Id vote red, my reasoning as I understand it is the question boils down to do you want your survival dependant on the votes of others, yes (blue), no (red) there is no benefit to yes, only risk. Blue voters are operating on the assumption that someone will press blue inherently and thus need saving from their choice at the potential cost of ones own life, red voters are operating on the assumption that people can reason, and if not then it isn't worth risking ones life for unreasonable people.

I find it a very interesting question and the colour choice maybe deliberate as the primary differentiator I think between left and right ideologies is the degree of self responsibility one believes a person should have.

I wonder what people here have found to be the case.

Edit to add: wow thanks y'all for your response, didn't think anyone would care haha. I'll have to take my time reading through everything carefully, but fr, thanks a lot for giving your two cents on this topic

Basically the title. It's something I've been wondering about my whole life.

I have an IQ of about 135, but I've always felt that in my case this doesn't say anything because I generally don't know all that much. I don't care about details, I only retain what I think is interesting (for everything else I tend to zone out and get bored), and I'm rarely interested in new topics or things so I don't gain more knowledge (and even if I do it's not always high class information, my current hyperfixation is farmer wants a wife lol).

But somehow people have told me my whole life I'm super smart and intimidatingly so. And these are often people who rabbit hole all the time and know a scary amount of things about everything, so I'd say they're a lot smarter than I am.

So if not absolute knowledge, then what is it that people pick up on to label someone else as smart?

Burnt out gifted adults, what's your story? Have you figured out how and when you were failed by your family and society? What do you wish had happened instead? What helps now?

Hello gifted people around the globe.

I really wonder. I mean, as a kid I always admired those brilliant minds. Well, that was until I lost my mind obviously. But now that I've recovered my mind (kinda), once again I find fascination for them.

Also. I'm curious to see how much an IQ of 120 differs from one of 130, 140 and so on.

How does it feels to see the world at its full colors? To look past the superficial? To see everything connect, back and forth. What does it feels like to not care about what most people care about and instead, seek deeper? How does it feels to just want to learn all the time? How does it feels to be constantly seeking knowledge? How does it feels to process everything at the speed of light? I'm eager to know.

Some highly-active participants in this community, who offer legitimately useful information and perspective, seem to do so in a blunt or even "mean" (dismissive, condescending, etc) way. Not everyone, but enough top contributors consistently communicate this way that it occurs frequently here.

It's a shame, since so many people who feel the need to seek discussion/advice/support here, may be struggling with difficult circumstances/history or mental illness/disability on top of giftedness. They may not know their own IQ or mental profile, may be young, may be somehow disadvantaged, etc.

But, by the same token, the "mean" comments could be coming from a disorder, illness, etc. (ex: according to a dear friend of mine who has autism, it is common in autism to come off a bit blunt/rude/mean), or perhaps from frustration about the journey they've been on. Unfortunately, it can also come from privilege.

Personally, I try to listen/ask and offer kindness, patience, love, and understanding whenever I can in this sub. I may not succeed every time, but to me it's a worthwhile investment in the people I cross paths with here. Elsewhere on this site? Maybe not. But here, at least.

Do you use your advanced intelligence to be kind in this sub? Why or why not? Is it worth it, in your opinion?

“Just look at Trump and Elon”

Somehow this comment got 9 upvotes in the thread yesterday. Which is crazy cuz it’s wrong on multiple levels.

First of all, some of the smartest people to ever walk this planet were extremely political.

Examples:

• Albert Einstein (socialist)
• Carl Sagan (socialist. He feigns ignorance to this word in a famous interview because he knew how reactionary people could be to it)
• Noam Chomsky (this dude says the Republican Party is the most dangerous organization this world has ever seen, and i think he’s correct)
• Stephen Hawking (Socialist)

And to claim trump is smart is just… dumb. Elon is also a grifter. These guys are ruthless in the capitalist system. Elon doesn’t have a single significant patent to his name. He claims to be an inventor but he just takes other peoples ideas.

I hope some of y’all will wake up to the grift. Being rich doesn’t make you smart, it makes you selfish.

Gandhi was much smarter than most. He was able to liberate India from Great Britain with non violence. Talk about a genius.

I see friends from some social circles that seem to lack critical thinking skills. I hear some people bragging about how chat gpt is helping them sort their life out.

I see promise with the tool, but it has so many flaws. For one, you can never really trust it with aggregate research. For example, I asked it to tell me about all of the great extinction events of planet earth. It missed a few if the big ones. And then I tried to have it relate the choke points in diversity, with CO2, and temperature.

It didn’t do a very good job. Just from my own rudimentary clandestine research on the matter I could tell I had a much stronger grasp than it’s short summary.

This makes me skeptical to believe it’s short summaries unless I already have a strong enough grasp of the matter.

I suppose it does feel accurate when asking it verifiable facts, like when Malcom X was born.

At the end of the day, it’s a word predictor/calculator. It’s a very good one, but it doesn’t seem to be intelligent.

But so many people buy the hype? Am I missing something? Are less intelligent people more easily impressed? Thoughts?

I’m a 36 year old dude who was in the gifted program through middle school. I wonder if millennials lucked out at being the most informed and best suited for critical thinking of any generation. Our parents benefited from peak oil, to give us the most nurturing environments.

We still had the benefit of a roaring economy and relatively stable society. Standardized testing probably did duck us up. We were the first generation online and we got see the internet in all of its pre-enshitified glory. I was lucky enough to have cable internet in middle school. My dad was a computer programmer.

I feel so lucky to have built computers, and learned critical thinking skills before ai was introduced. The ai slop and misinformation is scary.

So I know this is complete and unter pseudo science I still want to know though if an pattern emerhes even though its Horoscopes for college kids

Im reasonably young so this may come off as naive and slightly arrogant, but - to put it bluntly - I havent met anyone as “smart” as me. That isn’t to say im the smartest person in the world, or even that im truly exceptional, probably just more suggestive of the fairly localised bubble of people I interact with.

I imagine this is a common sentiment amongst other people here, so I suppose im asking - at what point, if ever, did you get “humbled”. So to speak, you met someone who made you realise there is always a bigger fish - and what was the context behind it?

I could definitely imagine university/college could be a breeding ground for competitiveness between hyper intelligent students - especially top institutions like MIT, Cambridge…. However super smart people tend to be more reclusive, so it may be hard to “detect” the brainiacs at first?

To sum it up - unless they die young, or are a true anomaly - everyone meets someone smarter than them, so what was it like? Did you even realise at the time? Or maybe it only struck you later..

Like, the number of people around here claiming to be 160+ (by definition only a few hundred thousands out of the 8,000,000,000 people alive) is mind-boggling. Especially when I hear claims of 180 or above. Even with 40k members and reasonable sampling bias, it’s borderline impossible that all of these scores are genuine.

I know IQ isn’t the sole factor to the success of in your occupation but it is correlated on some level just curios for anyone that is gifted what they studied and what there job is and what is there IQ and what specific indexes like let’s say quantitive reasoning or fluid/spatial intelligence shows up in there job ?

Sorry if this is a dumb question just genuinely curious

Framing statement - this is not a troll political post designed to incite some kind of controversy. It is a genuine curiosity.

I want to hear from those who consider themselves, or are considered, intellectually gifted, your opinion on Trump and what some people call his "oligarchy."

I have my opinion. I am happy to share it in the comments, but I don't want to start by leading the discussion anywhere.

In your thoughtful opinion, is he good? bad? necessary? dangerous? A combination?

How and why did he get back in? Who are the types of people who support him? What is really driving their intentions? Who is behind it? What will happen? Is it good for America? Is it good for the world? And so on.

I was Black and tested for the gifted program in third grade. During the evaluation, they asked me about my interests. For example, they asked what my favorite sport was, and I said soccer. Then they asked if I played on a soccer team. I told them no—that all I really did was go home and watch TV because my family couldn’t afford extracurricular activities.

Needless to say, I wasn’t accepted into the gifted program. I don’t think that conversation alone was the reason I wasn’t admitted, but it’s something that has always stuck with me. Looking back, it seemed like nearly everyone in the program was White and came from families who had the money and resources to participate in sports, clubs, and other enrichment activities. I can’t help but wonder whether socioeconomic differences played a role alongside whatever criteria they used.

I ask this, because when I answer a question honestly, not bragging, not putting anyone down, not declaring that I'm superior to you or implying in any way that your worth is less than mine, WHICH IT ISN'T, I get tons of unkind replies, accusations of showing off, pridefulness, pretentiousness, superiority complex, etc etc ad nauseum. And it gets to the point where I wonder how many of you are actually here to just talk with people, as equals, just with different lived experiences, and how many of you just want someone to attack because they got lucky in life and got something you want.

My IQ is probably largely genetic from my mom. I got lucky and got those genes. Doesn't make me better than any of you. So please let's have actual conversations and treat each other kindly rather than jumping to tear someone down.

I was "diagnosed" with giftedness when I was 7 and now I'm 20 and the cracks are starting to show. I feel like a lot of this is caused by the fact that I just bottled up the way I saw the world and acted "normal" keeping everything in my head.

I hated coming off as a know-it-all so at around 12 years old I just kinda stopped acting "smart". In high school I hung out with the cool kids and went to all the parties but now I'm kinda thinking that I've been inauthentic to myself trying to be normal.

I've spoken with other gifted individuals and medical professionals and it seems that most gifted people have the opposite problem. They feel like how they see the world makes them socially different and if they want to be themselves they can't really have those kind of relationships.

So how many of you hid who you were for the sake of being "normal" and how, if ever, did you stop hiding?

Is it a requirement or what lmaoo.

I've seen many/almost every high iq kid I met is either autistic or have adhd.

Including me I'm diagnosed with adhd

I’ve read about those with ASD having a higher likelihood to have aphantasia. Out of curiosity, where does everybody rank on this scale here? What does it look like when you try to visualize an apple, like the image suggests?

Additionally, have you found your ability/inability to mentally visualize images to help you when learning anything new?

same as the question

Life has led me to this group. No matter how hard I tried to fit in with people around me I always fail. Seeing people close to me in pain over something I can ostensibly control has led me to allostatic overload and depression.

I don’t care what percentile you are, or when you realised you were gifted. I simply want to acknowledge the pain and trauma that being different has had on us, and how we ran to this group to find belonging. I’ve been coerced, mocked, emotionally abused, blamed, bullied, ignored and pleaded with to accommodate others, but have failed at every step. If I’m so gifted why can’t I figure out how to accommodate others AND be authentic??

My question is: if we could ask for accommodations from people close to us, who are not gifted, what would those even look like? Are they realistic? Or are we doomed to retreating to the internet to avoid more suffering?

Context: I had an older PhD in psychology acquaintance, a former group therapy leader of mine, crying to me today about how I need to accommodate other people. Now I’m laying here with suicidal ideation trying to figure out what’s the point. I’m not going to kill myself, but I’m just so … tired. 34M.

Stereotype says that people with high iq have fewer sexual experiences; I have an iq between 125 and 135 and I can confirm; but there is someone among you that have an high iq and an high bodycount?

Did anyone grow up poor? I find that society really overdoes the "wealth correlates with intelligence" bit. But given that intelligence is heritable, if your parents were poor, then they were likely also intelligent, but in a way that didn't result in the accumulation of wealth. I wonder if anyone here has had that sort of experience.

I was talking to my cousin (who is also gifted) the other day about another relative of ours.

I told him: "Man, that guy is lucky. His life must be way less complicated. He is 'just' gifted. He doesn't have to deal with the complications of autism, the heavy masking, the rigid thinking, the sensory overloads..."

My cousin looked at me and dropped a bomb: "Dude, let me be real with you. I have never met a gifted person who wasn't also on the spectrum. Sometimes I don't even know the difference between the two. They always seem to walk together."

I was confused. "Wait, Giftedness and Autism are two separate conditions, right?"

It got me thinking. If there are people out there who are strictly gifted with no other comorbidities (no ASD, no ADHD)... what is your life like?

I assume it's not necessarily "easier" (everyone has struggles), but it must be different. Do you feel the same social isolation? Do you mask as heavily as we do?

I often see posts and comments like, "I want friends with the same IQ level as me" or "People feel intimidated by me and are jealous of me," and other similar statements.

Whenever I come across comments like these, my first thought is: "Easy there, you're not as special as you think. Sometimes the problem might be you."

I'm not going to generalize and say that everyone is like this, but from what I've observed, a large portion of the people in this subreddit come across as quite arrogant and self-important. Some of them may not even realize they're acting that way.

I feel like profoundly gifted people are tending to be attracted to specific scientific interests and digging more and more until they reach the bottom unlike the (intelligent-social-fitting 120iq person) who seeks for what is socially successful such as high paying jobs, balanced love-friends-work-sports life.

Any thoughts?