Awake or Asleep

A female reader considers the question of intelligence

In which a high-IQ woman responds to the female critic who a) admitted that she didn’t read the original post closely and b) refuses to admit that intelligence is not an attractor in its own right.

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I thought a gamma male wrote that woman’s rant. It has all of the same characteristics.

Supposedly women are generally clustered around the midpoint of the bell curve of IQ and seldom stray too far to either side, and since perception of intelligence is always relative to your own intelligence, their idea of someone being “really smart” is usually not worth taking note of. However, if they happen to have a very unusually high IQ and a decent ability to be honest with themselves, they know that what Vox said is exactly right.

A man’s IQ just has to be at least as high as hers. If it isn’t as high as hers, he will seem like a child to her and she will have to explain everything to him and it feels pretty gross, like they are underage or not able to consent to a relationship. You also worry about their ability to make decisions and know they probably can’t be trusted to handle important tasks on their own, because if you did it yourself it would turn out infinitely better.

Sometimes it takes a few dates to assess the guy’s intelligence but eventually she will realize what is going on. My husband is the smartest and most clever man I have ever met, which really excited me only because of my own IQ. Most men did not like the fact that I was “too smart” and I definitely wasn’t doing anything to deliberately play it up either. Some men could not tell that I was much smarter than they were, but these were men of below average intelligence who did not have much conversational ability, so it just never became apparent. The ones who could tell would point it out and react to it in a hostile, accusatory way, 9 times out of 10. So is intelligence romantically attractive? No, I definitely don’t think so.

“It’s so hot watching him working on his proof for the Riemann Hypothesis!”

Since people are talking about how intelligence IS attractive in their view, that it is just often accompanied by other unappealing qualities: I’ve also met a good number of “super nerd” men in my life, and very few of them were actually smarter than I was. They were often better at a certain thing, such as math or engineering for their careers, which they had practiced diligently for decades to acquire that level of skill… but they were not nearly as clever. They had nothing interesting to say, they lacked original thought, and did not question the world around them. I don’t think they would actually score extremely high on an IQ test as they are slow to pick up on 99% of things, so when people talk about this type of man and say he is ultra high IQ and just has a personality that isn’t great and lacks situational awareness and social skills etc- I contest the idea that these are even ultra high IQ men. There are many scientists and mathematicians who were not gifted children, and memorization does not equate to a high IQ either…

A lot of the things that people were talking about in regards to this subject were actually irrelevant. Qualifying what high intelligence actually is, has been a serious struggle for humanity… possibly forever. So I can’t say that I have a perfect answer for how to best describe it, and it may also be difficult for people to recognize it even with an accurate partial description. Another big mistake that is being made in these comments is trying to apply logic to attraction. People think a high IQ is useful and rare so it must therefore be desirable and attractive, because this would be logical… but if you first get the definition of it wrong and then try to disregard human emotion, that makes no sense. There is a strongly negative emotional response that most people will have if they are confronted with another person being able to see right through them. They don’t usually like it when someone has figured them out, figured their motives out, their life situation and their character and everything else… this is terrifying to almost everyone.

Everyone is going to have a different experience in life, and the brain works differently if you are a man or a woman… but being high IQ is generally being awake while everyone around you seems to be sleeping. I will watch people fail to learn from their mistakes over decades, not even wanting to admit they are mistakes and wanting to validate themselves using relative comparison to other people, though this is a terrible thing to do. I know that if I say anything about it, they will get really angry and probably not talk to me ever again. There are many situations that are painful for me where I could fix the way something is being done and point out that something is going to lead to a bad outcome, but doing so will seriously damage my situation socially. People also do not like it when you are a fast learner in a broad sense, and whatever it is you just pick it up quicker than they do. You are able to process more information about the world and about anything, and process it quicker, like you have a larger bandwidth. This makes people dislike you. It is also easy to think you like someone high IQ over the internet in a forum where they aren’t observing you, but in person… they’d see things you don’t want them to, instantly.

Intelligence is an alternate state.

All I would add is that this is one of the most succinct descriptions of the general experience of being high IQ that I’ve ever seen, and in itself is sufficient to testify to the woman’s bona fides.

“Being high IQ is generally being awake while everyone around you seems to be sleeping.”

The single most important lesson the high-IQ individual needs to learn as a child is to shut the fuck up in nearly all circumstances. Don’t make suggestions. Don’t offer solutions. Don’t try to help. In fact, one of the easiest ways to distinguish the high-IQ from the midwit is that the high-IQ individual is quite comfortable watching people struggle without showing any emotion or interest, while the midwit can’t resist putting in his two cents even when someone is successfully accomplishing something.

The former is, of course, a learned behavior, the inevitable result of a long series of painful and futile attempts to help one’s intellectual inferiors after identifying a problem.