The original question was, Why Are Some Extremely Smart People Extremely Quiet?” You can read the thread here on Quora, incidentally one of my favorite sites.
A lot of answers are given, but many of them are the usual stupid PC Cultural Left crap –
“Some people are this, some people are that, some people are everything. Some smart people are quiet, and some are very loud. Some dumb people are quiet, and some are quite loud.”
What stupid answers, huh? But every time you see a question about intelligence on Quora, you see an endless list of the same type of retarded PC answers.
The reason is that the Cultural Left absolutely despises the idea of intelligence, especially true intelligence such as brain speed, brain efficiency and memory capacity. This is the sort of thing that is measured on IQ tests. The Cultural Left hates IQ tests with utter fury, and furthermore the very idea that there is such a thing as intelligence drives them into utter conniptions. In fact, the PC crowd tends to say that there is no such thing as intelligence.
This is probably because the Left is addicted to the insane idea that everyone is equal and everyone has equal abilities. Certainly everyone is born with equal abilities. The former commenter on here Swank actually made statements like this countless times. It is incredible how a very bright and highly educated person like Swank could actually believe such a thing, but Leftism is more about suspending belief than anything. Like religion, a lot of Cultural Left precepts must simply be taken on faith.
In addition, once we start talking intelligence, the conversation might drift into some uncomfortable truths like differing intelligence among races and ethnic groups and until recently among the genders. Furthermore, intelligence has an obvious genetic component, and the Left hates the idea that any human behavior is genetic with a fanatical passion. They don’t want to hear about any of these things, so they would just as soon shut it all down.
Anyway, some people did give sensible answers.
I would agree that highly intelligent people tend to be quieter than those who are less intelligent. The loudest people of all seem to have intelligence of maybe 100-115, I am thinking, but you are free to guess on your own.
Introversion: This is because as intelligence declines, extroversion tends to increase. As intelligence rises, especially beyond a certain point, people tend to become increasingly introverted. People with very high IQ’s of 160+ are often extremely introverted, even pathologically so.
Living in your head: We all live in our heads to some extent, but no one lives in their head more than extremely bright people. I imagine if we could look into the brains of very smart people, we might be amazed at the content in there. Very bright people are often having conversations in their head frequently of a question and answer type. The content of the inner conversation often changes rapidly, so as soon as they are ready to say something, their mind may have moved on somewhere else, or it may not be an appropriate thing to say anymore, as the conversation has moved on.
Face it, you’re either thinking or talking. You can do both, which is what smart people try to do when they talk, but it doesn’t really work very well.
As if it wasn’t obvious to everyone already, people who are yabbering all the time have for the most part shut down their brains, assuming they had one in working condition in the first place. The more you think, the less you talk because you tend to do one to the exclusion of the other. Very smart people spend a tremendous amount of time thinking, much more than less intelligent people. Since you can only do one or the other, people who think deeply all the time are likely to talk a lot less. Also smart people are likely to find the notion that one must partly shut down one’s brain in order to talk away to be outright terrifying and even a bit dangerous.
Weighing what to say: Although very bright people are often regarded as social retards, I doubt if there if there is much good evidence of this. For instance, for perhaps every ten things I think about saying to people as I move about in public, I might say one or maybe two of those things. All of the others are censored out as unacceptable, unlikely to go over or more likely to fall flat or bomb out.
This is because before they say something, bright people often weigh it in their heads quite a bit from all sorts of angles to determine whether it would be an acceptable thing to say or not, whether it would fall flat, bomb out or be seen as weird, crazy, offensive, too familiar, out of context, too forward, too personal, or too sexually oriented for the situation.
Bright people tend to be inhibited because in the course of their lives, they have seen countless comments by themselves and others fall flat or worse due all of the above things. Of course all people experience this, but extroverts might not care so much, and I doubt if they weigh their words so carefully. Bright people are often shy and sensitive, so it hurts them when their comments fall flat, bomb out or are regarded as weird, crazy or offensive. So very smart people often choose their words very carefully if they have any social skills at all. This is why I regard the idea of the brainy social retard as a bit of a fraudulent cliche.
Being extremely observant: Most people don’t realize this, but bright people are often observing everything around them very carefully, and in many cases, they are trying to figure out, analyze and put the situation in front of their eyes together in the most sensible ways. They are searching for patterns, making hypotheses, and yes, engaging in a lot of generalizations along the way because if you are in the habit of pattern recognition, you must be generalizing constantly. Indeed the wisest man of all is the one who has figured out the most patterns in life and has made the most and most accurate generalizations about the patterns that he has seen.
That in effect is wisdom right there.
Inhibition: This can be thought of best as recognition of and being chastened by the notion that one can open their mouth and make a complete ass of themselves, hence caution about speaking. One of the problems of being very bright is that one observes a world full of people saying and doing stupid, irrational, and just flat out wrong or incorrect things all day every day.
Continuous exposure to obvious human error is very chastening, humbling and a bit frightening because the bright person realizes that by speaking or acting too hastily, they risk saying or doing stupid things of the sort that they painfully observe day in and out. Hence the notion of “Better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt” is often floating around in the back of most bright people’s minds like a flashing warning sign on a highway at night.
Caution: Smart people tend to be cautious. As IQ declines, people become less and less cautious. Indeed, an argument can be made that “Life is an IQ test.” Careful studies have shown that more intelligent people quite simply make fewer mistakes and do fewer stupid things than less intelligent people. As a result, they have fewer health problems, and they actually live longer.
And believe it or not, as IQ lowers, the rate of accidents increases. That is, less intelligent people tend to have far more accidents, both nonfatal and fatal, than brighter people. The more cautious someone is, the more likely they are to think carefully about what they say so as to be more likely to say things that go over well and make fewer conversational flops and failures.
Most conversations are pretty stupid: Most bright people would agree with Robert Frost:
“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”
The smarter someone is, the more likely they are to think of a typical conversation in public as consisting of a bunch of not very smart people talking about a bunch of idiotic and unimportant things. Indeed, most conversation can be thought of as akin to grooming behaviors among our primate cousins. Dumb pointless conversation is like picking nits out of your loved one’s fur: it works to bring people together and make people feel closer, warmer and more friendly towards each other. In other words, it is social WD-40 – a lubricant to enhance human bonding and socialization.
Nevertheless, many bright people react in horror to the idea of sitting around with a group of not real smart people talking about inconsequential things.
In males, it’s gossip, sex, women, the weather, sports, fishing and hunting or whatever.
In females, it’s gossip, who’s fucking who, cute guys, clothing and makeup and that’s about it, not necessarily in that order.
Smart people tend to be bored out of their skulls in these situations unless they are so high on booze or dope that nothing matters anymore. Smart people tend to recoil from the notion of a few hours of shooting the shit – to them the people who love to do this seem more like ultra-evolved baboons than sophisticated Homo sapiens.