This is a terrible measure. It's not "dumb people think they're smart, smart people think they're dumb, so just flip the answer." It's "everyone thinks they're roughly 75th percentile."
> The real geniuses will know it’s not their place to judge.
I was taught or picked up this sort of self-depracation thing as a child and I think it hurt me more then it gave me any sort of advantage.
A characteristic of intelligent people is that they know their limits, what they know and what they don't, how quickly or slowly they can learn a new thing and in general have a pretty good idea about their intelligence and how they might be positioned across other intelligent people they know well.
You can't get far if you can't perceive your limits and limitations. This is also where your modesty should come from; the understanding of your boundaries.
Me, too. It's a cultural clash. I had a really fragile up and down ego as a kid, and I tried to cover it up with the most normal, boring, appropriate modesty I knew, which in my family meant self-deprecation, but at school it didn't seem normal to people at all.
In retrospect the irony seems obvious. When I felt self-conscious about my problems I tried to use self-deprecation as a cloak of normality to hide behind, but everyone else saw it as using deviant behavior to intentionally draw attention to my problems.
It's weird how long it takes to realize how many of the assumptions you inherit from your family aren't shared by everyone else.
So true. But not weird, predictable. You need a lot of interactions with the world to understand how differently people might think and evaluate a given situation. You don’t know what you don’t know.
That's annoying, but it does give all of us some cover, in that no one can ever be certain whether any two logfromblammo users are actually the same person behind the keyboard. The HN logfromblammo is not the same person as the eBay logfromblammo, for instance.
I am very smart, in my own opinion--not a genius, but probably 90th percentile. It just doesn't seem to be rewarded very well, unless you turn yourself into an ass. So I'm smart enough to let my supervisors think they are smarter than I am, but not smart enough to get promoted above them and stop hiding it. The self-deprecation you taught yourself is probably part of the same act.
Making other people feel stupid just by being smart in their vicinity also seems sort of mean. By keeping my mouth shut, and dumbing down what I do say, people are free to assume that I'm no better than they are. But then again, if they ever do need someone smarter than they are, they wouldn't know to ask me.
Unless you know that everyone thinks they're 75th percentile, and then you can assume it's the deluded answer--and more likely, you're much closer to average. Eventually, this is not so much a question about intelligence, but self-awareness.
Ah, yes, that resolves it nicely, all tied up with a bow.
But... wait! If you're using that logic, it is itself probably very strong evidence that you're above average in intelligence!
Crap. Just when we had this all figured out!
(This is a "ha ha only serious" post; there's a serious point under it, too, but one better communicated this way than by just dumping it out.)
If almost everyone think they are 75th percentile, the reason for you being closer to the average is barely affected by the aforementioned fact, but because for most statistics over large populations, you are always more likely to be close to the average. It's the average.
It does however inform you that if you feel like answering the 75th percentile, your answer will be quite certain to be incorrect, except obviously for the 25% of the people that's in that percentile.
If you however does that inference, and realise you actually need to calculate the relative odds of the various answers given what we know of other people's answers to have a chance of a better than average answer, you are almost certainly in the 75th percentile. At least when it comes to understanding how tricky statistics can be, as that is an extremely rare skill to encounter.
People almost always seem to assume I'm in the 99th percentile or above, with the notable exceptions of being 'really stupid' from time to time. I don't really know what stupid has as a numerical equivalent, but lets assume 1% for symmetry.
Personally, I'm ambivalent between agreeing with the majority, and believing I'm quite a bit less gifted, maybe outright stupid.
I'd say I believe that I'm in or above the 75th percentile about 25% of the time, which would seem like par for the course, on average.