I've met a handful of people across my life that i'd call truly brilliant. Like, holy heck how in the world is this person this smart? Two things I've noted about really smart people are (usually mutually exclusively) 1) Sometimes they do not realize how smart they are, because it's simple to them, or because they know the subject they assume everyone else, say with a computer science degree, knows and recalls and understands all they do. I've had friends who go off on crypto related maths and I'm like "I passed that class, but know that I do not really know the subject you just talked about" ...

And 2) There's the people who it's painfully forefront of mind that they're smarter than most everyone around them. Some of them are jerks, some of them are exhausted by being surrounded by relatively "stupid" (again, relatively...) people. For the latter group i have some sympathy. Imagine walking through life and everything is clear, obvious, easy to process and having to watch humanity make stupid choices over and over and over again when the answers have been long known...

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Havoc 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And then you’ve got a third problem - that well north of 50% believe themselves to be in that last sentence of yours

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functionmouse 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It seems that way sometimes but maybe we're just biased as we tend to hang out among intelligentsia

	▲	Havoc 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Oh we can call that the 4th problem. The bias of the people perceiving the bias
	▲	booleandilemma 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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conductr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Imagine walking through life and everything is clear, obvious, easy to process and having to watch humanity make stupid choices over and over and over again when the answers have been long known...

I don’t claim to be book smart or have a high IQ or whatever but I feel this way about small things that I feel are common sense. It’s maddening to me to watch people fumble around. Or do X when obviously it will result in -Y a bad thing. I really have learned to just not vocalize it, most of the time. It’s especially unhealthy for my close family relationships as I just see so much of it that I could nag them to death.

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ryandrake 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One of the things I try to teach my kid is: You are going to have to deal with the fact that there are deeply stupid people all around you, without it affecting your mental health. Those stupid people might be in a position of power over you, they might be other kids in school (or coworkers, later), they might be the president of the country, they might be your neighbor, or they might just be obstacles on the road on your way to work every day. You need to learn how to cope and accept this, gracefully deal with them, and how to protect yourself from their stupidity when it might affect you. It's emotional regulation that smart people need to learn or they go crazy.

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apsurd 3 hours ago | parent [-]

i hope you don’t actually refer to these others as “deeply stupid people” to your presumably young kids.

	▲	ryandrake 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Of course not. I'm translating for HN

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jaggederest 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The older I get, the more I realize that individual variation in humans is truly enormous. Any trait you could pick is much more widely distributed than any individual human can see from their perspective.

Just the other day I was watching a video on youtube, of someone absolutely struggling at a task that had a built-in checklist, verification steps, pictures, and basically (in my opinion) perfect guidance. This is something where, if I was doing it, I would just... do the steps. in order. and it would work, probably... 99.9% of the time, the first time, and relatively quickly, to boot.

I watched them fail to succeed like... 5 times in a row. At no point did they actually complete all the steps and verification in order. And this was a reasonable, intelligent, thoughtful, thorough person. They just could not follow a checklist, visual or written instructions, probably to literally save their life.

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pjm331 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

i feel fairly certain everyone has some set of activities or tasks they feel this way about

my wife and i have two non-overlapping sets haha you can imagine how that plays out

	▲	conductr 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Same wrt my wife and I. She’s quite clumsy and to my assertion doesn’t always think things through. So it’s a bad combination for “accidents” to always happen which I think are very preventable and quite obvious to occur using her approach. A lot of it is just mental errors that I don’t make, but it’s not that I’m perfect I probably just make different mistakes (I think less volume too ;) Yesterday she literally failed miserably at a single task. Her mission was grocery shopping. She drove to grocery store, shopped, and came home and left the groceries in the car. Didn’t realize it until she was making breakfast the next morning and there was no milk. I see this two ways; 1) I would never make that mistake 2) I know her quite well, partners for over 20 years now, and this kind of thing is just her normal par for the course type of “oops”. The second part is what frustrates me the most, I like to learn from my mistakes and she treats it as a given that she’s just spacey/dimwit by nature and leans into everything being an “accident”. Obviously not healthy if I treat her like a child so I just watch her fumble through life and try to have a sense of humor about it all.

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kilroy123 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yup, I've known and met such people.

However... NONE were "the 10x developer" who built up a huge mess. Which a team and I had to spend months and months cleaning up after.

	▲	hamdingers 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The 10x developer believes deeply that they are #2, but they are usually incorrect.

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thegrimmest 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's lonely being an outlier, especially in a trait that's so fundamental to how you see the world. Despite best effort, it's hard to relate to most people, and they especially find it hard to relate to you. The delta of lived experience is quite wide, often insurmountable.

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blanched 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I feel like this could be said about most human traits, on both ends of those traits’ axis. I’m not sure if that makes it insightful or obvious :).

	▲	andai 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>on both ends of those traits’ axis. I somehow suffer from both simultaneously!

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Yokohiii 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> painfully forefront of mind that they're smarter than most everyone around them

Many devs choose to just do their day job or decide to follow a cargo cult.

Probably not every dev can have the same output, but if you decide to keep thinking beyond what is the cultural average, then everyone could be smart in their own way.

Most people don't realize they can do that.

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throw4847285 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would say there are two explanations for group 2.

The first is that you aren't as smart as you think you are, because if you actually understood the people around you in any real way, you would instantly find them less frustrating. But instead you are using flawed heuristics, built out of your own insecurities, to interact with the world.

Possibility two is that you are smart, but you have developed a malformed coping mechanism whereby you take all your negative traits (social ineptness, anxiety, impatience) and treat them all as simple the nature outgrowth of your prodigious intelligence. This is a common coping mechanism, and the neat thing is, it has nothing to do with intelligence. You can be dumb as a brick and still feel like you're in a world of morons who are inferior to you.

In fact, I suspect these two explanations are one explanation.