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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

Moreover, there is difference between what people think about themselves and what they say about themselves. Politicians in particular are bound to say what is considered "appropriate". If confidence is popular and rewarded, they will call themselves smart and if humbleness is woke, they will say something humble.

> 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.

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I learned in school to conceal the actual extent of my intelligence, except when I was completely surrounded by other nerds. It's why I enjoy pseudoanonymity so much. As a log, I'm not obliged to conform to human standards and expectations. I'm the smartest and most popular chunk of trunk there is, and my only competition is from those who managed to register my username before I ever got there.

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.

Personally I strongly disagree with the author here.

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.

Depends which kind of intelligence. If what you wrote were true, there'd be a lot fewer sanctimonious libertarians with six figure programming jobs.

I believe my potential is unlimited on a long enough timeline, but any practical concrete endeavors or decisions I undertake are bound to be flawed, more or less. For example, I believe I can write an OS. But if you ask me where I think that project would be in a year if I started today and did my best, I would say it would probably be in pretty terrible shape overall, with some parts I'm proud of. And I would keep on working at it.

I was taught or picked up this sort of self-deprecation thing as a child and I think it hurt me more then it gave me any sort of advantage.

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.

> 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.

I'm over forty and still discovering new things that aren't universal.

Most people remark when noticing another's exceptional characteristics. For example, real geniuses tend to be constantly hearing about how genius they are.

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