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.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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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.
And I don't know Jack shit about either of those, but I can do a lot of different shit on a forklift efficiently and safely!
Same, but reversed.
Same here. I absolutely dread the days where I need to touch my companies infrastructure repo. A simple infra chsnge turns into a week of pain for me
Another post really testing the limits of the sub
But how will we ever learn where the boundary is if we don't go over it?
OP's post history is full of those
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.
Re the first : I wouldn't call those guys smart. I'd call them specialists.
Re the second : well yes, the truly smart guy would be aware of the limits of his understanding.
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%.
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To the top 1% truly smart people the other 99% are dumb as a box of rocks. But exactly how fucking stupid is that 99% ?
Do you actually think that they think that basically everyone is that dumb?
Do you really think that there is a magical line dividing people who have a difference of a fraction of a percentage of mental capacity?
intelligence, unlike wealth, is not a one dimensional metric
you could identify several hundred different definitions of identifying “top 1% intelligence” and get totally different results for every one
Define stupid. Define smart.
Back in high school, I scored 98th percentile on a general intelligence test. I can tell you right now, I was (and still am) pretty stupid in a lot of ways, I just happened to be good at that test. I feel like any "smart" person should know that everyone is good at doing their own thing.
Then again, had I scored 2 points higher, maybe I'd spend all my time sneering down my monocle at people. Who knows?
Lot of people with ADHD score super high in IQ tests because they just tickle their brains the right way. But they still struggle the with day to day tasks.
We are also forced to use our brains a lot more. ADHD induces novelty seeking. This exposes us to new information, which requires processing. It also messes up habit forming, so normal tasks require far more mental effort.
Since intelligence is a little like a muscle, it grows with exercise, it makes sense why a good number of people with ADHD score higher. It's one of the few useful side effects.
On a side note, raw intelligence does remarkably little to help with day to day tasks. No matter how much you throw at it.
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My advice is to drop the oversimplifications. Reality is complex and cannot be reduced to a single double digit number and a label. Use many qualifiers, recognize that we exist on multiple spectrums at the same time, and that stupidness is not a metric.
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Look up a bell curve, most measurements of intelligence that have been conceived end up making a bell curve distribution. That’s your answer, most people pool up around the middle with smaller tails on either end.
Exactly.
Which is to say, the average person is in fact not stupid, they are average. By definition.
If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree....
People know different things, "smart" is an nebulous concept that changes for each person. We even have colloquialisms for different types like book smarts and street smarts.
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The average American reads at the 7th- to 8th-grade level.
Well that's worse than I thought it would be. And judging from the graph at the bottom, it's not just a US only issue. Many other major countries (Germany, Denmark, England) have basically the same score.
The scores for the top countries (Japan and Finland) don't seem that high either (US had 270, Japan had 296), but I might be underestimating how much improvement that score change represents. Edit: was re-reading the article, and the literacy score is out of 500. So 296 as a score still has a long way to go.
The 99% are exactly as dumb as everybody.
If you are one of the 99% dumb ones, then you are unable to recognize the truly smart ones. For you, everybody appears exactly the same dumb.
If you are one of the 1% truly smart ones, then you know that you should not call the other ones dumb, and you should also not tell anybody that you are 100x smarter than they are.
So in the end, you never know, and everybody remains the same dumb as everybody.
I have a few issues with this, but I'll just point out the obvious one: being in the top 1% of something doesn't mean you're 100x better at it.
Uuuh look at mister monocle speaking aaahh oooh
I don't think the math of the post was the takeaway there.
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There's this worry that high intelligence itself drives you to be more dismissive of other people. I don't really think that's the case. I think intelligence can help you understand and sympathize better with other people.
Anyway, if you go by IQ, the upper one percentile score about 135 or higher, so that's where your dividing line would be in raw numbers.
But since intelligence is distributed in a continuum, it wouldn't make sense for everyone at or above 135 to consider everyone else equally 'dumb' - even if they did choose to use the IQ-scale to gauge everyone's 'stupidity'.
To do so would be like you getting first place in a spelling contest by a single point and then concluding that the person in second place (and everyone following) must be completely illiterate.
All that being said, the one percent really are very far from average. One way of putting it is that these people are further from the average than average people are from the 'extremely low' range (>69).
Top 1% is IQ of 135 or higher. They probably get along fine with 115 and up. It's basically on a bell curve, you can go look that up.
Being in the top 1% (or 0.1%) of the smartest people probably comes with its fair share of tradeoffs. For example I bet you find a ton of autistic people here with quite poor social skills which probably makes them appear more unintelligent to the average neurotypical person than they are.
Also what is intelligence anyway? For me personally what makes someone smart is not what they know but how they think.
Your assumption that intelligence means social tradeoffs is a nonsense. Intelligent people are more likely to be diagnosed with autism., adhd etc but that's from very low numbers in the population and also likely an in built bias. For example it's reasonable to assume more intelligent people are more likely to be aware there is an issue and go and seek a diagnosis. That doesn't mean the diagnosis is more common with intelligent people.
It is also a stereotype to assume intelligent people are emotionally incapable.
Frankly, we live in a society where the majority seemingly wish to see intelligence as some form of disability in itself. It's bizarre. I have to say I see this coming from US culture more than anywhere else (nerd and geek as insults for being intelligent for example; there aren't UK English equivalents).
We seem to be living in a society which celebrates mediocrity of intelligence and paints intelligence as something to be suspicious of or a bad thing. The most famous and lauded people are sports stars, music stars, film stars. A few writers, business people and scientists get a look in but ultimately we celebrate people doing pointless things like running faster more than we celebrate people winning Nobel prizes for science or pushing forward technology and medicine.
I don't understand what you base your claim on that the assumption is nonsense. I'm just speculating and I think there's greater that 0% chance that there might be a correlation there. You to then just come and confidently call it nonsense seems a bit arrogant.
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Magnus Carlsen isn’t good at astrophysics. Just think about what that means for a little while.
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When I was a kid, I was a huge asshole without realizing it because I thought all the other kids weren't trying or were specifically being coy with me. I thought they weren't trying their best like I was. I would get really mean about it. Turns out they were trying their best maybe.
As far as I've seen, so many people don't think their way through things but imitate their impression of those things instead.
We once had this girl about a year younger than I was over at the house and we were gonna have her drive my go-kart. Everything seemed fine until she blasted off into the corn field and we had to chase her down and get her out of there. She just pressed the gas and the brakes at the same time(breaks were a one tire friction band POS) and wiggled the steering wheel back and forth because that's what she thought driving was. She had absolutely no idea that she was supposed to be directing the go-kart's functions.
It completely shattered my impression of other people. I had no idea anyone could be so absurdly stupid. She basically thought of vehicles as magic and I suspect many people navigate through life thinking the same.
This is part of why I worry about self driving cars and the kids who are growing up without seeing the incremental progress of stuff like computing and AI.
I recently discovered that I'm in the top 1% of IQ scores (if that's the kind of smart you're talking about!), which was surprising to me. I knew I was smart, but not that smart. Looking back through my life, though, I do notice a trend. I pick up new skills and knowledge very quickly. Like I frequently surprise myself "how do I know that?" When I stated out as a young person, this was a big disadvantage. School was intensely boring to me, which caused me to lack interest and focus and check out of it. So I did poorly. In the working world, starting out, I was on the same level as everyone else, I had no real advantage. I learned things quicker, so I advanced quicker. Now, towards the end of my career, I see that the faster acquisition of knowledge, while not really too much faster than my peers, was enough that now I have a dramatically different perspective than other people. The cumulative effect of which is that I have been able to remove lots of glass ceilings and allowed me to avoid lots of obstacles that many others of my peer group have not been able to do. All of that said, I also agree with a lot of the other posters... there are so many types of Intelligence, the IQ score is merely this one aspect and is NOT a great predictor of actual success, although in my experience it has been a great advantage.
TL;DR for the IQ type of intelligence, it basically just means faster knowledge and skill application. Depending on how you apply that it could provide a cumulative long-term advantage, but brings its own challenges as well.
I love how tactfully you avoided the actual question of how fucking stupid everyone else is. Kudos!
LOL! Well it does astound me sometimes the things that come out of other peoples' mouths! :-) That said, I don't always have all the information, either, so it's not super productive to view others as dumb, everyone just has different information, so I like to listen to what others have to say and how they formed their opinions. That helps me test whether I have all the facts or have considered all the perspectives. It's hard not to be arrogant and rush to judgment, but I have learned that I am wrong just as often as everyone else, so I need to listen to other people!
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In terms of abilities, there's problems other people can solve that I never will even with years of study and training, and there are problems I can solve that my immediate peers never would, even with years of study and training.
In terms off knowledge, everybody you meet knows something you don't. (They might not have the ability to help you find what it is though)
In terms of skills, behaviors it seems like nobody ever considers trying and finding out for themselves, which is endemic across all levels of academia, government, business, and profession, and in that matter they are all as dumb as a bunch of rocks.
There's quite a range within that 1%. Someone in the top .001% would see the average person very differently than someone at .999%.
If you've met 1000 people, on average the top 10 of those would be in this hypothetical 1%. But there's quite a range in what those 10 people are like, isn't there? If you think about the 10 smartest people you've met, they're not all Stephen Hawking types. They're not all sci fi/fantasy fans. They don't all wear glasses. They don't all build servers as a hobby.
So, to answer your question, the opinions of those 10 people on how smart the average person is will likewise vary greatly.
There's lots of different kinds of intelligence.
Many types of intelligence are no help in a rap battle or a race to grab the high score in Galaga. So choose wisely.
Don't get to excited about 1%
NdGT points out that 1% difference in DNA has within it somewhere the difference between chimps and humans. Think about that 1% between us and the post humans that come after us, or aliens that are out there already.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, now remember that half of everyone is even dumber than them!"
More seriously, intellect can't actually be measured in an objective way because there's lots of kinds of smart that don't have to line up in any measurable way to still be valid.
Being a never ending fountain of factoids doesn't mean I have my dad's business sense for example.
About 74 stupidity units, give or take
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