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A high IQ can be a brutal burden to bear

Hello Everyone,

I am assuming there may be some high IQs (I am a former member of MinD, or MENSA in Germany) in the Nexus? What have been the challenges you have faced in the world due to this? Has your IQ sometimes been a heavy burden to bear?

Any thoughts on this? Experiences to share?

Tags: IQ

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Permalink Reply by Фелч Гроган on April 20, 2010 at 9:55am

Lucky we have someone from mensa to explain the joke to us dummies.

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Permalink Reply by Glenn Sogge on April 20, 2010 at 2:04pm

What joke??

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Permalink Reply by Фелч Гроган on April 20, 2010 at 9:22pm

I forgot. That funny energiser bunny came on teevee.

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Permalink Reply by Jaume on April 20, 2010 at 8:04am

People lie. Everytime.

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Permalink Reply by Douglas on April 20, 2010 at 9:00am

You have the right of it, unfortunately. It is an old, old story with me and my wife of 10 years: we will be in a social situation, with lots of "intellectual" people discussing fascinating topics, at which time I (happy to share with thinking people) delightedly join in the discussion, only to have people approach my wife quietly afterwards (they never approach me personally) and make statements to the effect of "Your husband is too arrogant", or, "Your husband should be more humble".

Both my wife and I have decided not to socialize with others, and instead focus all our energies upon our son, and improving our own lives, rather than always hearing the same old things again and again.

Who else here has read "Harrison Bergeron"? It is certainly satirical, but also eerily realistic in a social sense.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on April 20, 2010 at 7:30pm

Liar!

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Permalink Reply by James Croft on April 20, 2010 at 9:31am

I would simply say that there is little evidence to believe that IQ is a helpful construct for investigating human capacity. I think it should be part of the Humanist project to replace outdated notions like "IQ" with fuller, richer and more complex evaluations of a person's intellectual capabilities.

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Permalink Reply by Douglas on April 20, 2010 at 9:41am

It is true that intelligence has many forms, not all of which can be detected by conventional IQ tests.

With what should we replace IQ? Any ideas?

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Permalink Reply by James Croft on April 20, 2010 at 9:51am

Well, Howard Gardner, my advisor at Harvard, has suggested a multiple model of intelligence. Sternberg has a hierarchical multiple model. But I think the most important point, as Gould stresses, is that any attempt to capture human capability in a standardized numerical measure is probably doomed. I think we should evaluate people's potential through observing them in action performing meaningful real-world tasks.

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Permalink Reply by Edward Teach on April 20, 2010 at 9:56am

True nuff.. it's a ghost in the machine.

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Permalink Reply by Douglas on April 20, 2010 at 10:00am

I daresay that your real-world observation method would be possible, but for one small problem: people's definition of meaningful is not a constant, but can vary.

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Permalink Reply by James Croft on April 20, 2010 at 10:05am

I don't view this as a problem, but an opportunity - real-world societies and groups do legitimately value different things, and call different things "intelligent". I feel we should attempt to accommodate this (at least to an extent) rather than try to fit everyone and every society into the same analytical framework.