Does this strike a chord with anyone else? (obv. change the 20 in the title to whatever is appropriate, teenagers/old timers)
― N., Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Stop scaring me Nick.
― Graham, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
on a social intelligence level i believe that i have only ever grown in intelligence - that is what time gives you i believe the ability to rationalise, evaluate etc
but the one factor in life that made me realise i must be more intelligent now was that "Diamond lights" by chris waddle and glen hoddle was my favourite song back then
― born clippy, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― chris, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― jel --, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Though I suppose for having worked that out I rule.
I still think the so called stupid kids in class were just doing better things with their brains while I was swotting.
― Pete, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
I think I am just lazier now more than anything.
― Emma, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Andrew Farrell, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― RickyT, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Now it is working: Precocious.
― Dan I., Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Tom, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
I suppose the nature of succeeding at what I want to do for the next 10/20/who knows years of my life involves a belief that I can do it as well as anyone else. So at secondary school yes I felt this, not at college.
― Ronan, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Jez, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― David, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
and these days i think my memory is going and i think memory is a big part of perceived intelligence, just being able to remember useful things. i struggle with learning things now. object oriented design? uh?
did well on the recent bbc iq test night though but that was heavily skewed towards the maths though so...
andy
― koogydelbbog, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
As a youngster I always considered myself more socially advanced than my peers in terms of realising that being purposely nasty and annoying (as most children are) was pointless, boring and just not RIGHT, but at the same time completely socially backward in that I was too shy to make proper friends or try anything new/risky at all.
― Ally C, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
But through my childhood I was used to being the cleverest around, and from 14 on I started meeting others at least as clever. Since Cambridge particularly, I have sought out and socialised with very clever people (it's one of the things I love here) and am now used to thinking of myself as nothing remotely special intellectually - there are a bunch of people here whose brains impress the hell out of me. I think I always knew that I'd learn nothing and get bored with people much less clever. I find that the people I tend to become and stay friends with are always extremely intelligent and often brilliant in some respects.
So I reckon it's down to social selection rather than getting less clever, and to realising the breadth of value that there is in the mind, that scoring 200 on an IQ test or getting to Cambridge doesn't tell much of anyone's story at all. I realised that when I went to that university, and found that plenty of people there were fools who were really good at maths or whatever. And one other very educational moment, that made me appreciate this wider range...
There was an old foreman called Wally at the factory where I was in the accounts section. He'd left school at 14 or something 50 years before, and seemed an idiot. One day I was chatting to the head of R&D, and I asked him what the colourful graphs on his desk were about. He explained that they mapped variables in industrial steel rolling doors (which the company made): thickness of the steel, length of the roller, all sorts. He explained how you examined them and calculated things, and eventually derived the strength of spring you needed. "Or," he added, "you could just ask Wally, and he'll tell you. He's never wrong."
― Martin Skidmore, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Disclaimer: works only with people sharing vaguely common paths (HS- university-employment) as people wasting away in day-jobs void of creative space, and that definition just might include some kinds of teaching as well as sweeping, quickly lose the grasp in the traditional scholarly ways of wisdom and take huge steps sideways from the NORM? When making comparisons you always have a norm, don't you? Wally escapes the norm. Specialized professionals escape the norm. Heed the seven or how many ever classes of intelligence that tell apart social, mathematical, visual, kinetical, sensual and so on types of intelligence, and please also tell apart intelligence from wisdom, and all this i guess just goes out to say that never try to write people off in being anything you happen to see or not to see in them.
still, the feeling is there.. in high school I placed myself in the "wimp" category and effectively felt myself to be nowhere near the apparently rockin' levels of social and mental development most my classmates shared between themselves. Of course the case was not so, twas' merely a separatist teenage fantasy that I was able to rid myself of by the time I hit art school and realized that I finally shared a common space with people I could genuinely relate to and understand and who understood me, and this was not because my new mates were wimps too but because almost everyone my age I'd met before had been uncomplicated and straightforward middle-people. To my eyes somethin unreachable and beautiful at the time. In my new surroundings I was happy to feel small, only this time knowing by heart that the world WAS really BIG, not just so in my own imagination.
<--Memories
back to the topic in my final point: What you seem to understand and appreciate in other people could be a reflection of yourself in their image, no more. There is no truly objective understanding of minds. When you meet people more intelligent, more competent, more social and faster than you, the fact that it is possible to think about them as being so comes from your OWN ability to recognize and define intelligence, competency, sociality and speed. My suggestion is: be happy when you can tell someone's being more something than you. This is a sign of your own understanding and intelligence. It takes one to know one. Be very suspicious about people with whom you have absolutely NO clue about where to place them in your scale
And people with good imagination tend to rate their company very high. In some cases what you see in people and the things you read in their appearances is more about your worst-case approximation (worst- case as in very much more intelligent than the person making the approximation) than the actual reality. Sometimes. When it's not, be happy about it. When you spend your time swimming in swarms of super- pumped mind-androids and social majesties you just might be learning a thing or two about life and yourself
at least in my experience actually, when I feel the need to RATE people I do so by their ethics, attitude and achievements not by their efficiency or their IQ
I'm sure this thread spawns a lot of commentary, since when we're still bustling through school it's fairly easy to think you're something special if you're hitting good grades. Then you do the statistics and realize there are a few hundred millions hitting good grades in the western world and you might be one of them but the other 199,999,999 could also be posting at ILE and ILM while the rest dropped into politics or whatnot
― teenage professional, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
It is as if we spend our first twenty years building the house we will live in, the next twenty decorating it and adding the odd extension, and the balance of our lives doing the steady maintenance required to keep the roof from leaking and the pipes from clogging -- while casting sidelong and occasionallly envious, glances at the new houses under construction in the neighborhood.
― Little Nipper, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Martin Skidmore, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Martin, do you think you *are* getting cleverer? You haven't felt any loss of patience of the kind I mentioned when your brain is challenged?
― David, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Yeah, I think I'm more intelligent now than I was 10 or 20 years ago. I don't know if I'd score higher on an IQ test now, but I don't believe them anyway - I do think I have a broader intelligence through having seen and read and thought about things that keep making me reassess how I do things and link things up. I do believe that your mind doesn't have to decline early if you keep exercising it. I don't know how soon physical matters will overtake any effect from mental exercise - probably soon, given the standard of care and diet I achieve - but I don't plan to help nature along by stopping trying. I couldn't, in fact. This isn't like going to the gym to keep fit, it's like playing football because you love it, and keeping fit as a side effect.
I think this change, ie between school and post grad, is more important than the stuff about yr peers becoming smarter through selection, mostly because I don't think I was aware of how smart my classmates were for quite a while.
― isadora, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Julio Desouza, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link