You haven’t met my ex-sister-in-law, who used to start her arguments with “Well, I may not be as smart as most people, but…” because although a perpetual D student, she had lots of common sense and what her grandmother called “gumption.”
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I don’t think I’m smarter than average, honestly. I’m afraid I’m not very bright at all in fact! I just managed to figure out how to jump through some particular hoops, and honestly, I’m not very good at that either, considering I took so long to do it and have yet to secure a tenure track type job-thingie.
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“And not generally rigged in favour of rewarding intelligence.”
There, fixed it for ya.
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Almost exactly my experience - sophomore, impressed, then saddened as realization hit.
One more brick in the wall.
But haven’t genius and madness always been linked, at least in art and music and writing? That’s not scientific, but it might be considered strongly anecdotal.
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To be fair, some of us got grad degrees because we’re just weird nerdy types who wanted to study our interests or because we care about the undergraduates we get to teach. Sometimes even both!
I will say that I do know lots of people who got puffed up overinflated egos by being so much “better” than other students and having their ego constantly stroked by the professors, etc. But many of us are here because we love it, despite the fact that college professor no longer carries the same prestige or often even middle class life style that it once did, probably because women and POC are making serious inroads in the academy.
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Sounds like my mom. Her sentences often run “I know I’m not very smart but” followed by something highly intelligent and insightful that nobody else thought of.
I don’t think that’s true, it’s just that the outliers get more press. Perhaps you’re thinking of mathematicians?
“Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.” ― G.K. Chesterton,
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A life in academia is very different from earning a graduate degree, but I do not think we disagree at all.
The gentleperson poster seemed to suggest that earning a graduate degree is a more legitimate measuring stick for ones intellectual penis than MENSA membership. I was pointing out it is just another measuring stick when used as suggested.
A graduate degree in something interesting is an indicator, but no guarantee, someone may be interesting. EXACT SAME THING FOR A FELONY CONVICTION, BTW.
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I think that for almost every task there is a sort of minimum amount of intelligence that you need to be able to really perform it. If you want to serve coffee well, you need to be able to do a certain amount of mental weightlifting, but being able to do more than that doesn’t help, and most people get that. What I think most people don’t get is that this goes all the way up. The same is true for rocket surgeons and brain scientists. If you fall below a certain threshold you just won’t be able to perform the duties properly, if you greatly exceed it that’s no reason to think you’ll be exceptional at the job - other things like good communication skills are probably more important.
I think there are very few endeavours were more intelligence means better performance.
But that could simply be the tendency for us to notice people being intelligent when they are otherwise flawed. If a genius uses their intelligence to justify doing crazy and/or awful things, we’d all think that it was remarkable how smart they were. If someone of similar intelligence gets along with other people, does a good job at work, and likes to spend time with their kids, we don’t write any stories about them.
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"in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is set aside for special treatment. He’s given medication and counseling, and special therapy around the upper front part of his head. And eventually, if he’s very lucky, he’ll learn to stop talking nonsense to everyone else…
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Yep. All the people I know who’ve served time are deeply and permanently damaged, which does tend to make them “interesting”.
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I recall reading a story in a magazine (when I was in a gifted class in middle school - just so you know my IQ dick is huuuge! or was when I was a kid…) about an explorer stumbling on a village of blind people and they thought he was crazy because he claimed to “see” things and the eyes he had must have been the source of his craziness since it was the only thing they could tell was different about him.
Edit: Looks like it was an H.G. Wells story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind
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All that’s fair enough of a point. Like I noted, plenty of people believe that learning to jump through these particular hoops indicates some sort of inherent intelligence on their part, and it’s just that - the ability to jump through hoops. And depending on the field, getting a job in academia is no longer guaranteed.
So, really, how smart are those of us here, doing just that! 
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This, and it’s known that depression and anxiety actually inhibit cognitive function. I say this as another high-testing person with a diagnosis.
Although I suppose intelligence and processing could be considered different things.
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Well, if you’re a Bear of Very Little Brain, I’m told your IQ test results will increase if you learn to play a new instrument or practice n- back until you can increase n.
But I think the idea that IQ measures “how smart you are” is a self-evident fallacy.
It just measures a very specific type of problem-solving ability, that is very admired in our currently dominant industrial culture.
The history of intelligence measurement in a nutshell: When Galton designed his IQ test, he based it on head size and shape, grip strength, and similar physical attributes. It didn’t work as he thought it should. So other eugenicists and fellow travelers kept trying different things until they finally found something that correlated with their prejudices, a test that confirmed what they “intuitively” knew - that is, that their own social class and ethnicity are smarter than everyone else’s.
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I think that people with high IQs have useful skills in manipulating symbols, generalizing, reasoning, explaining and so on. They are skills like any others, a combination of intrinsic talent, training and practice, and they are at the heart of our arts, crafts and sciences.
I think people associate those skills with mental illness is because people with those skills can better dramatize and exploit their mental illnesses than most people. When Joe or Jane Blow, who never got taught to read or write and was never trained in a story telling tradition, gets severely depressed, he or she just suffers. When someone skilled in painting, story telling, or even writing programs, gets severely depressed, he or she can exposit that depression through painted symbols, in the form of narrative or even by the sheer intensity of their coding.
There are many great artists and scientists who have not experienced mental illness, polar voyages, life in a war zone or pasta bolognese. Those who have experienced such things, however, are more likely than most people to have those experiences as driving forces behind their creativity.
My guess is that people who join Mensa are more likely to participate in studies linking intelligence to something else, perhaps enjoyment of thin crust pizza.
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Eight percent of a week is 13.44 hours. Where is this job that lets you see the world and make good money while working less than two days a week?
Two separate things…JLW repeated the same boring trope that a degree is measuring yourself against other’s standards…getting a grad degree takes about 12 hours a week of dealing with others. And then whatever it takes to do the professional development on your own.
No, I’m saying on average, the person that has a grad degree has a general IQ of about 1.5 to 2 STDEV above the norm. I’m saying that to get a graduate degree, we can correlate this. And the correlation is pretty stable. I mean, this is degree dependent…we know which degrees correlate more and have a higher predictive nature.
But you seem to have the answers…
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