More than a decade ago, I was being interviewed on Jesse Lee Peterson’s show. He’s a nice, affable man, but he speaks slowly and he’s never going to be confused with a rocket scientist. We had a good conversation, and at one point, he asked me one of the more insightful questions anyone has ever asked me.
“You’re said to be very, very smart,” he said.
“Yes, that’s true,” I admitted, not seeing any point in false modesty. “I am.”
He nodded, then asked: “So what’s that like?”
The reason I thought it was an excellent question is because it exhibited a degree of self-awareness that most people lack. Midwits, those with above-average IQs between 105 and 120, almost invariably believe themselves to be considerably more intelligent than they are. People of average intelligence don’t tend to give the matter any thought at all. And even those with genuine high intelligence, those in the top 10 percent with IQs above 120, seldom comprehend the significance of the gap between them and those in the top 1 percent, much less the top 0.1 percent.
They simply can’t imagine that their everyday experience is not essentially similar to that of their intellectual superiors. But it isn’t.
What it’s like, I told Jesse, is like swimming in a sea of retardery. Everything is very slow and unclear. Everyone is always simultaneously confused by the obvious and yet easily upset by any attempt to help them resolve that confusion. Every conversation is like walking through a minefield, where just answering a question accurately is liable to send the other individual into one form of emotional tailspin or another. Even when things are fine, people have a tendency to repeat themselves over and over and over, as if the listener’s memory is as porous as their own.
I think it’s primarily for effect, actually. If they don’t get the response they’re seeking, they repeat themselves, presumably operating under a solipsistic model that assumes if you don’t respond the way they think you should, you must not have understood what they said. However, it’s also vital not to respond too strongly, or they suspect that you’re making fun of them, even when you’re not, and that creates a problem too.
It’s seldom enjoyable.
This is why most highly intelligent people are introverts. It’s not instinctual, it is a learned aversion to the unpleasant experience of swimming through the endless retardery and never getting anywhere.....
This is as adequate an explanation for why nothing works anymore as you could ever require:
So if you ever wanted to know what it is like for 3SD+ people to be surrounded by people with normal IQs, it appears you’re going to get the chance to find out good and hard. Because I calculated that the average American IQ had fallen below 95 back in 2015, and I’m fairly confident that the addition of large numbers of people with sub-80 IQs, along with the continued dumbing-down of every educational level, is unlikely to improve the average level of intelligence across the country.
It’s one thing to be a 120-IQ midwit in a land of 100 IQ people. It’s another to be that same midwit surrounded by 85-IQ people from whom you are separated by the 2SD communications gap.
A lot of things are going to change for many of you. You’re going to have to develop more patience. You’re going to have to adopt a stoic or zen approach to everything from sending a letter to standing in line at the grocery store. You’re going to have to accept that everything is going to take more time, and quite require possibly repeated attempts, to get anything done. You’re going to have to balance the need to explain things with the need to avoid triggering psychological defense triggers.
And there is literally nothing you can do about any of it except reduce your daily interactions with others. This should make for an interesting test of the limits of extroversion, if nothing else.
