Another question at Quora.com was,
I have an IQ level in the 99th percentile. Why do intellectual inferiors think that they can argue with me?
Say what?!?!
I love this answer,
Here’s a story that may help. The last time I checked, my IQ is in between the 98th and 99th percentile. A few years ago, I had to change the wipers on my car. I spent over an hour on those damn wipers, with no progress. They could not be put on. There was no doubt in my mind they were defective as I read the instructions, watched videos, and tried every possible solutions that came to mind. Eventually, an extended family member of mine pulled up, and asked what I was doing. This guy is probably your exact definition of stupid, because he was mine up until that day. He’s worked blue collar jobs his whole life, has a ninth grade education, and literally has a tattoo of a bird perched on top of his ear defecating onto his shoulder. As he got out of his truck, with a 40 oz Olde English in each hand, he asked me what I doing. I told him I was trying to replace my wipers, but it couldn’t be done. He cocked his head to the side, handed me his beers, and put the wipers on in about 90 seconds, all without saying a word. He took his drinks back and walked inside.
If Jesus himself had appeared before me, that would’ve still been the second most shocking thing of the day. Here’s a guy I always viewed as intellectually inferior, and in 90 seconds he gave me one of the most humbling lessons I’ve ever experienced. There’s no doubt in my mind I could score much higher than him on an IQ test. But I will NEVER consider him an intellectual inferior to me. In anything automobile related, or construction related, he is Albert Einstein and I’m Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford.
Given the proper circumstance, I guarantee you I would have the exact same experience with 99% of the population (and so would you). Everyone is better than me at something. And given the proper circumstance, I could be in the reverse situation with just about anyone in the planet. I’d be willing to go head to head in a debate with Neil deGrasse Tyson on a range of subjects from the economics of various tax rates to how to navigate downtown Los Angeles, and any high school football player would mop the floor with me on a debate about nutrition or exercise, and likely be on par with me in terms of competitive business strategy (football teaches a lot). Does that mean this average football player is intellectually superior to me, or I’m intellectually superior to Neil deGrasse Tyson? The answer is no and hell no respectively.
“Every man I meet is in some way my superior; and in that I can learn of him.”-Ralph Waldo Emerson
——Tyler Lee, CEO and Founder of Anioval
I’ve a ex-friend (he still believes we are friends) who is one of those Mensa types with higher than high IQ (or whatever that standard is…) and he knows just about everything, because he’s a know-all. If you try to have a chat about xyz he goes off on a tangent – the history, the ideas, the good/bad notions and so on…and he’s a bit of an organiser, I still have some of his boxes here (he gave them to me at some point), labelled as well of what is in them.
But there are aspects of him that aren’t nice at all..including using the system and anyone he thinks will “give” and then never getting around to giving-back. He absolutely no idea about budgeting because having lived with him and others some decades ago, where he handled all the invoices, we were forever having to race around and cough up more money because services were going to be cut off!
Now he is living on his own, his partner skipped off one month…he’s still frantically trying to get “stuff” …
so all this fancy notion of “I’m brainy than thou…” hasn’t really helped him in the real world. as friends disappear from his horizon…
I can well relate to man with the impossible wiper replacement 🙂
Yes, scoring well on an IQ test isn’t everything. As Andy kept telling Kaitlin when she was growing up, “Smart people are a dime a dozen. You have to learn to be effective!”
what always puzzles me is the inferior ~ superior thing.
why can’t everyone just be accepted? with no judgements.
maybe it’s a buddha thing. I don’t know.
I think Will Rogers said (and I’m paraphrasing)
“we’re all ignorant. just in different things.”
so it’s really a moot point as the guy in the article discovered … isn’t it?
until of course you meet someone who doesn’t feel ignorant about anything! 🙂
At least the writer figured it out. Good for him!
That response for a dumb question is one of the best that I have ever seen or heard to handle a fairly common syndrome of people with chips on their shoulders. I have had enough experiences in my life of incidents like this never to think too highly of myself compared to my fellow human beings and sometimes dogs too.
Amen to that!
I recently changed the wipers on Karen’s car, my truck and the motorhome. The first one, on the truck, was quite frustrating and all three had different ways of attaching. I probably could have found instructions on YouTube.
You have a lot of experience doing practical things like this, so I have no doubt you can figure it out. As you say, the internet helps a lot! It’s harder for people with no experience. I still sympathize with a reviewer of a lantern top battery. It took him ages to figure out he had to take the protective cap off one of the terminals and wished the battery had come with instructions. He wasn’t stupid, he just hadn’t had the assumed experience. It sounds as if your wipers would have been better if they had instructions given that someone with your experience had trouble.
So humbling for a snobby person! But at least, he did admit his error!
Yes, and he was willing to share his story. 🙂
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
– Albert Einstein
I love it! Thank you. 🙂