Things have changed. I finally got over it over the past 24 months, and feel so much better now. I’m just offering explanation for where my apparently aloof tone is coming from – it may seem disrespectful, but it’s actually what I need to be mentally healthy: I need to be able to be open about who I am and totally discount people’s reactions when they’re angry and hostile in response.
For so many years, the egalitarian pressures were suffocating. The irony is that my experience probably actually has a great deal in common with the experience of many LWers on account of being smarter than others earlier on in life – mine is in the same direction, only more extreme. And I couldn’t find kindred spirits even here: people who were ok with me being smart and thoughtful even when it signaled superiority in a way that would result in social backlash from mainstream society.
To the extent that I’m dismissive, that’s why. A sense of the type “these people aren’t on my side, they’re in the same reference class as the women who construed me giving them interesting math books as an attempt to coercively obtain sexual favors, when the actual situation was that I was starved for intellectual companionship, and mistakenly thought that they were the same as me and would be happy to have someone to talk to.”
Things have changed. I finally got over it over the past 24 months, and feel so much better now. I’m just offering explanation for where my apparently aloof tone is coming from – it may seem disrespectful, but it’s actually what I need to be mentally healthy: I need to be able to be open about who I am and totally discount people’s reactions when they’re angry and hostile in response.
For so many years, the egalitarian pressures were suffocating. The irony is that my experience probably actually has a great deal in common with the experience of many LWers on account of being smarter than others earlier on in life – mine is in the same direction, only more extreme. And I couldn’t find kindred spirits even here: people who were ok with me being smart and thoughtful even when it signaled superiority in a way that would result in social backlash from mainstream society.
To the extent that I’m dismissive, that’s why. A sense of the type “these people aren’t on my side, they’re in the same reference class as the women who construed me giving them interesting math books as an attempt to coercively obtain sexual favors, when the actual situation was that I was starved for intellectual companionship, and mistakenly thought that they were the same as me and would be happy to have someone to talk to.”