Superior intelligence is so overrated

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Interessing enough is that people with superior intelligence can also posing challenge for diagnosis. Their energy can wrongly been see as ADHD, their sensivity and their mood swings wrongly see as bipolar disorders, their sensivity to the environnement, their insatiable curiosity about "adults" subjects (science, philosophy, politic,...) and the difficulty to integrate to their age peers wrongly seen as.... asperger LOL . Of course they can have all that, but the misdiagnosis are quite frequent... (Overall it seem that most WP menbers, even of high intellignece, are really autism or asperger though. )

There's lots of reasons that you might be a social misfit; there's got to be more to it than that to diagnose AS.

What may be "true" for your daughter with a low IQ may not be the case for others. If you are not her, how do you know she is thinking that her difficulty understanding the great source of unhappiness and frustration in the world is why she is struggling?

I have an uncle who is M.R. and he is happy with the simple things in life. He may get frustrated at being told to do something, however that has nothing to do with the state of the world.

What applies to your daughter as you say, may not be the case for others.

Agreed. But some can confuse the social difficulty from being intelligent for AS. And if you add the intellectual interests that can be confused with aspie interests, and a greater sensivity to sensorial input who look a lot like the problems of sensory integrations from being AS... The inverse can also be true, having a great intelligence can hide asperger because of a better rational learning of social rules. And there is the misleading idea that if you have a good imagination you're can't be asperger.

There a article about the issue of diagnosis with gifted children. http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Webb_MisdiagnosisAndDualDiagnosisOfGiftedChildren.shtml

You make a very good point!

Oh for pete's sake. Read my sentence more carefully. It says she "struggles to understand the world and her difficulty in understanding it is a great source of unhappiness and frustration for her."

That has a completely different meaning than your scrambled version that "her difficulty understanding the great source of unhappines and frustration in the world is why she is struggling".

She (not the world) is unhappy and frustrated. This unhappiness and frustration stems in part from her struggle to understand the world and fit it into some sort of sensible framework. Part of that is autism (the idea that there must be a sensible framework that she should be able to grasp in order to feel comfortable) and part of that is low IQ (there is just too much to grasp and the simplified explanations that she can understand have to be so simplified that they stop really explaining things).

The "ignorance is bliss" incorrect trope implies that if people can't understand the miseries of the world, they will be happy happy happy. This is not true. One does not need to understand the miseries of the world to experience unhappiness. The act of trying to understand the world (meaning far more than just its miseries) when you havn't been given the neurons to do so but can see that everybody else has can be a great source of unhappiness. And the reason I can know these things about her is because she can talk and tell me. She tells me in short sentences but tells me nonetheless.

It is dehumanizing to people with low IQ to imply that they are somehow exempt from the full range of human emotions, I'm sure that your uncle, MR though he is, happy with the simple things in life though he is, feels grief, sadness, joy, anger, frustration, contentment just like any other human. I am just fed up with the idea that low IQ means somebody is going around with their emotional dial always set to "happy". It's dehumanizing.

Did you mean it in the sense of "admire"? Why would you need to be surrounded by "relatively" intelligent people who admire you? What is wrong with peers who just see you as a friend?

Your daughter isn't the only one experiencing that, and low IQ isn't the only thing that can make it more complicated. I struggle to understand the world, too; things like, why are people selfish? how do you deal with the reality that you're going to die? how do you know whether you really are trying as hard as you can, or whether you're just lazy? what's the difference between "good enough" and "perfect"? Maybe those are different things from what your daughter struggles with; but what you said about her frustration really resonates with me. When a question can't be answered, when I can't fit things into a neat framework, it is very distressing to me. Whether those questions are things I'll never understand, or things nobody in the world will ever understand, not being able to know some things is still a real source of anxiety.

If you are very intelligent, you can become very rich. That should take care of getting laid.

ruveyn

I never thought the "ignorance is bliss" meant that people with low IQs are always happy. I think the cliche would have been better phrased, "Denial is bliss." I guess I always saw it more as that. For instance, if my husband was cheating on me, do I really want to know? Maybe yes and maybe no, but I am much happier not knowing that. Of course, if he's having an on-going affair, I probably want to know that, but if he cheated on me 3 years ago one night really drunk with some random girl i don't know and it was just one night, I really don't want to know that because it would kill my bliss and it really doesn't matter anymore. So, anyway, that's kinda how I coined that phrase, and I don't see how anyone would take it to the level to assume people with low IQ's are happier than people with high IQs. Perhaps that's because people often misunderstand the purpose of the IQ.

The IQ is not something where you compare to see who has the bigger penis type thing like you see in this thread. You don't see us bragging about our emotional test results. Psychological testing is meant to help you understand more about who you are, your strengths, your weaknesses, etc. The IQ is just a way to see what those strengths and weaknesses are in the realm of what people have considered intelligence such as verbal ability, mathematical ability, and mechanical thinking (IMO, creativity plays the biggest role in intelligence, but that's just me). Anyway, your IQ score doesn't mean Intelligent vs stupid. It just lets you know where you compare to the "average Joe." If you score high, then it's just one less thing you have to worry about as opposed to something worth bragging about, and if it's high enough to be a strength, then it can get you into some programs to help harness that strength using methods that should be used on every kid anyway. If you score low, then you analyze your results to see what areas you need to work on. When dealing with children especially, you also need to see if they actually took the test vs. slept through part of it, just chose answers to rush it, or if there were any distractions. You can't confuse that for assuming they'd score higher, but we all have to realize that other factors do come into play with the IQ testing. I also believe if a child's behind on reading comprehension, that will kill the whole testing process since the whole test is in writing.

In the case of your daughter, she's struggling because she missed out on something. It's pretty hard to diagnose what it is, but the IQ test is designed to help guide you into finding out what it is. If she is doing well in school, then it probably is something in the IQ testing more so than her abilities. If she's struggling with school, then maybe all you need to do is get her up to speed with what she missed out in math, or vocabulary, or whatever. Either way, it never hurts to motivate and get excited about academics as if she were gifted (we all are gifted in our own unique way, but I meant that to be the term used by shrinks). Pick a book that's beyond her reading comprehension and read it a few times together. My friend did that with her daughter with Romeo and Juliet when her daughter was 9 years old/6th grade. They read that play a few times, she explained what it meant, they talked about literary terms, acted it out together, watched movies on it, etc. They kept up with Shakespeare for a few years after that with Hamlet and Othello I think. You can also do your own science projects at home or visit some historical site and learn about history (more fun when it's haunted around this time of year). You just have to look for opportunities to make learning fun. Basketball can be a physics class, math class, or you can discuss the nature of the Tao. Either way, most kids just want to hang out with their parents (until they become teens of course). Until the subliminal umbilical cord breaks, you are in the position to totally mold your children into doing exactly what you want them to do by doing it yourself and allowing them to join you. So, you can either sit and watch the Transformers together, or you can make your own transformers with some strange connecto toy.

Also, to everyone on this topic... Happiness is a state of mind. If you are not happy with what you have, then you will never find happiness in obtaining that which you do not have.

Well if that's all you are concerned about, I may be married now, but I'm sure I'm not the only girl who is highly attracted to intelligence. Being a little more specific, I love men who are good at math and mechanical concepts. The artsy fartsy literary men bore me. I also like Marines. Forget beef. Devil Dog is what's for dinner. Either way, all women have their preference, and many love intelligent poor men. Most women who date men for their riches prefer them to be really old and dumb anyway (duh, they aren't there for the man as much as the money, so they want someone they can take advantage of fiscally).

My college years say otherwise! I was pretty, intelligent, blunt about what I wanted, and surrounded by various flavours of geek. I never lacked for male attention.

The trail of emotional destruction that behaviour wreaked was extraordinary. I may have got a lot of sex, but I did not make a lot of friends. It took quite a few more years before I even learnt what being "happy" meant to me, and it will most likely take me many more years to achieve it.

Agreed. I try not to even sound remotely intelligent most of the time. I have studied Anthro, Bio, German and some History but it means little to me most of the time b/c languages are simply a means to communicate, history is the history of mankind and therefore only a sliver of evolutionary time and Bio and Anthro are useful subjects but so broad that I could study for years and still not feel like an expert in either area.

You're a woman. This doesn't apply to you. Men get desperate and lonely and other guys are never there to support them emotionally as women do. Unfulfilled horny men go insane. Men are programmed for sex. I know men who will f**k a plastic bag filled with jelly if they can't get laid. I know men who have commited suicide b/c they couldn't get laid. Guys are tortured by overwhelming testosterone levels. Women, for the most part, have their choice of men even if they are ugly. I know many average looking friends who date ugly women simply because they want sex and other average girls have too high standards. This is why average men are so mad: average women would rather abstain from sex in many cases than date an average looking guy. Why? Because they have been f****d by good looking horny guys once or twice and think that they can have a relationship with those kinds of people. In their thirties, when the find out they were wrong, they will "settle" for a nice, "average" guy (although they think they are doing him a favor in their conceited minds).

Found this on craigslist...sums up my feelings on the matter:

"Dear Good-looking guys,

Thanks for ruining things for us average-looking guys. You, like all men, will tag pretty much anything female. So you go out to bars and other social venues and you go for the low-hanging fruit. You go for the average-looking girl. Why? Because they are easy and don't give you half the s**t that hot women give.

So what's the big deal? The big deal is that average girls don't know their place anymore. They suddenly think that they are hot just because they have been banged by a hot guy. They are wrong, and they do not know it. We average guys, however, do know it. We know that the average girl -- in the long term -- is out of your league. We know that she is in our league, the league of the average. But she does not know that.

So the average girl goes on thinking she is hot and holding out for a hot guy to spend the rest of her life with. Yes, it's great for the ego of the average girl. She bangs a hot guy every now and then, and she really thinks she is the s**t. No one told her, though, that any guy (hot or not) will bang any average girl. Sadly, the average women develop this "I'll never settle" mentality. Average guys are suddenly not an option for them, leaving us average guys out in the cold. The genuine hot girls, of course, are not an option for us, so that leaves us with the fat chicks. Thanks. Thanks a lot, hot guy. Meanwhile, the really hot chicks are sitting around dissing us and waiting for you to come talk to them. (And we can only imagine the torture that the fat guys are going through as we average guys are forced to mack on their women.)

So do the social scene a favor -- stick with your own kind. Leave the average girls to us, and stop creating delusions of grandeur in their minds. The average chick is our niche. We work hard enough as it is for the average girl. Now you go work hard to bag the hot chick. Don't be afraid of a little work. "

Oh, come on! Sex is awesome. f**k friends.

it certainly was an enticement for marilyn monroe to throw herself at albert einstein.



???isaac asimov was very popular even thought he was an egotistical so-and-so. for every so many snookies, there is also a gore vidal with a very large social circle as well.



but it sure can't hurt, either.