Tag: IQ | A Banana Peeled

Keeping it to myself, part three

Posted on October 20, 2024 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I want to be clear. When I talk about knowing I’m intelligent and wishing I could mention it without being a jerk, I don’t mean I want to be able to go around bleating about it willy-nilly. Just when it has relevance and in a thoughtful way. It’s not as if I want to rub everyone’s face into the fact that I’m soooooo smart. But, I don’t understand why it’s verboten to talk about it–or being empathetic. Here is the post from yesterday.

I’ve said this several times, and maybe it’s apocryphal at this point. I am a huge Poirot fan (which is not apocryphal). He is a pompuous, arrogant Belgian (NOT French) man who is not averse to tooting his own horn. In one of the novels, he is saying how great he is while Captain Hastings is dying in very British embarrasment next to him. Hastings says something about how Poirot should not say tihngs like that. Poirot says (paraphrasing), “If I met someone else with the abilities that I have, I would be impressed and say how great they are. Why should I hide it when it’s me?”

Again, that’s paraphrasing and I’m no longer sure it’s something I’ve actually read. Meaning, it could be something I have retconned into existence. But it’s something that Poirot would say, so I stand biy it. Meaning, he had no qualms about talking of his intelligence, though he preferred when Hastings bigged him up rather than when he had to do it himself. What else was a lapdog for? (He’s said things similar to that, too.)

I thought about that long and hard because I was raised to believe that saying anything positive about yourself was not only verboten, but blasphemous and rude. It’s Taiwanese culture in general, but especially for women/girls. Add to that the deeply misogynistic church we belonged to, and, well, it took forever before I could see anything positive about myself, let alone say it out loud.

I am better about it now. Dying (twice) really helped with that. It stripped away a lot of the bullshit that I had grown up with. Unfortunately, some of it has come back because I still live in this world and not some ideal one. But, I know my worth now. I know that I have worth, which is something I could not have said before my medical crisis. Not with any confidence, anyway. When I came back from the dead (twice), it was as if all the filters had been stripped away.

Keeping it to myself, part two

Posted on October 19, 2024 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I’m writing about being a weirdo and how I mask it on the daily. Here is yesterday’s post about how I pretty much keep my trap shut about, well, almost everything. In particular, about intelligence/empathy.

I was trying to tease out why people react so negatively about someone plainly saying they were intelligent/empathetic in a way they wouldn’t with someone who says they are very good at basketball/playing piano, etc. I was saying because the ability to do something is more concrete and measurable, but I think it’s also because…how do I say this?

OK. I’m just going to muse it out as I write.

Everyone has a brain of varying function. I don’t think that’s too controversial to say. But, almost everyone has mobility to a certain extent, too. We can talk about the latter (thoughtfully), but there doesn’t seem a way to talk about the former. I have seen people try to talk about their intelligence in forums while qualifying it every way left of Sunday, and people still jumped on them.

“Oh, you think you’re so smart, do you??”

“There’s someone smarter than you!”

“You’re not the smartest person in the room.”

I’m paraphrasing, but this was in response to someone carefully saying they were oftentimes ahead of other people in figuring things out (in a work blog). The commenter was judicious about what he was saying, extremely so. So many qualifiers about with the gist being that he worked twice as fast as other people and had to find ways to talk to them so they could understand what he was saying.

I nodded my head sympathetically as Iwas reading. I thought he had put it very carefully and underplayed it as much as he could and still get his point across. But it wasn’t enough for most commenters and there were several angry comments chastizing him for saying anything at all. This was on a blog that skews progressive, which I think is actally part of the problem. There’s been a push in that demographic to downplay anything intelligence-related, including college. Again, I’m talking mostly about the Ask A Manager website. I’ve noticed in the last few years, there’s been an uptick in saying college is overrated. But, at the same time, everyone saying this has gone to college. I find the disconnect amusing, quite frankly.

The other one I find funny is how people will say very loudly that nepotism is bad! But, if they tell a colleague about their (the commenter’s) kid’s job search, that’s completely different! WHich falls into this post quite nicely, actually.

Keeping it to myself

Posted on October 18, 2024 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

The last time I talked to K, we had a very frank talk about things we didn’t say in the gen pop. Nothing nasty or gross, but things that we knew most people would not understand. I have told this story many times, but I’ll tell it again to make my point.

A few decades ago, I was really into buying things on eBay. I was also very into Alan Rickman. I bought a bunch of paraphernalia and media that featured him, and one of the items was a videotape (yes, it was that long ago) of him in a Broadway production. The description said that it was not pirated, which made me think it was a theater-approved videotape. When I received it, it was a personally-recorded video of the performance. I immediately contacted the seller and said that it was pirated. She wrote back saying it was a genuine copy because her husband had videotaped it.

Nowadays, I would have just notified eBay and pointed out that this was against their policies. Back then, I naively thought I could explain to her why she was wrong. We went back and forth a few times before she contacted eBay to complain about me. When I explained the situation, they immediately refunded my money. The seller gave me a negative rating so I did the same in return.

I mentioned it to my therapist because it really bothered me. I told her (my therapist) how I was frustrated because I could not find the right way to explain to the seller and was taken by surprise when I got the notification that she had reported me. My therapist said to me (paraphrasing), “Minna. You talk on a level six whereas others talk on a level two or three. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of need. You’re at the self-actualization level whereas they are worrying about physiological needs or safety.”

She also said to me at a separate time but on a related point, using the Senate as an example in relation to IQ. She said that the average IQ was 100. In the Senate, that means that half of them are over 100 and half are under. Her point was that I was in the top 5% or so, which meant that I was ‘above’ most people in the gen pop. That’s when she mentioned the second conclusion of the Dunning-Kruger study–that people who are much better at something than other people drastically underestimate how much better they are.

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