You said in another comment that you deal with misinformation online by just waiting for it to get debunked.

I have completed a masters degree at university. An IQ test showed my IQ is higher than 130. People around me consider me a pretty smart guy.

I have never even thought of your way to deal with misinformation. It’s the simplest thing too, just wait. It’s brilliant too, because it almost never fails and anyone can do it without any practice or training. The source of the misinformation doesn’t matter, if it was spread via the news or on a forum online doesn’t matter… It always works.

It might actually be the perfect solution to this problem. And I never even thought of it! When I read your comment my first thought was “Oh my god that’s brilliant”.

You might not be very intelligent. But you do seem wiser than most. Everyone has their own shortcomings, their insecurities, stuff they hate about themselves. For you it’s your intelligence, for others it is how athletic they are, or their looks, or maybe they really want to grow a beard, they think they’re not sexy enough, not nice enough, want children but can’t have them, or maybe they wake up worrying about their micropenis every day.

I can’t tell you to just love yourself and who you are. I know it’s not that simple. Looking at this in a different way than you probably have all your life is not easy!

I can only offer you this: my girlfriend has an uncle with a severe learning disability, severe autism and he also had a stroke when he was young. He went from an already not very smart carpenter to effectively a man with the brains of a five year old, unable to drive anymore and not able to do his job anymore.

He had to be placed in a care home. He “works” by folding envelopes or sorting lego pieces. And someone needs to explain that to him too, almost every day, again and again.

His brother, my girlfriends dad, is what I can only describe as a shithead. He was violent to her, ignored her wishes and was just cruel. She was traumatized by her youth, because her mother died young because of an accident and he quickly married again, to a total bitch this time. She hates her dad with a passion.

This uncle however is not violent. Never has been either. If another person who is in the care home hits him (some are sadly aggressive and get angry easily), he doesn’t react back. They told him he can push them away, but he refuses. They sent him on a self-defense course, which he did, but he refuses to use what he learned. He says he doesn’t want to.

There isn’t a fiber in that man’s body that is violent. He is never angry with others. He is always happy to see us and enjoys the little things in life.

I consider him a good man. I consider him better than a lot of people I know who are perfectly normal. And that’s probably what he will be remembered for: that he was a good person.

Your friends aren’t your friends because you’re not smart. They probably just like who you are. And if my girlfriend’s uncle can be a good person and happy in life, then I believe that you can be too.

I wish you all the best.

Thank you for expanding on your position. I’d say that’s a pretty accurate assessment with IQ and other psych tests from what I learned and saw in college/internships. Psychology is a soft science, and I didn’t like the idea of trying to gauge things like “intelligence” (What does that even really mean?) on a numbered scale. I was more of an abnormal/forensic psych student.

Probably for the best I ended up in networking - I’ve got shit people skills.

I watched a few of Marks videos and I’m not convinced he is as stupid as he believes himself to be, just read the comments on his videos.

Through my life I’ve been told by people I’m smart, which gave me an ego, and lead me to being an asshole to people I deemed less intelligent.

Later in life I began to resent the association, and I almost reflexively deny any assertions that I am anything other than slightly above average.

As aforementioned, getting stuck on how intelligent you are is the wrong metric to evaluate your personal worth. I wish that instead of being told I’m smart, that people praised me for my effort.

For example, if there was a word I’ve wrote which you don’t know the meaning of, look it up - that’s a very simple way to improve your vocabulary, which helps to improve how you navigate your own mind.

I feel that encouraging growth is far more important than telling someone they have some kind of innate talent, and it’s something I live by.

If I can offer one resource for you to study to “have a higher IQ”, it’s learning about logical fallacies.

To put it simply, people are stupid because they fail to recognize flaws in their own thinking. With the link I’ve given you, click on each fallacy and try to think of a time when you’ve committed that fallacy.

It can be a bit wordy, so don’t worry if you don’t entirely understand the definition. Try to infer the meaning by reading the examples in bold at the bottom of each fallacy.

Even very intelligent people are not immune from logical contradictions, so don’t be disheartened if you begin to recognize you’ve got some bad habits.

And whatever you do, if you notice someone else committing these fallacies, keep it to yourself. Too many people learn basic epistemology (study of knowledge itself) and think they’re capable of debating others by dismantling the other persons arguments by citing their fallacies. This is… (say it with me)… really dumb!

This resource is also very helpful.

It explores biases which virtually everyone holds, and might be easier to understand than the other link.

it had been almost a day since you started the AMA so i thought i missed the boat

I don’t know what Mensa is and if they have different types of tests or smth

Unfortunately, that part of the test, was also part of the test.

Not necessarily.

IQ tries to measure intelligence on one dimension, which is usually pattern matching. In reality a bunch of different things go into what we consider intelligence. Social intelligence and emotional intelligence are two big ones, that are often completely unrelated to pattern matching. But even within what one would consider “book smart” there’s a bunch of variation - someone could be incredibly smart in some ways and unbelievably dumb in others.

I think the variation within the chess elite is a good example. They are all intelligent in a way that would rank them favourably in IQ tests. Some of them are also brilliant people, but others buy into propaganda or conspiracy theories, some of them may be sexist and backwards, and some of them it’s almost a wonder they know how to breathe.

Another example is practical vs theoretical skills. A lot of theoretically intelligent people would be completely helpless in practical tasks like building something or fxing a broken machine.

There’s something particularly weird about watching academics deal with practical problems. Their stupidity can be unbelievable.

I think a lot of people with downs syndrome can have pretty high emotional intelligence for example, where they can empathize and relate to the feelings of other people.