Originally Posted by Iucounu
ACh, after reading this thread and your previous one, I had the following impressions:

1. You seem a little full of yourself, in the sense of being smug about your intelligence. I fell into the same trap long ago, although I am much better now. Such a sense of superiority may come from low self esteem, and in my case it did. My advice: most people, including the cowy masses at your school, should appreciate your intelligence if you're nice and not pushy about it; but the inverse is also pretty much true, with some differences (e.g. some capable people might cut an obviously capable though pushy person some slack). Some of your classmates have probably picked up on your attitude towards them, unless you've hid it extremely well.

Actually, I don't even say a word to them most of the time. I just keep to myself and get my stuff done. If asked for help, I help. 'Pushy' is about the opposite of what I am.

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2. You seem to be too eager to impress others with your intelligence. Your writing style comes off as a bit flighty or nervous, but I think this is mostly because your word, phrasing and sentence-structure choices are designed with the total message in mind: you want us to know that you are quirky, have a decent vocabulary, etc. My advice: relax. smile You don't have to work to make people like you, and trying too hard to appear intelligent generally isn't the right way if you do decide to work at it. You also don't have to worry about convincing anyone here that you're smart.

In part, this is pretty unconscious for me, sentence-structure-wise. I'm not sure where you see the flighty or nervous, though. I really don't like the idea of consciously making myself sound dumber or less confident or less straightforward about what I'm saying.

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3. People are not worthless or beneath you simply because they are less intelligent. Intelligence has a flexible definition in the first place, as you must know. You have surely enjoyed some products of people who would have scored well below you on intelligence tests; this might include books, movies, food, and a thousand other fruits of human labor. A good number of those people would actually perform better than you on at least some real-world tasks. Some of them would also score higher than you on one test or another; that doesn't make you a lesser being either.

4. If you are really having trouble coping with lesser ability in others, or different viewpoints (which often include some sort of prejudice or another), I suggest changing so that you are a less irritable person. It sounds to me like simply making a conscious choice to adopt a different attitude for a while might work fine; other options might include therapy to address some of these issues. You'll have a happier life if you can appreciate the good in others, instead of focusing on what you perceive to be bad; you might even notice a lot of good that way that you would have missed otherwise.

ETA: I think no5no5's dogs-and-silverware comment is a good one. I would add that if you've ever liked a dog, or any other being that's less smart than you, you can eventually see your way clear to liking some people who are less smart than you.

But the dog's a dog. The dog's not a human being. One has standards for human beings.

My mother and my father have both scored a bit below me on intelligence tests. Does this mean I don't respect them? No. Likewise with many others in my life who have done so as well but who continue to teach me many things.

It's a little more nuanced than this. My beef is largely with the more average whose combination of illogic and various other mental gymnastics they do makes them do things that it would take actual conscious effort for me to screw up.

... take, for example, people who deny their children medical treatment for various reasons, people who perpetrate or perpetuate genocides and other violence (a great example of how bad it gets in some places is chronicled in the blog Other Things Amanzi - http://other-things-amanzi.blogspot.com/ - where this kind of crud is commonplace, people who use religion as a justification for various human rights abuses - or really anything else, including their own homophobia or racism or sexism or anything else, people whose own willful ignorance digs them into financial holes, people who are simply too unable to learn to dig themselves out of things, and other people who hurt others either directly or indirectly due to their own lack of brains. The list of iniquities visited upon humanity is long and being continually written and it grates.