Comment by YeGoblynQueenne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by YeGoblynQueenne | Hacker News Reader

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YeGoblynQueenne

Sorry, but I think you're reading way too much in the OP. Their account is compatible with their biggest issue being "extremelly high intelligence" coupled with a lack of empathy, but it's also compatible with ordinary intelligence coupled with some bad choices- and the chances are that the latter is the right explanation ("extremely high intelligence" should only be the case very, very rarely, by definition [1]).

I think you're also perhaps projecting a bit. You stopped (very) short of giving the OP a diagnosis of ASD ("high functioning"). Again, that's way, way too much to read into 1590 characters (not counting spaces) on an HN post.

Personally I think there's no way to answer OP with anything approaching good advice when going only by what they have posted. I understand that everyone will want to try anyway, but sometimes the best asnwer is to say "I don't know".

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[1] Funny aside. Suppose Alice has "extremely high intelligence" (EHI). Her EHI will make her aware of two facts: a) everyone seems to think they have EHI, or at least intelligence above the mean; b) only a tiny minority of those people can be right. The obvious corrolary is that Alice herself must be of average intelligence and only feel like she has EHI because that's a common cognitive bias of people with average intelligence. Therefore Alice will assume she has average intelligence and discount evidence to the contrary. In other words, people who have EHI will very rarely believe they have EHI, let alone say they do.

I think with any kind of crowd-sourced-internet-therapy like the OP is currently receiving, you're right, no one answering is going to be able to accurately understand and relate to the OP. That being said, if 50 kind people like /u/endymi0n share their own parsing of the situation and offer some advice, maybe 1 in those 50 is actually the advice OP needed, and their life could be positively affected.

The alternative, I guess, is that everyone correctly realizes they can't understand the full context of OP's position, and no one gives OP any advice and they continue down the road they're currently on. Just my view :)

You are right that the poster you replied to makes many assumptions. But I think his post is still very valuable to others: I have seen smart people shoot themselves in the foot doing just what was described and that advice is a good thing to keep in mind. My 2c.

I don't disagree! But the way I've mostly seen capable people fail is by becoming afraid to push themselves beyond the limits of their innate capabilities, into the territory where people stop telling them how smart they are and every step forward is paid for with pain, Little-Mermaid style.

By contrast, people who have not learned to put so much value on their being "above average" don't have as much trouble pushing further into that painful territory because to them, everything is pain anyway.

That way I've seen people with little talent go further than, or at least catch up to others who have it in abdundance, through discipline and work. My formative experience in that respect is from a different life when I was studying for a modern drums degree.

Please slow down with the "intelligence" narrative. Cognitive abilities are complex and multi-faceted. There's logical-mathematical and much more.

Even if they are reading too much into the OP, the advice is sound for anyone starting any job, especially at the start of their career with little on their resume.

About your aside, while all of that is true, the inverse isn't. Not everyone thinks everyone else has EHI. So if you have a lot of people telling you you have EHI, then you can feel confident in your own assessment of whether or not you have EHI.

That's an astute observation, but there is such a thing as flattery and compliments paid with an ulterior motive and it's not always easy to tell those apart from genuine recognition of a perceived positive trait.

For example, perhaps people are telling you you're smart because they like your er other assets. Or because they feel obliged to because you're their boss. Or because they know your parents. etc etc.

Bottom line, there's confounding factors that can throw the calculation way off.

> The obvious corrolary is that Alice herself must be of average intelligence

Would she also conclude that because some fruit in bowls is hollow plastic that there doesn't exist any real fruit in bowls?

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