Hacker News Reader

Comment by plutonorm | Hacker News Reader

I think everyone is being a little rude and reactionary here.

People enjoy what they enjoy, it's not ok to demand that they change.

Suppose you lived in a world where everyone was obsessed with Pokemon. No one talked about anything else. Everyone around you had the mind of a 10 year old, in terms of intellectual and emotional development. How would you feel, could you really feel like you belonged?

There are people out there who are so smart that this how they feel about the people around them. They are just genuinely beyond them across the board, emotional, intellectual and spiritual development. They are lonely and they are bored and they are often a little bitter.

It's not their fault. It's not your fault. It just is. Leave them be and listen sympathetically to their point of view.

View on HN

The reaction here is more over the idea of "unknown unknowns". This poster doesn't demonstrate the self awareness to even suspect the average person might have something to teach them which, rather than super intelligence, belies a lack of emotional maturity.

Pointing to arbitrary metrics like phd reinforces this initial read. But at the end it's a numbers game; is a 6th sigma super intelligence on this board venting to the void with a throwaway, or is it an average/below average intelligence person who for one reason or another is emotionally stunted to the point of lacking both introspection or empathy.

I've, for one, seen far more people in the second camp (hell, there was a time when I struggled with identity where I was one, saved from eternal shame on the internet by the philosophy "lurk more"), than the first.

> There are people out there who are so smart that this how they feel about the people around them.

Nah. There are insufficiently socialized people who use this as a self-defense mechanism. Getting good at people is hard work, too, and there's not a lot of room to be sympathetic towards somebody who implicitly shit on that effort because of how so very very smart they think they are.

I know plenty of folks who are Actually That Smart who somehow have little trouble having a conversation with we mere mortals. They're happier, too. And sometimes--wait for it--they too learn something in a conversation. If GGP is actually as much of a bright light as his post wants us to think, surely interacting with we mere mortals in a way that doesn't clank is a solvable problem.

Is it generally true that people of extreme intelligence have richer lives in terms of emotional and spiritual development?

This is definitely not the case in my circle, where the MENSA candidates tend to sound a little bit like the Throw away comment, and if they don't have outright disdain for typical human connections and spiritual pursuits, they definitely don't spend the average amount of time on emotional or spiritual development.

That's the kind of people mensa attracts. Gifted people are often highly emotional. If you're gifted in one respect you are more likely to be gifted in another. Some are intellectually gifted. Some are emotionally gifted. Many are both. And I believe the chances that you are both increases as you move from gifted to highly gifted to profoundly gifted. The smartest person in the room will more often be a MENSA type, the smartest person in the company will more often be gifted across the board.

I'd say if you're not intelligent enough to also develop your emotional or spiritual development (it doesn't have to be forced you just need to not be closed to it), then you aren't really extremely intelligent, you're just trying to come off as one or more accurately your idea of how one would be like.

Last I heard MENSA has an annual fee, isn't that already a nice indicator of the intelligence of its members, to pay for an "I am smart" badge?

Sometimes they are paying to try to find other people like themselves. Sometimes they are paying to feel like they belong. And, yeah, a lot are paying to feel special or social signal.

But then, I'm not calling others idiots for not liking the same topics as me, which is what OP is doing, so the pushback nis warranted in this instance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com