I recently discovered that I’m in the top 1% of IQ scores (if that’s the kind of smart you’re talking about!), which was surprising to me. I knew I was smart, but not that smart. Looking back through my life, though, I do notice a trend. I pick up new skills and knowledge very quickly. Like I frequently surprise myself “how do I know that?” When I stated out as a young person, this was a big disadvantage. School was intensely boring to me, which caused me to lack interest and focus and check out of it. So I did poorly. In the working world, starting out, I was on the same level as everyone else, I had no real advantage. I learned things quicker, so I advanced quicker. Now, towards the end of my career, I see that the faster acquisition of knowledge, while not really too much faster than my peers, was enough that now I have a dramatically different perspective than other people. The cumulative effect of which is that I have been able to remove lots of glass ceilings and allowed me to avoid lots of obstacles that many others of my peer group have not been able to do. All of that said, I also agree with a lot of the other posters… there are so many types of Intelligence, the IQ score is merely this one aspect and is NOT a great predictor of actual success, although in my experience it has been a great advantage.
TL;DR for the IQ type of intelligence, it basically just means faster knowledge and skill application. Depending on how you apply that it could provide a cumulative long-term advantage, but brings its own challenges as well.
I love how tactfully you avoided the actual question of how fucking stupid everyone else is. Kudos!
LOL! Well it does astound me sometimes the things that come out of other peoples’ mouths! :-) That said, I don’t always have all the information, either, so it’s not super productive to view others as dumb, everyone just has different information, so I like to listen to what others have to say and how they formed their opinions. That helps me test whether I have all the facts or have considered all the perspectives. It’s hard not to be arrogant and rush to judgment, but I have learned that I am wrong just as often as everyone else, so I need to listen to other people!
When I was a kid, I was a huge asshole without realizing it because I thought all the other kids weren’t trying or were specifically being coy with me. I thought they weren’t trying their best like I was. I would get really mean about it. Turns out they were trying their best maybe.
As far as I’ve seen, so many people don’t think their way through things but imitate their impression of those things instead.
We once had this girl about a year younger than I was over at the house and we were gonna have her drive my go-kart. Everything seemed fine until she blasted off into the corn field and we had to chase her down and get her out of there. She just pressed the gas and the brakes at the same time(breaks were a one tire friction band POS) and wiggled the steering wheel back and forth because that’s what she thought driving was. She had absolutely no idea that she was supposed to be directing the go-kart’s functions.
It completely shattered my impression of other people. I had no idea anyone could be so absurdly stupid. She basically thought of vehicles as magic and I suspect many people navigate through life thinking the same.
This is part of why I worry about self driving cars and the kids who are growing up without seeing the incremental progress of stuff like computing and AI.
How would one describe “how stupid” these 99% are? Sure, you can take the distribution of IQ, though that doesn’t mean much.
A good idiom to think about: 99% of people believe, that 99% of people are idiots.
There’s this worry that high intelligence itself drives you to be more dismissive of other people. I don’t really think that’s the case. I think intelligence can help you understand and sympathize better with other people.
Anyway, if you go by IQ, the upper one percentile score about 135 or higher, so that’s where your dividing line would be in raw numbers.
But since intelligence is distributed in a continuum, it wouldn’t make sense for everyone at or above 135 to consider everyone else equally ‘dumb’ - even if they did choose to use the IQ-scale to gauge everyone’s ‘stupidity’.
To do so would be like you getting first place in a spelling contest by a single point and then concluding that the person in second place (and everyone following) must be completely illiterate.
All that being said, the one percent really are very far from average. One way of putting it is that these people are further from the average than average people are from the ‘extremely low’ range (>69).
If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree…
People know different things, “smart” is an nebulous concept that changes for each person. We even have colloquialisms for different types like book smarts and street smarts.
