Curse Of The Gifted (2000)

There's a specific reason I'm not inserting IQ into what I'm talking about, I agree that it's not a good focal point for a discussion about intelligence.

And I'm not saying I have perfect prediction of human behavior. Just that, with many people, if I spend enough time observing them, I can start to predict what they'll do or say with better than chance accuracy. The best analogy I can give is not Sherlock Holmes, but Groundhog day. What people miss in that movie is that the main character (Phil Connors played by Bill Murray) is spending his time mapping out the behavior patterns of the girl of his dreams (Rita by Andie MacDowell) to see if he can find the behavior pathways that will lead to her falling in love with him (or sleeping with him depending on your take on the story). Many people follow routines and habits, and if you observe them long enough it's like spending the same "day" over and over with them. You can start to mentally note and map out their behavior and then start making predictions about that behavior.

Most people do it all the time, we track what foods or films or whatever our friends like and dislike, and then make recommendations to them, or buy them presents based on that. We know them, so we think we can predict their behavior on a like/dislike vector. But what if you observed other things? Say you find a friend has an extreme allergy to milk and milk products. You can guess then that, if they drink coffee, they'll use a milk substitute, maybe soy. If they use soy, and you know what stores in their area carry soy milk and which don't and the ones that do are only the vegetarian stores, then you might be able to make a probabilistic guess that they're vegetarian. If they're vegetarian, you know there aren't many restaurants that are vegetarian in their area, so they probably cook at home, meaning they have a decent kitchen. So you can guess they have decent cookware, guessing at their income level you can guess if it's $100 an item cookware of $1000 an item cookware. There's only so many vendors at each price point for that, and only so many sell in my area etc., and on and on to yoga studio and car choice and neighborhood.

You can probabilistically guess all kinds of things from a cup of coffee. A little more observation, a comment here and there, a couple questions from you to direct your guesses and you can improve your chances and before you know it you can run down the list of consumer choices many individuals make which defines their space.

Even singular biases or opinions can tell you worlds about a person. It's kind of like stereotyping, but it's a little more informed than that. You can guess, for example, a person with strong opinions on say gun rights is likely aligned with several other related categories. Differences in those aligned categories might tell you other things, and let you know if they're conservative, liberal, anarchist or something else. Even a single comment can inform your predictive model about a person and set boundaries on what they would or wouldn't do.

You also have to know things. I couldn't do this with somebody from a country or area I don't know anything about. I don't know the politics, neighborhoods, social signals, in and out group dynamics and on and on.

Another example, there's an old phrase, "everybody skis in Aspen", meaning that knowing a person is from Aspen implies they do snow sports, but knowing that doesn't inform you of much other than they probably own a pair of skis or a snowboard and there's a fair chance they come from money.

But knowing a person you meet in someplace like Tampa, is an avid skier (an outlier) tells you all kinds of things about them. That they travel, that they probably don't go to anywhere on the East Coast (the snow sucks), that they probably have a passport (to go to the Canadian Rockies or the Alps), and gives you an idea of their disposable income they set aside for trips and skiing, which then can inform you of their total income and on and on and on.

People are like chaotic systems, and every piece of information you know restricts the space they can operate in. Within limits you can infer many many things. And it's not superhuman.

There's literally hundreds of thousands of pages of advice columns and books and lectures you can go to about various typical money/relationship problems which make up the vast bulk of people's issues which are all summed up with the above.

Problem: I don't make enough money

Solution: Stop not making enough money and make more money.

Problem: My Significant Other and I don't get along

Solution: Stop not getting along and get along or break up.

Problem: My life sucks

Solution: Stop living a sucky life and get a better life.

Yeah, not every problem is simple, and not every problem (simple or not) has a simple problem, but the vast majority of day-to-day problems people have are trivially solvable...they just don't do the things to solve them.

Solutions don't have to be instantaneous, they just have to resolve the problem. People want instant quick fixes, "I'm poor" and poof money falls out of the sky, sorry doesn't work that way. But making money is stupidly easy...do something somebody wants and charge them for it.

"But I'm not rich" well that's not really a problem is it?

But to answer the spirit of your question. It depends.

What's the cognitive task I'm gifted at? Did I do that task? Why should I feel shameful for doing that?

If I'm good at rational reasoning, is doing the act of reasoning bad?

If I'm good at advanced physics, is doing physics bad?

If I'm good at painting, or music, or solving rubik's cubes, or biology or psychology, is the act of doing those things I'm good at something I should be bothered about?

There's a significant social stigma about being smarter than everybody else in the room. They're elevated on a weird kind of pedestal both to celebrate, but also to make sure they don't get in too close of contact with the normal folks. It's not fun. Most really smart folks just want to contribute and be useful and use their gifts. Just like tall people tend to play basketball or musically gifted people want to play music.

We don't really celebrate demonstrations of intelligence. It's weird and bizarre and worthy of study and research, but not use. The really really intelligent folks find themselves locked away solving other people's problems for them, rather than being engaged.

> Do you do anything productive to take advantage of your high IQ? I didn't see it yet.

If I'm good at a cognitive task, is there something useful I can do with it?

A criticism that I think is rightfully levied on people like Marilyn Vos Savant is that she doesn't use her gifts for anything particularly useful. Solving other people's brain teasers every week is pretty low on the accomplishment scale.

I try to put what I can do to good use, but outside of the startup sphere I've worked on some very hard, very vexing World problems and been successful in some cases, less successful in others. A byproduct of that work is some cool and elegant technology and approaches that I try to share with others, some of which has had some pretty big impacts on the world which I'm very proud of. It hasn't made me FU rich, but that's never been what I was aiming for. I live very comfortably.

I've also, quite literally, been the guy locked away in a room to solve a hard problem. It's not fun, and it brings up those deep feelings of social isolation. I'm not a person, I'm a functional black box nobody knows quite how to deal with.

But, something I really enjoy, figuring out how to take the advanced work and make it usable by regular folks is a pretty engaging and pretty striking challenge.

You can do drill in 8th grade, or you can do it in your freshman year of college.

The point is:

1) I thought it annoying and pointless in the 8th grade. Oh clever me, I knew so much better.

2) People who sucked it up and did it, with whom I shared classes, blew my doors off in college math courses for a couple of years. A teacher made this the central fact of the algebra class they took.

3) Then I took the discrete math course, and stopped having trouble.

There is something to this. Rigor is not natural. Learning rigor is essential to being able to operate your life well.