had the pattern figured out, why did I still fuck everything up (plot twist I probably didn't).

It comes with a superiority complex: I learned this in 10 minutes from looking at a Sci Journal, why has it been hours and yallvstill don't get it? 🙄

It comes with accidentally hurting people: frequently I say things thinking something hould be obvious when it is not, while unintended, it often hurts my partner who is usually in the line of fire when I let some dumb shit outta my mouth and insult someone's intelligence.

Anyway I hate it I'd rather be dumbsauce ignorance is bliss

Awful. I wish for ignorance in a very "Flowers for Algernon" type way, and often dull my senses with intoxicants just to try and get my brain to cease.

Imagine looking at the world, seeing all of the evils and horrors that lie in the hearts of man, and knowing you are powerless to stop all the terribleness that is happening as just one person. You try to explain it to other people, you try to get them as impassioned as you are at fighting the awfulness of the world...and they look back at you blankly. They don't understand the connections, they don't think on a global scale, and they question why you do. "Wouldn't it be so much easier not to worry about that? It's not like it affects you personally, something like that could never happen here." So you just get to live in a world that you know is fundamentally wrong, feeling like you are wrong for rejecting it.

That has been my experience having a 168 IQ, though it says nothing of the weight of expectations that were cast on me as a child or what all I missed out on by skipping past so many grades in school.

I had my IQ tested when I was 12 and it was high, but alas, not high enough to understand Rick and Morty

Jokes aside, I've been told that I catch onto things quicker and I'm good at solving things in creative ways!

Probably the thing it's get a little mad because you need to explain multiple times things you think are really easy or stop hearing some people when start explaining things because you know you can catch what they are saying anytime. It's really shitty, I dont whant to be this way. Also people treat you different because "you can so it better", no I can't.

The details of my life are quite inconsequential, but since you asked…

Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds, pretty standard really. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it's breathtaking, I suggest you try it.

It's very tiring having to start off every conversation by letting people know that I'm more intelligent than them, but it is necessary.

I'm 128, it's up to you to decide whether it's high enough or not.

Generally, I am successful in my studies and pursue career in science. I am not a high earner, and doing mental work still drains me heavily. I take a few hours of dumb physical work every week to reset. I am more or less satisfied with my life, I do have a romantic partner and generally find it easy to navigate social situations, but I'm introverted and need to recharge. So, you can say I have a high burst productivity all-round, but I'm not good at a long game.

This is just me though, and one thing to remember is that there is no objective metric for intelligence, and it can be divided in many different ways. Some people are great at solving math problems, but are dead stupid in social situations. Some go vice versa. Some have a gift for certain areas of knowledge or skills where they are way above average, while having underwhelming performance with the rest.

For example, I excel at disciplines that require me to connect many diverse data points (my area of interest is microbiology), but I'm not that good at following logic through many layers of calculations and linking it back to source (as in physics/math; I'm still able to carry out calculations I need for my work, but it's exhausting). I acquire language skills quite readily, and have good auditory perception overall, but have high reaction time and struggle driving or doing competitive sports/gaming (no, higher intelligence doesn't mean faster reaction).

Overall, I'm just a normal human, fairly smart, fairly capable, but nothing supernatural and sometimes straight up underwhelming.

It vastly depends on everything else.

You can be a dude with a normal life, who just makes conclusions faster and you've learned that everyone likes how smart you are and you enjoy this.

You can be a restless mess, because you've known all your life that there's nothing to compete with and it's difficult enough to find someone to even have a somewhat decent conversation on your level with. These people come with or without the arrogance you're thinking of right now. Some are just genuinely kind and thoughtful, but always a step ahead without even really appreciating their ability much.

You can be an absolute underachiever, because being smart was never rewarded in your life. Maybe you even learned that "You're not special" so much so, that you punished others for not being able to draw the same conclusions as you in the same time, because you always thought they were just being lazy on purpose.

You can be entirely unaware and may say funny things like "I don't think we're all that many really smart people in $techplacewithclearlysmartpeople. I talked to most of them and I don't struggle at all".

Source: High IQ myself, working with other people who increasingly talk to me openly about this and their overall situation. So much of who we become is about what our parents do to us and if there's understanding and love and support on that end.

Obviously there's the whole spectrum thing as well. I don't think a higher IQ means "more autism", as someone suggested. I think it increases your chances of struggling with a regular (neurotypical) kind of life, for example because you are supposed to be interested in 1 subject (to make a career), but - similar to people with ADHD - may care for all the subjects.
If you think about what is neurotypical though, you can classify people with a particularly high IQ or people with particularly high sensitivity as neurodiverse in just the same way you do that for people with Autism or ADHD. Now if you think about humanity as a whole, we may all to some degree be diverging from the norm in any or all of these ways, but still be more or less free of struggle, because it's not by much, while for the more extreme cases, they stand out for better or worse.

It’s being like you

I have a high IQ as well as ADHD and Autism.

Out of context, scoring as high as I did really meant next to nothing. In the context of the diagnoses I received later in life, definitely made sense, and helped color a picture painted in two solid days with a psychologist.

Somehow, I think it's important that the IQ test I took was not called an IQ test to me until after. Like, I knew I was in for tests, but more broadly told what things were about.

As a student, I had a science teacher who had been teaching many years, tell my mother he had never seen a student think in the manner I did. I was doing exceptionally well in class, but did not exceed in the fashion that would get me into an ivy league school, which at the time was supposed to be a goal. My father graduated MIT.

There are times when it's great. When I can focus on something, I can learn a lot and get very good at it. However, I spent decades with two obstacles I could never get myself past: the inability to keep that focus or control it, and the inability to even understand other people enough to try to get along with them long-term.

The result is I am just now, at 41, starting to figure out what I want to do with my life after way too long in a profession I should never have entered, and burned out of twice. And by burn out I do not mean tired and sad, I mean hospitalization.

In summary, it can be pretty great, but in my case it's fraught with difficulty as well.

Episodes of Rick and Morty really hit close to home in a way that normies couldn't possibly fathom. It's a blessing and a curse.

I have a high IQ and diagnosed as "gifted" by psy at nearly 40.

I won't argue about IQ and Giftedness having scientific base or not. All I can do is a professional clinical psy told me I am gifted. And what I'll say is just my way of thinking.

I have a systemic brain. I have very poor memory concerning names, date, etc... but I can remember complex system (basically, what cause create which consequence) really easily. I also understand problem, and find solutions much faster than most of peoples, I have strong Intuition of things, but I have difficulties explaining how I've found the solution. Scientists think it may be related to Myelin. That stuff increase connection speed between neurons, so it makes you think "faster", but sometime faster than you conscience.

I also wants to give meaning to anything. If I take a nap and hear the wind in the trees, I immediately imagine air molecules traveling and hitting leaves, sound wave propagating and hitting my ears. Wind also blowing the small layer of hotter air near my skin, explaining why it feel cold, etc...

I see object through their functioning, not their usefulness. When I see any new machine, I don't really care what it does, but more how it does it.

I'm constantly flooded by information, and I'm constantly analyzing everything. Being in a crowed area is exhausting for me, because there are too many stimulus. I'm not going to faint or something, but I think being in a crowd for me is like being in a kindergarten class full of screaming children.

I don't talk a lot because I'm easily bored by small-talks. I don't see the point of speaking about what I've done this week end, or the weather, or anything. I prefer staying in my own bubble speaking to myself.

I don't feel part of this world, I more feel like an observer watching some weird TV show. I don't understand most of human reaction.

If you are French speaking, I strongly encourage you to read the comics Comme oiseau dans bocal. It's based on serious research and is a very good popular science story about IQ, giftedness, etc...

IQ is skull measuring nonsense. how good you are at taking a standardised test is in fact not a remotely good "measure of intelligence". if you care about education you should discard the notion of IQ.

I think it would be hard to isolate exactly how much of our daily lives we experience as a direct consequence of our IQ and how much is a consequence of other things such as personality, emotional predisposition, environment, and luck.

My IQ is pretty average (around 115 I think? I tested ages ago and I can't even say the test was reliable). Some people insist I must be somewhat higher than that but I don't know. I feel dumber every day.

My father though, he does have a higher IQ (I think 135 iirc) and it's obvious to anyone that he's a brains guy. Always top student in his youth and later a decent researcher, engineer and programmer. And yet he still makes dumb mistakes like everyone else, and his temper and personality will often turn a mediocre day into a bad one. He has a tendency to overcomplicate things unnecessarily, and sets high standards for others around him- you'd think being smarter would mean he wouldn't do this, but as I said, intelligence doesn't work isolated. I remember asking him how it feels like being smarter than most of his peers and his answer is always "bah!".

So I don't know if this answers your question, but there's my two cents for you.

If you believe psychology and IQ are nonsense, here’s a comment I copied over from another thread:

IQ means intelligence quotient. A bunch of people take a test and they’re compared to each other. Your result is your intelligence quotient.

Its origins were noble, because it was designed to identify students who needed extra help in school. The creator of the test knew that people could change their results with good instruction.

However, that noble origin story was besmirched by what happened later. Eventually, IQ tests were used as a way to classify people in more brutal and rigid ways. The USA military used it as a cutoff for aspiring cadets. USA colleges use tests that effectively are IQ tests to let people in or not. The worst part is that bigots around the world injected pseudoscience into IQ and used it to decide who they think are worthy of life and who aren’t. It’s as awful as it sounds.

You may notice that helping struggling students sounds wonderful, and you may think that we should go back to that.

However, some people are deeply marked by the dark history of IQ. They have developed beliefs that protect them from the dangers of bigotry and IQ reductionism. They believe that tests aren’t useful at all to tell us something about anything. They believe IQ tests should be banished and never used.

Others people believe IQ tests are a snapshot of how a person answered the questions to a test in a given day. Take the same test days, months, or years after a great education, and the result will be higher. Additionally, these people notice that, in research, IQ scores are robustly associated with other things, such as quality of relationships, happiness, income, and other measures. They contend that learning about the world, about ourselves, and how to think critically and solve problems has massive domino effects in peoples’ lives. Once again, these people believe that a test result one day doesn’t doom you for life and doesn’t define you. A bad test result shows the gap that a good education would fill. These people know that a good education makes the mind curious, nimble, and open.

You get to impress the worst people in the world by giving them a number which generally indicates the quality of your education. Other than that, it's pretty useless.

I'm comfortably above average but comfortably below genius, not entirely sure whether that fits your personal definition of high so it felt worth clarifying.

In school, it meant that learning was something I could do with no actual effort. Without studying and without doing homework aside from what I did at my desk to pass the time before class started, I had as strong a grasp on the subject as the students who did and comfortable grades. Then when I started college, that passivity suddenly didn't work anymore and I had no idea how to cope with it. I never actually learned how to learn, formally speaking.

Emotionally speaking, that whole thing was awful. It sucked when it was easy because I was so bored, it sucked when it was hard because I was so frustrated. I actually failed out of high school due to low attendance at the very end, then tested into the local college without a diploma because I still knew the material even with the problematic attendance, then got suspended from college due to now-for-the-opposite-reason low attendance and never went back. There was also unrelated shit going on, to be clear, but this that I'm describing was not a small part of my overall psychological state.

As an adult, it doesn't mean much of anything. While it's a bit easier for me to learn things than it is for the average person, the ease with which I learn things doesn't matter anymore because it's largely happening without other people's direct involvement or on any kind of schedule. On the occasion there needs to be an actual work training lesson I attend, it's something that only happens for a day and enduring a single day of tedious education is so very achievable compared to it being my entire life.

The biggest impact these days is that it makes me hate Aaron Sorkin.

My situation is I have an ability to recall a lot of really old information and some of it seemingly mundane. I can also synthesize all this together to make a good decision quickly.

This is basically what learning is, but it's a broader base I can pull from and the process is just faster.

I don't do well with forcing specific information to be cataloged. This means I wasn't a great student in classes where you needed to just remember things (eg history).

The other thing I've got going for me is being able to visually see things in my head. It might be memories, but it's also things for solving problems like this https://www.intelligencetest.com/questions/visualization/medium/3/8.html

My highest IQ I scored was 135, the lowest 115.
Do I get to part of it?
The IQ tests themselves are not great tools of measuring intelligence but it's the best we've got. And I'm glad people here realize that.

Well...I currently feel like I'm the dumbest one among friends. I've got ADD, so I lose concentration a lot and my friends don't seem to have that, while they have high IQ as well.

It's also good to see that you know that IQ is speed of measuring thoughts, because I don't think the current physicists have got it correct at all and fail even on a basic level of natural philosophy/science, but they certainly can whip up complex equations faster than either of us can.

It's like having all the correct opinions