swbluto wrote:
Or is this feeling common among "weird high IQ NTs" as well?
I don't think there is the same feeling among that group. (But there's some overlap. By the end of this long article, I'm even more confused than I was at the beginning. I hope some of the quotes are interesting, anyway.)
When I was a teenager, I used to think that it was having a very high IQ that made me so different. Later, I came to think that I was wrong about everything, and I tried to force myself to adapt, to learn to be normal. At one stage, when I was about 32, I thought I would try to test my earlier hypothesis, by joining a very high IQ society (sort of Mensa squared, or Mensa cubed), to see if I fitted in better, and could communicate in an atmosphere of mutual respect. The entrance test was so tough, that I certainly do respect anyone who could get through it. I struggled hard with it, with no time limit, and still didn't get anything like full marks, but I qualified. I got several issues of the society's magazine, but it just seemed ... well, weird. It seemed just as bad as Mensa, which I'd never got a good impression of. Members seemed just like "normal" people, only more prickly and arrogant. The most interesting article in the society's magazine was written by a psychiatrist, appropriately enough, and it proposes a similarly "therapeutic" function for such societies to what I had in mind myself:
The Prometheus Society > Articles > The OutsidersQuote:
It is the belief of this author that the super high IQ societies were created primarily by those who have adopted the marginal strategy, and by rights ought to be aimed at fulfilling the needs of this subdivision of the exceptionally gifted. It's obvious from reading the journals that those who have followed the committed strategy rarely participate in society affairs, rarely write for the various journals, and indeed have little need to belong to such a group. They have far more productive outlets for their talents. It's the exceptionally gifted adult who feels stifled that stands most in need of a high IQ society. The tragedy is that none of the super high IQ societies created thus far have been able to meet those needs, and the reason for this is simple. None of these groups is willing to acknowledge or come to terms with the fact that much of their membership belong to the psychological walking wounded. This alone is enough to explain the constant schisms that develop, the frequent vendettas, and the mediocre level of their publications. But those are not immutable facts; they can be changed. And the first step in doing so is to see ourselves as we are.
Alas, his words seemed to fall on deaf ears, even though his article was well liked and respected! Perhaps I didn't stay in the society long enough to see an improvement? But it was long enough to learn that it wasn't having a high IQ that made me different. Still, I should read that article again.
On the more general topic of the thread: I'm tempted to rant at length about it, but I'll just say a few things. Even though I tried my utmost to conform between the ages of 19 and 59, I have ended up agreeing with my teenage self that I am of a different species to the overwhelming majority of the beings on this planet. I am definitely from some other planet (either that, or this one has been invaded, and taken over), even if the planet I'm from is not Planet Asperger. (I'm still patiently trying to work out whether that is my home planet, or not. It's not obvious either way.) The beings who rule this planet do seem very ape-like. I have an enormous admiration for much of what they do, but it is the admiration felt by a member of one species for members of another. At their worst (which is most of the time), I don't find them "weird" - that's not the word I'd choose at all - I find them insane, irrational, hateful, bigoted, closed-minded, mindlessly conformist, unempathetic, violent, and dangerous. (Well, I do come from Northern Ireland!) They seem to reject the best part of their own nature, and project the worst part of their own nature onto those who remind them of what they have rejected. I wonder if we Aspie-like types are perhaps evolutionary throwbacks, who don't have the right genes for participating in social super-organisms? I don't know enough about autism, or about my own "species", whatever it might be, to know if that is even a halfway-plausible hypothesis or not. But the difference is something radical, as radical as something in the genes. Perhaps we would have been OK in a hunter-gatherer society 6,000 years ago? I don't know. I haven't read any of Temple Grandin's books (I've just ordered my first couple of books on the subject of AS - which book of hers would be good to read first?), but I very much like some remark she made about autistic people being like animals. I often feel like a wild animal, hunted by members of Homo sapiens. I sympathise with the Neanderthals!
Ronald David Laing - WikiquoteQuote:
Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
Anyway, returning to that other point: I don't think you get anything like this feeling of being a separate, hunted, possibly alien species among "weird high IQ NTs". If there is any common feeling in the other group - and I'm not at all sure that there is - then it is, I'm afraid, more likely to be a kind of snooty arrogance, looking
down on the rest of humanity, and often having a leaning towards eugenics. That always felt very strange to me, and somewhat repulsive: my own intelligence has always seemed to be a kind of hypersensitivity, rather than a kind of unfeeling, domineering arrogance, although I do feel and sympathise with intellectual arrogance as a kind of defence against being oppressed and misunderstood.
But if there is such a feeling, and I've just forgotten it, the Grady Towers article is probably a good place to look for it.
There is surely some overlap in the experiences of the two groups, if the article is to be believed. For instance:
Quote:
Hollingworth points out that the exceptionally gifted do not deliberately choose isolation, but are forced into it against their wills.
These superior children are not unfriendly or ungregarious by nature. Typically they strive to play with others but their efforts are defeated by the difficulties of the case... Other children do not share their interests, their vocabulary, or their desire to organize activities. They try to reform their contemporaries but finally give up the struggle and play alone, since older children regard them as "babies," and adults seldom play during hours when children are awake. As a result, forms of solitary play develop, and these, becoming fixed as habits, may explain the fact that many highly intellectual adults are shy, ungregarious, and unmindful of human relationships, or even misanthropic and uncomfortable in ordinary social intercourse.
And:
Quote:
Wechsler is saying quite plainly that those with IQs above 150 are different in kind from those below that level. He is saying that they are a different kind of mind, a different kind of human being.
This subjective impression of a difference in kind also appears to be fairly common among members of the super high IQ societies themselves. When Prometheus and Triple Nine members were asked if they perceived a categorical difference between those above this level and others, most said that they did, although they also said that they were reluctant to call the difference genius. When asked what it should be called, they produced a number of suggestions, sometimes esoteric, sometimes witty, and often remarkably vulgar. But one term was suggested independently again and again. Many thought that the most appropriate term for people like themselves was Outsider.
The feeling of estrangement, or at least detachment, from society at large is not merely subjective illusion. Society is not geared to deal effectively with the exceptionally gifted adult because almost nothing objective is known about him. It is a commonplace observation that no psychometric instrument can be validly used to evaluate a person unless others like him were included in the test's norming sample. Yet those with IQs above 150 are so rare that few if any were ever included in the norming sample of any of the most commonly used tests, tests like the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory, the Kuder Vocational Preference Record, the MMPI and so on. As a consequence, objective self-knowledge for the exceptionally gifted is nearly impossible to obtain. What he most needs to know is not how he differs from ordinary people--he is acutely aware of that--but how he is both like and unlike those of his own kind. The most commonly used tests can't provide that knowledge, so he is forced to find out in more roundabout ways. It is his attempts to find answers to these questions that may explain the emergence of the super high IQ societies. Where else can he find peers against which to measure himself?
But even if the article isn't relevant as a whole, it is still of some interest, because it starts with a brief account of the sad life of William J. Sidis, who seems to have been autistic (although how this fits together with his forced education at the hands of his father, I don't know):
Quote:
And yet it all came to nothing [...] for the rest of his life [he] wandered from one menial job to another. His experiences as a child prodigy had proven so painful that he decided for the rest of his life to shun public exposure at all costs. Henceforth, he denied his gifts, refused to think about mathematics, and above all refused to perform as he had been made to do as a child. [...] He worked hard at becoming a normal human being, but never entirely succeeded.
(I'm nowhere near as clever as Sidis - I don't have, and have never had, any "savant" abilities - but I've been there, and done that!)
Quote:
And finally there are the dropouts. These sometimes bizarre individuals were often born into families in which one or more of the parents were not only exceptionally gifted, but exceptionally maladjusted themselves. This is the worst possible social environment that a gifted child can be thrust into. His parents, often driven by egocentric ambitions of their own, may use him to gratify their own needs for accomplishment. He is, to all intents and purposes, not a living human being to them, but a performing animal, or even an experiment. That is what happened to Sidis, and may be the explanation for all those gifted who "burn out" as he did. (Readers familiar with the Terman study will recognize the committed strategy and the marginal strategy as roughly similar to the adjustment patterns of Terman's A and C groups.)
If the exceptionally gifted adult with an IQ of 150, or 160, or 170 has problems in adapting to his world, what must it have been like for William James Sidis, whose IQ was 250 or more?
Aldous Huxley once wrote:
Perhaps men of genius are the only true men. In all the history of the race there have been only a few thousand real men. And the rest of us--what are we? Teachable animals. Without the help of the real man, we should have found out almost nothing at all. Almost all the ideas with which we are familiar could never have occurred to minds like ours. Plant the seeds there and they will grow; but our minds could never spontaneously have generated them [4, p. 2242].
And so we see that the explanation for the Sidis tragedy is simple. Sidis was a feral child; a true man born into a world filled with animals--a world filled with us.
At the end of all this, I'm confused. I'm not a typical case of anything, nor is Sidis. Was he born autistic? Was he born with exceptional intelligence? And is it just coincidence that his father was this man?
Boris Sidis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaQuote:
Sidis applied his own psychological approaches to raising his son, William James Sidis, in whom he wished to promote a high intellectual capacity. His son has been considered among the most intelligent people ever (with a ratio IQ broadly estimated at 250-300).[citation needed] However, after receiving much publicity for his childhood feats, he came to live an eccentric life, and died in relative obscurity. Boris Sidis himself derided intelligence testing as "silly, pedantic, absurd, and grossly misleading."
Hmm ...
_________________
Age: 60. Sex: male. Gender: OK I give up, please tell me
AQ: 37/50; Aspie Quiz: 110/200 for Aspie, 82/200 for NT
Almost certainly not Aspie, but certainly something like it
09 May 2011, 5:58 pm
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