What usually happens is that you’re top 1% in certain skill. There are still other skills where you’re not top 1%. Most people always keep learning from other people. A top 1% mathematician may not be top 1% anxiety manager.
Exactly this. I like to think I’m pretty fuckin smart when it comes to sysadmin. I’m an actual moron when it comes to software development. Just all depends on the skills you learn.
Some of the smartest people I know are some of the dumbest people I know.
A historian who falls in with one MLM after another. A senior engineer who doesn’t trust doctors because homopathy is the only real medicine. A dentist who thinks the moon landing was fake. A doctor who warns people off “seed oils” and onto a “paleolithic, mostly-meat diet”.
Ime, people can get “too smart” for their own good, and start to believe they’re qualified to speak even outside their own specialties. The smartest thing you can do is recognize where you’re qualified, and where you’re an idiot, and in the places you’re an idiot, stay quiet and listen.
What most people think of as being “really smart” is polymaths. These are people that suck up knowledge from many fields and make novel connections. It is believed that they are extremely rare. Some even argue they don’t exist
Modern academia focuses on a high degree of specialization which excludes most polymaths. So we have specialists that are highly intelligent in their narrow field of expertise but ignorant in most everything else. The bulk of the “smart” 1% are these types of people.
I think it’s important to understand that a role does not equate to intelligence. There is a spread of intelligence in all of society and in all roles.
Look at medickne: there are 10s of thousands of doctors but they are not selected for “intelligence”. Sure, passing high school exams is part of it but those are often biased towards memory. But other parts of selection are around social biases through interviews, university selection processes at. Also in places like the US selection is based around wealth - you’re more likely to get a place in a medical school. If you can fund it versus not.
So already you have a mix of intelligence in the field. Then within that you will have intelligent people and idiots. Someone had to place last in their medical school year, and someone had to be the worst in the entire years cohort across all medical schools.
I’m a doctor and I’ve met plenty of doctors who are fucking idiots frankly. People who sail through exams because of good memories for example - they are not intelligent. Intelligence is more than that - problem solving, creativity etc - but memory is mostly what we test for because it’s easy and lazy way to test students. The other elements of being a doctor are taught but not tested well - instead people gravitate to sub specialties that rely on specific skills beyond memory.
Being a doctor or an engineer or a dentist does not automatically mean you are intelligent. Our whole society is geared around lazy testing and metrics of academic success, and there are also other elements to those jobs where you can succeed regardless of intelligence (for example how much intelligence does it take to extract a tooth? Or take out an appendix 100 times?). You can succeed in these careers without high intelligence. That is not to say doctors are stupid either (the upper quality of medical practitioners can be incredible), just that the minimum standard is lower than people imagine.
And for me personally the brightest person I ever knew works in advertising. I’ve met a lot of very intelligent people in Medicine but also a lot of idiots. I’ve met a lot of intelligent people in scientific research fields, but also in computing and business and through family etc. Job titles are not a good metric alone - a blunt but flawed metric at best.
Another post really testing the limits of the sub
Not particularly dumb. The truly dumb as rocks people are probably about 30% - otherwise it’s usually just a question of knowledge specialization… if you can Encyclopedically recite every card in MtG then you’ll generally be looked down on but only because it’s not a monetizable knowledge.
The 99% are not as dumb as a box of rocks.
Have a look at Normal Distributions. If you look at IQ scores, 100 is by definition “average” - that is the peak where the normal curve is. 50% will be at or below 100 IQ and 50% will be at or above 100. The actual numbers beyond that depend on the test and that validity of such tests are hightl contentious (due to cultural biases and biases of what is tested - intelligence is difficult to define but is more than memory and even problem solving).
Assuming a simple symmetric normal distribution, 97% will be within 2 standard deviations of the mean. About 1.5% will be above that and 1.5% below that.
But that is not to say that anyone from 50-97.7 percentiles (score of 100+) is unintelligent. Plus people have different skills and areas of intelligence. Someone may be in the top 1% when it comes to mathematical ability but not when it comes to English literature. Also someone may be incredibly artistically creative but useless at maths.
So there may be different normal distributions for different facets of intelligence. A different 1% of people may be at the top for maths ability compared to the 1% of people at the top of science or writing or medicine. That’s also not to suggest that everyone is a genius at something, but rather that there is more variability and value in people at the top end of the curve than just the top 1% by one measure.
Most people are not as dumb as rocks. However it is true that by definition over half the population will have a below average IQ. However I’m sure a large majority of people imagine themselves to be in the top 50% - no one wants to believe they are unintelligent.
Unfortunately stupid people who believe they are intelligent are a dangerous thing - just look at some of the politicians spouting moronic nonsense yet are high profile and powerful. Now multiply that out to all areas of life and you have a problem. About half the people you meet in life are likely to be below average intelligence - assuming you mix freely and randomly. If you don’t mix freely then you may be in a biased bubble where you spend time with people of a similar intelligence and not appreciate the true variation. I think that is more important than worrying about the 1%.
