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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2859 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 8, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I'd like to hear more stories about encounters with people who are really intelligent.

Where did you meet them?

And how long did it take you to realise that they were intellectually gifted?

Having spent a decade in math departments (as a master’s student, then adjunct, then doctoral student), nearly all the professors were way brighter than I, and it was obvious very quickly.

The exceptions:

  1. Some but not all of the math ed specialists.
  2. Some of the oldest profs, especially US-educated ones, were closer to the stronger students in ability - the competition for tenure track positions was not as insane in the 80s.

I know many smart people, but in my life I think I've met two truly exceptionally intelligent people that I knew when dealing with them that they were somehow just different, set apart. Both men, as it happens.

One currently teaches at a very prestigious West coast university after getting his Masters in an ivy league university in the 90s. The other was from a poor white family in Nowhere, Alabama, and ended up 1) being imprisoned for about a year, 2) driving a truck for another few years, and 3) owning a bar in a coastal city The last one may have turned him into a functional alcoholic though last I heard he had sold the place (which is still thriving) and I am not sure what he's doing now.

They were/are different in terms of social class and all the various baggage that entails. I could go into details but it would be fairly easy to work out their identities by anyone who wanted to take the time so I won't.

I also know a family of extremely smart women (all daughters) one of whom is fairly high up in the mainstream press of the US, and the other sister puts me to shame in language learning and can talk circles around me in Japanese (and is even more fluent in Chinese) despite having spent a fraction of the time I've spent in Asia. She's married to some tech genius and their daughter is probably just as brilliant and is stunningly beautiful.

Of the two men, they are both missing something emotionally. I can't put my finger on it, but they don't have a certain set of responses that most people have. The women I don't know as well and therefore I have little insight into their private selves.

What made you think that the guy you knew from Alabama was really exceptionally intelligent?

The fact that he was. A brilliant chess player. When we both worked at a hotel he could do the night audit practically in his head. Widely read in esoteric literature. He once diagnosed accurately the cause of an electrical problem at my house by looking at a couple of wires. Fluent in Russian. Also a really good poker player. A talented writer. Many varied high level skills, a kind of generalized aptitude of subjects that didn't seem to go together in one person.

I notice you don't ask about the ivy league guy. I suppose that's reasonable, but I really do think class issues kept the other guy from thriving in certain areas.

What is the second guy doing now?

We lost touch, though he was married and had a son, so maybe he's just raising his family but I don't know doing what. Emails go unreturned but that might be because he's changed it.

The best indication of extremely outsized intelligence is noticeably-above-normal predictive ability. This is because prediction is pattern-matching and pattern matching is, essentially, intelligence.

So I’d say I’ve met a handful of people in my life who, if not always then certainly to an unusual extent, seem to be able to synthesize information and understand what is going to happen or what needs to be done to get something to happen much more easily and with less information and less prompting than even ‘normal’ very smart people.

Any stories? I feel like I have an intelligence fetish.

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