Levels of smart and how do the the median of intelligence manage to sound smart to smart people?

The Normal Person* and the Savants* thinking have a lot to do with your intelligence quota. The cut point is where an individual’s own personal benefit outweighs consideration of what is fair and right to others or the common good. This may not always be easy to tell from the outside as self-serving motivations are often incorrectly linked to either the male or female gender, rather than the intelligence of an individual.

You know the expression “Monkey see, monkey do”? An unintelligent person lives their life by mimicking others, trying to fit in. They do as others do or the people in the group they want to befriend. A person of relatively low IQ considers “fitting in” a measure enough for IQ, and for the most part, it is.

At what point on the IQ bell curve a person is smart enough to mimic highly intelligent people without bringing any original thinking onto the table and at least initially without appearing idiotic doing so. When they do have an original thought it is usually either narcissistic, self-serving, or manipulative. So there is a point when a person stops being obviously stupid and starts being pretty convincingly smart in their “self-” expression, without actually being so. Sometimes, this ability turns into high narcissism in a person who thinks “fooling people” makes them superior.

Average person’s idea of “smart.”

Now, what an average person considers “smart” is the ability to not get into trouble in society and the ability to hold a steady job. What I mean by “intelligence” is the ability for original abstract, analytical, and logical thinking and the artistic, philosophical, and scientific conclusions and products of that thinking. So when I refer to “smart people” on this website, I do not mean “average people,” as in people who can hold an (upper) middle-class job and have an average IQ.

Granted, intelligence is a matter of opinion in this light, too, but then again, people who have a low IQ define “smart” as what normal people would consider “paranoid, mistrusting, abusive, lying, and manipulative”, rather than, well, “capable of critical thinking”. Then, those with a very low IQ (what the smart people of any level might call “mouth breathers”) don’t bother considering what “smart” is at all, as their attention is fully on physical strength and violent dominance, and they don’t think “smart” is a good thing at all, but rather gets in the way of your social status.

Explaining average people to average people.

Now, a little jab; if you consider ‘maintaining a normal life’ a pleasant intellectual challenge, you can’t really be referred to as “smart” but “normal“.

The fact I have to struggle to EXPLAIN the obvious, that AVERAGE means median, normal, regular, nothing to write home about, not impressive nor worrying, to point that when you are in the middle there are people who are “better than you” and “worse than you”, which puts you in the middle. The middle is a good place to be, but it is not either “stupid” or “smart”.

That said, smart people can’t manage “a normal life” because it simply isn’t intellectually challenging or rewarding, but it is incredibly challenging emotionally speaking. Smart people living a normal, regular lifestyle will get easily depressed and/or driven to substance abuse to find relief from the intellectual black hole they find themselves in. Being intelligent doesn’t mean you don’t have problems, but it means the problems also come with a bucket load of solutions that benefit the entire world.

I also quip that “someone who is just smart enough to be accepted to Mensa is smart enough to have all the problems related to intelligence, but is not smart enough to solve them.” (Like taking pride in being fake-depressed for “being intelligent” when you just barely scampered over the 140 point threshold, and couldn’t possibly even KNOW how depressing it is to be in the company of stupid people and see no way out. Oh my god can I tell you stories of an ex-boyfriend. Anyway.)

Bill Gate’s idea of a smart person.

I am not as smart as Bill Gates is (I don’t think, lol), however it is a difficult comparison as our area of expertise is very different. And definitely whatever extra Bill Gates has in comparison to me, is well… Extra. Where he crunches numbers like a bowl of breakfast cereal, I struggle to even fit one single loop into my mouth, but mathematically I am an absolute idiot to the level of being laughably bad at it. However, I think I am smarter than him in dissecting humans, and understanding their inner workings with the same ease as he programs a computer… But only because I’ve put my full attention to it.

However, what Bill Gates is known for is his insatiable appetite for knowledge. Someone like him or Elon Musk can basically read a book about something they initially know nothing about… Like how to build a rocket, and then actually do it. This literally means the ability to absorb the knowledge of a rocket scientist in a matter of weeks or months. That kind of intelligence is INCOMPREHENSIBLE to those of us with a lower IQ, but to them, it’s child’s play, quite literally. They do it because they enjoy it the same way an average child enjoys building Legos.

Interest vs intellectual ability.

Intelligence is fuelled by interest and limited by ability.

I am contemplating myself, if I had the INTEREST (and financial resources) to build a space rocket, would my IQ suffice to figure it out? Tentatively… Maybe. I’d take LONGER than either Gates or Musk to do it, but I think I could figure it out on my own. Maybe if I could save like 100 people or more in the next 50 years by designing a space rocket to take them out of here before the planet explodes my motivation would be on par. It would be best left to Musk of course, but if he wasn’t available… 😀

Oddly enough, my interest would be tweaked if I came closer to the solution of artificial gravity rather than doing what has already been done. (I do what I do because what I’m doing has been attempted by thousands of people before me, most of whom have given up before starting believing the problem is impossible to solve, and nobody has cracked the problem yet… I am cracking it. And yes. I’m making it seem easy at times. At times, I sound like I have no idea what I’m talking about. To me, this is as easy as it is easy for Bill Gates to design a PC, Elon Musk to figure out space travel, and Nikola Tesla to harness electricity. But I don’t know how smart this makes me, but I know I’m working at my own peak.)

In reverse, if Bill Gates or Elon Musk had the interest in figuring out the dynamics between human beings in the realm of spiritual psychology, could they do it? Absolutely they could. Would they be able to stifle the arrogance that would come with such understanding? I don’t know. They might learn it faster than their moral code can keep up with, to be honest… Whereas I’ve been teaching myself to keep my ego and sense of entitlement in check for thousands of years – and there’s some chaining of it to be done, too.

Creative person vs non-creative intellectual.

the Normal Person* are non-creative, non-adaptive people despite their IQ. They MAINTAIN things. They are creatures of habits and conformity, even at high IQ levels. They repeat things that have already been created, and rarely adapt their knowledge to something new unless they are being TOLD TO by someone they consider a part of their alliance.

the Savants* are creative, adaptive people despite their IQ. They acquire knowledge and then apply it to new situations and create new things, ideas, approaches, and solutions to problems. All unsolicited NEW ideas ever in history have been created by a Savants*.

Evolution is completely dependent on the intelligence of a Savants*, while societies and stability are dependent on the Normal Person*. Interestingly, considering the Normal Person* hate diversity, they are also the ones creating it. In their need to force everyone into being the same, they inevitably create different groups of different kinds of people.

If you want a space rocket built right from clear, specific instructions, put the Normal Person* on the job. An Savant* can’t build anything without making a few improvements… And if you’re strapped for time, those improvements may turn out to become problems instead. However, if there IS a problem, the Normal Person* can’t solve it (and will attempt brute force instead of intelligence). Fixing existing problems and creating new solutions is a job for the Savants*.

Intelligent people are starved for company.

When you belong to the smartest 10% elite (and this rarely means academic excellence, as academia is built for the average or low genius person in mind), you will be starved for company. You are nearly always the smartest person in the room, and your loneliness shows. You’re still nowhere near Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Even though you understand most people with relative ease (as long as it’s a non-intellectual thing in question) you feel misunderstood as people who are not as smart as you cannot understand the workings of your mind… At all. It’s like seeking an intellectual counterpart in an ape… That said, I have met plenty of apes that seem to outsmart an average human with no trouble at all.

Regardless, as smart people think smart all day long, they don’t question it when someone else APPEARS SMART. Quoting a smart author you’ve never read yourself, without actually citing them, having learned lines from books and forgotten the author and think you thought it yourself, a non-intellectual person can actually sound pretty smart to an intelligent person – perhaps a bit worn out and unoriginal, but they may attribute it to “we’ve just met and they’re holding their cards close to their chest”.

There are smart people who constantly cram in books and will immediately know if someone is quoting direct passages out of a book without citing the source, but you can be smart and not realize someone is quoting a book they’ve read – not written.

Average people see smart people who are not famous for being smart as “fakes” or “wind-bags”.

A non-intelligent person will always treat “smart people” as “showoffs” or “fakes” or “wind-bags” because their logic makes little sense to them, and they don’t truly BELIEVE in people smarter than themselves unless it’s Bill Gates, Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs – for a person to be considered smart by the average person, they need something tangible to be given as evidence… Preferably a crap ton of money or power (neither of which is a direct sign of intelligence) and a lot of other intellectuals point them out as intelligent person.

All the average people see and hear is someone “trying to be smart” without really even knowing what “smart” is, or someone trying to “act interesting/artistic” and “seeking attention”. In reality, smart people are smart because that’s what smart people do and are and think. Average people thus feel often insulted by smart people because “they’re trying too hard” and “act narcissistic”, but in reality, again, we’re talking about a difference in IQ which is an inborn trait rather than a learned behavior… But “acting smart” IS a learned behavior.

How can she be so smart and stupid at the same time?

NORMALLY average people don’t bother trying to “act smart”. Intelligent people are used to people of lower IQ than themselves much more than people of their own IQ, but they also know MOST PEOPLE don’t act smarter than they are by putting it on. So when someone ambitious tries to put on a fake expression of intelligence “for the circles”, they are likely to buy it, up to the point when they realize that “OMG you have NO IDEA what you’re actually talking about, do you?”

So, intelligent people tend to make the mistake that they initially think a person acting smart actually IS smart, while average people assume a person acting smart is simply after attention and tries to get into their circles by pretending to be smarter than everybody – therefore “acting smart” to an average person may seem as if it is compensating for social insecurities. This belief is obviously then fortified by the fact smart people often feel drawn back home to continue whatever intellectual project they have going on, rather than wasting their time socializing with half-wits.

Normal people tend to believe intelligent people suffer from being alone and are alone simply out of their fear of not being accepted, but that is not why smart people choose to stay alone a lot.

 

 

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*) Term changed after this post was originally written. Fractions of old terms may exist elsewhere in the post. Read about term updates.
**) Narcissists are Young Souls left alone to survive and they're doing their best. Their emotional age ranges from 3 to 17 -year old. The younger, the more severe the narcissism.

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