It's "bane" as in "HN is the addictive bane of my existence".
It's hard to get tone across when talking about one's own experiences. In my case my experience is about having the attribute of high intelligence.
If this was a discussion about being tall instead of being intelligent, and I happened to be very tall, would it change your opinion if my deduction had been that tall people can dunk basketballs more easily than short people and then relayed an experience where I, though I don't play basketball, demonstrated this to a short fanatical basketball fanatic by dunking a ball?
It doesn't mean I'm always right, or that my deductions are always correct. I'm not omniscient. In that anecdote it turns out I was, and it was destructive to my relationship.
Being highly intelligent is like walking around with a bomb in your head. You have to be very careful how you approach other people because your mere existence is hard for them to accept. It's not a good feeling to hurt or scare people by doing what you were born to do.
Just being tall, and doing tall people things, like grabbing something off of a high shelf, is not likely to elicit the same response.
You have to constantly translate the complex interconnected mental world you swim in into a simpler model you can communicate with. When I meet another high-intelligence person, I don't have to do that beyond establishing a common vocabulary. It's a fun thrill to have a conversation with somebody who's mind races along like yours, just like it's fun for a tall person to be around other tall people.
One of the issues with being highly intelligent is that you're right more than most people, which makes it difficult to trust the input of more normal folks. So you end up trusting yourself all the time, which means that when you are wrong, you don't know or recognize it until it explodes spectacularly in your face.
Yes, "dunking a ball". We are talking about "dunking a ball" when you are taller than most of other people.
You have a good metaphor here, but what kinds of ball are you dunking when you have higher IQ than other people? Do you do anything productive to take advantage of your high IQ? I didn't see it yet.
I agree that being super intelligent is a disaster to people around you. But if you can make something to benefit people, you will be accepted as a hero by the people eventually. That's how heroes are generated.
I don't want to get dragged down by measuring intelligence with IQ. It's a vague and unclear measure at best.
But to answer the spirit of your question. It depends.
What's the cognitive task I'm gifted at?
Did I do that task?
Why should I feel shameful for doing that?
If I'm good at rational reasoning, is doing the act of reasoning bad?
If I'm good at advanced physics, is doing physics bad?
If I'm good at painting, or music, or solving rubik's cubes, or biology or psychology, is the act of doing those things I'm good at something I should be bothered about?
There's a significant social stigma about being smarter than everybody else in the room. They're elevated on a weird kind of pedestal both to celebrate, but also to make sure they don't get in too close of contact with the normal folks. It's not fun. Most really smart folks just want to contribute and be useful and use their gifts. Just like tall people tend to play basketball or musically gifted people want to play music.
We don't really celebrate demonstrations of intelligence. It's weird and bizarre and worthy of study and research, but not use. The really really intelligent folks find themselves locked away solving other people's problems for them, rather than being engaged.
> Do you do anything productive to take advantage of your high IQ? I didn't see it yet.
If I'm good at a cognitive task, is there something useful I can do with it?
A criticism that I think is rightfully levied on people like Marilyn Vos Savant is that she doesn't use her gifts for anything particularly useful. Solving other people's brain teasers every week is pretty low on the accomplishment scale.
I try to put what I can do to good use, but outside of the startup sphere I've worked on some very hard, very vexing World problems and been successful in some cases, less successful in others. A byproduct of that work is some cool and elegant technology and approaches that I try to share with others, some of which has had some pretty big impacts on the world which I'm very proud of. It hasn't made me FU rich, but that's never been what I was aiming for. I live very comfortably.
I've also, quite literally, been the guy locked away in a room to solve a hard problem. It's not fun, and it brings up those deep feelings of social isolation. I'm not a person, I'm a functional black box nobody knows quite how to deal with.
But, something I really enjoy, figuring out how to take the advanced work and make it usable by regular folks is a pretty engaging and pretty striking challenge.
Nice to hear that you have your own focus. I doubt about that because from what you've said in the previous posts, you feel lonely, or socially lonely, because not many common topics can be shared between you and the normal people. Or you feel it's so hard to make the advanced research in your area to benefit normal people.
I guess there is a gap in your heart which needs to be bridged with your social life. Advanced research can be seen as a type of work, all the scientists are kind of isolated with the regular groups of people. But they can still have their social life to enjoy food, art and something else outside the work.
On the other hand, my doubt came from the fact that you have a wife who is more intelligent than you. If you did, you would never feel lonely. No matter what you do in this world, you have companion who can really understand your value is. You should not feel lonely and you would not feel it so weird when you see the majority of people cannot understand you. If you wish to get rid of the social isolation, there are always ways to enjoy other types of pleasure life brings to you. I still think you are too narrow on a certain spot over the entire spectrum of life.
At any moment when I see any small achievement I get, I feel so fulfilled, especially when some people may understand my work. That's enough.
> I still think you are too narrow on a certain spot over the entire spectrum of life.
I think you are right. When I think on my wife, the loneliness goes away, but it's tempting to fall back into old thinking patterns and habits, no? Sometimes bad feelings you've carried around for a long time are comfortable, like an old pair of shoes.
Yes, I sort of understand what you mean. I guess the only way out to relieve from the bad feeling is to be grateful for what life has brought to us. But I know, feeling is feeling, feeling is not logic. Try it, you may feel different, because our daily life is impacted by our emotional energy on a large scale.
Another angle to see the loneliness is from a long historic point of view. We are all lonely on the way to be born. See the story here: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html by Andy Weir. So try to forget about it or ignore the feeling and find every piece of joy in your daily life.
Thanks for sharing the story. I think we can agree that not dwelling on the past and the feelings it might bring up, but to move forward and be grateful is a better path to follow.
I don't think it's really a superhuman deduction. I think if you spent time carefully observing people you're around a lot with the intent of figuring out how they think you'd be able to do something very similar. It's just that most of us (including me) don't do that very often. Most people are reactive about such things rather than proactive.
As far as userids, neither you or I should be making guesses about people based on such things. :-)
