Comment by personlurking | Hacker News Reader

Comment by personlurking | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"As is probably the case with most of us here, I didn't suspect this because my intelligence in all other arenas is excellent."

I'd like to branch off from this comment a bit. What happens when your intelligence, like wealth (a comparison I recently started making), creates a gap between yourself and others? What happens when you want to talk about really interesting things ('go to a fancy restaurant') but others basically clam up ('can't afford it')?

Over the last decade and a half, my personal 'wealth' has been created from finding and maintaining varying interests. Most people I talk to don't seem to have any. They work/play, spend/earn, watch tv, listen to music and go out with friends to bars/clubs. And when you ask them about their interests, they rattle off the list I just made. I suppose it has to do with the idea that education is something you're forced to deal with and 'luckily' it's over after college.

Finding those (IRL) who have interests or who believe in lifelong learning is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Completely agree with you, although I think it is more about the personal desire to learn than education in itself.

If you don't have the personal desire to learn in the first place, then I doubt that education can genuinely "teach" you this.

Where does this desire come from? It comes from within, so it can't be "taught" to most people who are unreceptive in the first place.

During my life of 27 years, I have met only a few other individuals with the same eagerness for self growth as I have, and hundreds of people who have no interest or concept of what self growth even means and dozens of additional people who are somewhere in between and use their social skills to manipulate other people instead of manipulating themselves to be better people.

Funny, funny world we live in!

I've often made excuses to myself along the lines of "there are just fewer people I get along with because I'm gifted" or something like that. But I can't buy those completely, because there are plenty of people smarter than me who don't seem to have that problem.

Edit: You might reframe what friends are for? Common interests are really important, but not an absolute necessity.

I was like this several years ago myself, the key is in being humble whilst still being argumentative without sounding like a wanker - it's possible!

Tis' a fine line! I throw in plenty of humble statements as I like to think the only thing I really know is that I know nothing (though this makes me want to learn more, question more). I also throw in bits and pieces of random things I've studied and hope the other person doesn't just find it interesting for a moment but rather goes home thinking about it. Of course, possible they don't find it interesting at all and just think I'm a wanker.

Indeed it is a fine line, but there is plenty of things you can learn along the way to make that line a little less fine until it gets to the point that the line might not even exist anymore!

Give yourself some credit, you know stuff, and you can know even more if you want to :-)

That is what self growth is all about after all!

I find that having an understanding of human psychology is a critical step towards being effective with this kind of stuff, because it helps you work through the psychology of other people for a common goal (ie, a random conversation with a stranger, job interview, speech, etc).

Without it, your flying blind. When I was younger and flying blind it cost me a number of futures I will never see now.

Humbleness can come off as exploitable and dumb, just as much as it can come off as being intelligent, it's not just what you say, it's also how you say it!

Safe journeys!

>because there are plenty of people smarter than me who don't seem to have that problem.

They do have this problem. Since childhood they are surrounded by dumb and uninteresting people. Cynicism and distrust in the common sense of the fellow humans are already there by age of 12. But this is unproductive, and they make conscious effort to mingle, so they don't have to be alone all the time, have somebody to mate with, have playdates for their children, but it continues to be a struggle and sacrifice and they continue to stay intellectually alone.

There is a way out though - each typical step in society that is pre-programmed for smart people is also a filter - getting to school for gifted children, good university, then good, hard to get to, company, then changing it to better one filters out dumb people from your acquaintances and makes people around you nicer to talk to and easier to get along with. The downside is that they typically have not so stellar "emotional intelligence" as well, and, depending on occupation, there could be a gender bias (so mating within peer group could be problematic).

Your last statement is quite possible but I've found two groups forming: those who like to go out and those who like to think yet have accepted going out, albeit in more interesting ways. The latter might go to an open-mic night or spend their evening seeing a new foreign film and later, a beer or two in a venue where people can actually hear each other. While those things are preferable to me, they are icing on the cake since the subjects discussed along the night are about a new study they read or a new connection they made while taking a walk that day. If these people ever need to go a few layers deeper because you've got them excited, they can easily go deeper. I'm 31 and I've probably personally met maybe 6 people like this...ever.

I actually thought of having some sort of internet social network that would help people find other people like them using criteria like "believe and practice lifelong learning", "have diverse and special interests" and features like that I actually believe CAN be defined, even mathematically.

It sometimes amazes me how "socially retarded" thing like Facebook and Google+ are... there's so much more one could do in these areas that all the "facebookies" that mentally jerk of in hackathlons and quickly code new "cool" video sharing features should be doing instead...

Yeah, that part really stinks. I've had that thought, too. I suppose in some sense this is what subreddits are, but no one cares about being your friend on Reddit.

...but imagine what would be to see someones G+ or Fb profile on Reddit (or request to see it and only have access to it of the Reddit user gives it to you) and then add it (submit a friend request) in a way such that he/she sees that you added him via Reddit and automagically sees your most recent common Reddit "conversations" on the side of the accept/deny friendship request so has enough infos and context to quickly make a decision... combine this with some non-annoying non-awkard psychometrics for whoever chooses to use them/accepts being used by them and it would start to be less "socially" retarted...

...the only HARD thing to do would be to make all these things unobstrusive enough so that they's happen without taking extra time and incurring too much cognitive overload

...or maybe 90% of users would be too "IT dumb" too actually benefit from and therefore use these advances ...and they would not bring enough extra revenue for behemonts like Fb

Reply on news.ycombinator.com