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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

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jedberg·

77% think they are smarter than average.

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It could well be true that 77% of people are smarter than average if intelligence is a heavily skewed distribution.

That's part of the Lake Woebegone effect.

For me it's different, I think I'm smarter than average 77% of the time.

I believe in this. Smarts are more like a distribution curve, even in a single individual.

There are areas I am in the 1 percentile, I think I can say without exaggeration. Those areas I seem to have insights in without effort, coupled with thousands of hours of focus.

But I experience a high cost of many things I do very very badly compared to almost EVERY SINGLE PERSON I know.

I am not alone in this assessment of myself. Friends & family all agree.

My many areas of remarkable incompetence, besides occasionally causing me great shame, make it very clear to me that everyone I know or meet has something to offer, at least to me!

There's so many facets to intelligence. There's a lot of areas that I'm more competent than most in and I learn very quickly. Then there's things like math where I have plenty of education, but the simplest real-world applications throw me for a loop. Add in frequent blonde moments and I can go from looking like the smartest person in the room to the stupidest in no time.

My definition of dumb is people who don't agree with me. So it's safe to say I'm basically Einstein ;-)

Smarter at what? Smarter at the things you are good at of course and there are lots of people who are not good at the things you are good at, so you consider yourself smarter than average.

If you asked people if they were smarter at everything than average what would they answer?

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