Intellectual isolation

Anyone else here feel isolated due to being of above average intelligence? Clearly on a board like this there are plenty of people all over the spectrum to associate with but it does suck that, in a city of 75k people, I have difficulty finding another human being that I can spar with and actually has social skills.

Hilarious that the "video game club" president has no clue what Steel Battalion is. Most of my Political Science class has no idea what is going on in Libya or what significance Tienanmen Square holds. Sigma is an "E" thing....

Either these concepts are really "advanced" or I need to lower my expectations.

 

Are you of such high intelligence, or do you just have knowledge of different trivia than your friends?

It's not hilarious that this guy doesn't know about Steel Battalion, its an obscure, limited release game, do you know every single game?

As for not knowing what's going on in Libya, that just means they are uninformed, not stupid. Any moron can grab a newspaper and memorize what they tell you is going on somewhere, doesn't make them smarter for doing so. Maybe your friends just don't care.

It sounds to me like you just have interests in different subjects, none of these examples showed me that you are of any higher intelligence. Why don't you sit down and challenge some people to a game of chess, a math-a-thon, IQ test or something else that measures your intelligence, genius.

 

Aren't all intelligence tests based on ones ability to perceive, store and recall events surrounding the individual being tested regardless of interest. If so APE has a point if he's referring to his peer group having a lesser ability to perform the aforementioned tasks.

Also:
@APE yeah, I know exactly what you mean. And Steel Batallion isn't an obscure video game. Fucking nora, the amount of times I've had to dumb down communication to suit the situation is depressing sometimes.

Not saying I'm some fucking genius, far from it. But there have been times more often than not that I couldn't let on I knew certain things for the sake of fitting in. I'm sure a lot of us do it as a necessity.

 

I live/work in a low-education area so the people here literally kill me with stupidity.

Here's some quotes from work this week:

Me: 'That's a bit hypocritical of you?'
Staff Member: 'I'm nowhere near as fat as a hippo!'

'Oh just upgrade your iPhone software and that makes it into a 4S'

'The earth revolves around the moon'

Me: 'You're quite the philanthropist!'
Staff Member: 'I've never been to the circus'

I could create a whole blog about stupid shit people say round here.

 

Well, you have to be a complete moron to be that uninformed in an age where all the information in the world is at your fingertips. I mean, these people most likely have an Internet connection, just go to BBC or CNN or whatever every once in a while.
Personally, I think the world is fucked exactly because of these stupid people and their sheer numbers.

 

I can relate to what you're saying somewhat, but here are a few things to consider. Intelligence is highly subjective, and it's also highly dependent on what attribute you're talking about. A person may have extremely extensive knowledge of computer programming, but have very poor social intelligence. Or vice versa. It's difficult (or impossible) to say who's more intelligent in that case, because each person is intelligent in their own way. Einstein famously said, "Everyone is a genius."

Moreover, it doesn't matter. Having an above average intelligence doesn't make you a better person, or make what you have to say any more important. In fact, one might argue that the more you know, the more you will realize how much you don't know. Therefore, paradoxically, humility is often a sign of intelligence.

Let's be honest about something, though; the world is full of idiots. For the most part, people are so profoundly stupid that it really doesn't take much at all to be considered "above average." Therefore, if there's to be any metric at all, that's not a very good one. There's a quite a large range outside of that, I think.

So let me put it this way: you should be proud of your intelligence, but not to point where you develop a superiority complex. Keep in mind that the dumbest people in the world often think they're the smartest.

 

This.

 

As I've said before on these boards, the film 'Idiocracy' is more a social commentary documentary than a work of fiction

As for Cooleo, where about in the UK do you hail from? I'm originally from Stoke on Trent and to be brutally honest the number of knuckle-draggers there far and above outweighs those with even basic intelligence.

 

I believe quite a lot of us feels intellectual isolated, because of our above average IQ.

But then again , I think there are something like 8 different kinds of intelligence. So we search for people who reminds us of ourselves, and people who know stuff, about stuff you did not know about, so we can expand our interests, and perhaps even get us even more IQ points or respect between our peers, and friends.

I mean all this week, I have been among people, that came from all levels of society and creeds, sexualities, and cultures.
But we had a common goal, and I am still supporting those people, and so are they supporting me. And by listening to them, I expand my understanding of different ideas, ideals, and areas of interests.

And perhaps not all of them knew about the old Duke 3D or some other game. But that was not the reason why I was where, I was. It was because I stand for something, and so do they. But did I feel intellectual isolated ? yes sometimes I did. But when I listened to the other people, then I began to understand, even though in the beginning it was a bit beyond my comprehension.

But APE Tienanmen Square is something I know about, in Danish that square is called "The Heavenly Peace Place/Square". And what you are thinking off, is the man who stood in front of the tank, in China. And I used to have a class mate, who was a witness to what happened (heck he was even a student back then), before he fled from China to Denmark.

And I understand the importance , when it comes to the whole shit that is going in Libya, and I totally support the people who are "occupying" such as Occupy Wall Street, and the support demonstrations, that has become internationally known there are even two support demonstrations/protests in Denmark, where one is called Occupy Denmark/Occupy CPH, the other one is called Occupy Aarhus.

So the voices has been heard about that, and you can tell your friends, that there are people in Denmark who totally get what OW is all about. But Steel Battalion is not a game that tickles my fancy, if it is the game for XBOX 360, and Kinnect.

 

It's hard to read such a text wall. Please split your post into paragraphs.

 

Take your time mate, and copy and paste the text. Into a text document, and read it again, I just got carried off. And thanks for the constructive criticism.

 

Consumed, Originally from the London outskirts, I now live about 30 miles away from Norwich in a seaside town. After living here for 8 years, I'm disgusted with most of the people in my town.

 

It all depends on what you want to spend your time on. I know a lot about politics but that's because I enjoy reading/talking about it. I went to a bar the other day and watched an amazing guitarist. Why was he amazing? Because he decided to spend his time doing that. I might know a lot about politics but I can't really engage in any meaningful conversation about art. I know a lot about music and business, more than most, but I couldn't say much about history. And I started a thread about how bad my Japanese is...heh. I just never spent the time learning it.

I'm not sure if the problem is intelligence or if the problem is finding people who enjoy the same things you do. I had a 1967 Mustang for 10 years and I could easily hang out with someone who loves cars. In the end our "level of intelligence" would be meaningless. You made a point about isolation but there doesn't have to be a link between that and intelligence.

 

Too much comes down to opinion. My friend is one year away from his PHD but has no common sense what so ever. So is he smart or stupid?

It also comes down to your own interests.

 

Agree totally. I actually have 2 friends, one who is now an Optometrist and one who is an Epidemiologist, they are obviously smart, but if you sat down and talked to them, you wouldn't get the impression that they were anthing more than average intelligence.

Hell, I've got a couple of friends with the quickest, funniest wit you would ever see but couldn't even tell you what Libya is!

Just keep in mind that there's a very good chance that your friends wanted to talk to you about something they know about or casually mentioned something that slipped over your head and now they think you are the idiot.

 

Shit happens

 

Back to OP. I also feel that way sometimes. I like to talk about quantum physics and astrophysics. Most people around me only knowledge of physics is 'what goes up must come down'.

 

I feel that way too. Specially since whenever I start trying to make new friends, I see that people don't generally understand around 75% of the cultural references I make... And that's not just because I make a lot of geek comments (which I do), but when I try to step out of that zone, they still don't get me...

Whenever I start talking to other girls, their levels of shallowness are SO HIGH that I don't see the point of keeping up with them; I don't want to talk about clothes and hair and beauty tips all the time... That's one of the reasons I have internet connection: to get those tips from verified sources without having to endure a shallow conversation.

But that takes me to another point I want to make: many people here have university degrees and still are assholes and morons. I will take for example a family issue I have currently going on just to prove this point. My cousin, who is 17 years old has been sick for almost 2 years now. She has some blood problem, which the rest of the family doesn't know about given that her parents (my aunt and her asshole husband) want to keep everything a secret and tell nobody about anything. The truth is, that even if there seems to be no clear diagnosis, she has been having recurrent episodes of anemia and clotting disorders.
At this point, she was admitted to the hospital on friday and the doctors will remove her spleen to see if that is what's causing the problem. (something they wanted to do 9 months ago, but didn't because the girl's parents just refused to allow it; jeopardizing her life in fact by making that decision).

Talk in the family runs this course: "They (the parents) are not idiots at all, he's an ingeneer and she has a college degree, so therefore they MUST be intelligent and MUST be well informed".
What I say to that is that they are both idiots who push themselves into ignorance pretending that if they say nothing, then nothing is happening.

And my point after all this is that intelligence is not just measurable by having a college degree or a university education, but by what the person does when faced to a problem and how they take steps to solve it...

 

If you lower your expectations of people to Zero you are less prone to disappointment.

As part of my thesis of everything it is not that man is neither inherently good or bad. It's that we're a bunch a complete fuckwit morons.

Treat people to that standard and you are less likely to be disappointed by them.

 

Intellectual isolation = Aspergers syndrome in my books / i know some fucking dumb people....