Here is an unpleasant but typical response to my answer from Quora. This is such a typical response or answer that it could nearly be cookie-cutter. The IQ Forum is a great place for savants, geniuses, and other gray matter freakazoids to go on about their beloved secret secret, but sadly, it’s also badly invaded by IQ haters, almost all of them liberals.
You have to wade through endless tiresome pages of liberal screed and screed, of liberal snicker and snark about how IQ means nothing, how the tests don’t measure intelligence, how a high IQ only means you scored well on a test, how everything else in the world is important because IQ isn’t, how really high IQ people never talk about and those who do are not that smart (an American lie), how all of the other eight or 80 or 800 different types of intelligence are just as good as IQ, how everyone needs to shut up about IQ (so why are you in the IQ section?).
You must wade through eye-drooping yawners such as the endless annoying conflation of intelligence and wisdom (which are not the same thing), the neverending remarks about the obvious, like how intelligence does not equate to success – duh, the repetitive copypastas of very high IQ (160) Stephen Hawking’s painfully retarded remark about IQ, the constant examples of high IQ fools, idiots and failures, over and over, drearily and boringly.
All of the liberal IQ-hating tedium and pablum, tirelessly reiterated and regurgitated like some liberal verbal perpetual motion machine, on and on, the same old liberal same old, the same tired liberal shit, the same snoozing Liberal IQ Denial which is really, let’s face it, Liberal Intelligence Denial.
This post, while perhaps well-intentioned, ironically comes off a bit arrogantly. You seem consumed with how smart you are—navel-gazing, in a way, and feel free to express this only in the safety of an online medium. It smacks of narcissism that you feel is too dangerous to express in the real world. I may have misgauged the tenor of your post but it seems superfluous and states the same thing in more than one way. We get it, you’re incredibly smart.
I also think there’s something fallacious about your conviction: while your IQ may be in the 99.99 percentile, this is only one way of measuring intelligence. Does your IQ mean you could be Beethoven, Steve Jobs, or even a civil rights hero not requiring “objective” genius? Of course not. Only a TINY percentage of the population can achieve those heights and it’s safe to say that IQ is only a small piece of the puzzle. Other factors, not reflected in an IQ test include creativity, emotional intelligence, memory, articulacy and language skills, charisma, and more.
IQ Hatred is the American disease. It’s deeply embedded in our culture.
Sigh. You just can’t escape the liberal IQ bigots, can you? Even on the Quora form IQ section which has been specifically set aside for us high IQ types as nearly the only place in society we can talk about these matters due to attitudes like the commenters, the IQ haters and IQ bigots swarm right into our safe space IQ bar nevertheless and start throwing chairs around and picking fights.
We know. We know we can’t talk about this shit. We know it’s a social faux pas. We know it’s a social violation. Mostly due to prejudiced liberals like the commenter. That’s why we mostly never talk about it, especially in public with folks we do not know well. Alas, even here in the IQ section of Quora, our one tiny safe place on Earth where we can go on and on about our brains, it turns out to be a damned social violation even here.
Narcissism which is kept hidden to yourself and hence invisible to anyone isn’t even narcissism.
Narcissism is NPD – a personality disorder.
Anything less than that is relegated to self-esteem. Narcissism and self-esteem are synonyms. High narcissism just means high self-esteem, and it’s generally seen as a sign of good mental health. Thinking you are hot shit or the cock of the walk or having a high opinion of yourself is not necessarily narcissism. In fact, many such folks have robust mental health.
Vain and conceited people are not necessarily narcissists. Most such folks simply have high self-esteem.
Having a big ego does not necessarily mean narcissism. Most such folks simply have big egos, often because they have been very successful.
I have dealt, usually fleetingly, with some pretty famous people in my life. Like have their own Wikipedia entries famous. Quite a few had huge egos, and arrogance was extremely common. You feel like you are talking to a 20 foot high marble statue staring down its nose at you from above. It’s a very humbling experience. Yet I think most were not narcissists. They just had egos the size of small planets, and often for a good reason.
Narcissists are assholes. All their self-esteem is for themselves, and there’s nothing left over for anybody else. They don’t care about others. They don’t like or love others much. As long as you still love other people and treat them well, you can have an ego the size of Jupiter and not be a narcissist.
The conflation of egotism/self-esteem with narcissism is ubiquitous in US society. Usually the folks doing it are fairly educated. But they all wrong, and many are even projecting.
Once again, “hidden” narcissism isn’t even narcissism because narcissism is pathological and is defined by causing interpersonal difficulties. If nobody can see it, it’s not doing anyone harm.
PS I work in mental health.
Not sure what the commenter’s IQ is, but I wonder if it is in the very high IQ range. I doubt it. Because you see, someone in that range would not have written his post because he doesn’t understand very high IQ people, probably because he is not one. I have met many very high IQ people and observed many others in my life. My whole family is high to very high IQ.
The thing about very high IQ people is that it is quite common for them to be very aware of this fact most of the time. And most of them love to talk about it if you get them alone, contrary to the American lie that if you talk about, you don’t have a high IQ because supposedly high IQ people do not need to talk about it.
Well, maybe they don’t need to, but a lot of them do talk about it, and I will bet you good money they were not lying about their scores.
In fact, it is quite normal for a very high IQ person to talk about it. I have courted and dated a number of very high IQ women, and every one of them loved to talk about this subject. Why not? If you are superior in some way, go ahead and take your pride. You deserve it.
They are extreme outliers in terms of IQ, and like most people with a superior talent, they tend to be a bit obsessed with it, which is normal, and I say good for them.
As IQ rises, it becomes more and more one of the most important things in their lives. Their intelligence is so far above average that they are nearly aliens, and this is jarringly apparent nearly everywhere they go. Their minds are always churning along like a Cray computer and that’s hard to ignore. You are being reminded of your super-brain all the time, every hour, and often more than that. So it ends up being on your mind a good part of the time because your super-brain takes over your world and starts coloring and changing everything about it via its distorted lens.
By the way, navel gazing isn’t narcissism either. It’s called solipsism, and yes, I am solipsistic. A lot of very smart introverts are. Nearly all females are. As you don’t like solipsists, I assume you don’t like females.
Lastly, IQ clearly does not correlate with success. My individual income last year was in the 27% bracket, and that’s the most money I made in my life. Nevertheless, such outcomes are not uncommon for very high IQ people, and as IQ rises above mine past 150 and especially to 160 and up, this problem gets so much worse. A lot of 160+ IQ men are single, celibate, never married, painfully introverted, and living in poverty or near poverty in a single apartment. It’s nearly a typical outcome.
Lastly, IQ is the only measure we have that measures intelligence.It is a test of, more than anything else, pure brain speed.
- A higher IQ means a faster brain.
- It also means a more efficient brain. The higher the IQ, the better your brain utilizes glucose.
- It also means a larger brain. As IQ rises, so does brain size.
- Higher IQ also means superior abstract thinking.
- Higher IQ means better short term and long term memory and also faster and better recall (to contradict the commenter’s statement about no tie between IQ and memory).
- Very creative people tend to have high IQ’s. The best musicians and artists tend to have high IQ’s. I’ve known a lot of them.
Success in our society is not well correlated with intelligence, as society tends to value a lot of things more than sheer brains. This is the lesson of the commenter’s last paragraph where you discuss things IQ does not measure.
IQ is the only measure of intelligence that we currently have. It’s not that it’s only one of the ways – it’s the only way, period.
The commenter makes the mistake of correlating geniuses – Jobs, Beethoven, MLK – with very high IQ people in the genius category. 1% of the US is in the genius category. That’s 3.3 million geniuses in the US. Not all of them will grow to be the folks the commenter discusses of course. Geniuses like Jobs and Beethoven are very rare. Of course they also tend to be very high IQ, but just because you are one of the 3.3 million does not mean you are like Beethoven.
This is another mistake that Americans often make – conflation of genius in the sense of Mozart or Jobs with genius as an IQ metric = 140 IQ, just a place on the IQ highway. They are not the same, but people like the commenter conflate them all the time for some unfathomable doggoned reason.
Creativity: The most creative people tend to have high IQ’s.
Emotional intelligence: Right. Although EQ and IQ correlate fairly well, many very high IQ people are social retards or especially social failures. And as IQ rises, in fact, social failure, mostly due to sheer weirdness, rises.
Memory: IQ measures memory.
Articulacy and language skills: IQ measures language skills very well, articulatory skills, not much at all.
Charisma: Of course not and in fact as IQ rises into the very high IQ range, charisma drops off dramatically and reverse charisma such as open social failure sets in.
