Elite—a group of people who are considered the best in a certain category. It’s a descriptive term.
Usage—Power elite are the most powerful. Intellectual elite are the smartest. The Navy SEALS are an elite team of soldiers—they are the best at what they do.
Elitism—the view that their exists an elite class which aught to be given some privilege or consideration which is not given to non-elite members. This is a normative term—note the word “aught”.
Usage—Obama is an elitist because he doesn’t think the opinions of people like Joe the Plumber are important. He is dismissive of them because they cling to guns and religion.
So, putting this in context:
The users of lesswrong (rightly or wrongly) believe themselves to constitute an intellectual elite. Thanks to the lesswrong polls, they reason to believe that the average user has an IQ that is two to three standard deviations above the mean.
A self described intellectual elitist may believe that this group (as defined by education, high IQ, and rationality skills) is best suited to make decisions for the rest of society. An ideal political system in the view of such a person would be one that brings these intellectual elite to power. There are in fact quite a few people on lesswrong who hold this opinion—that politicians aught to be high IQ individuals with a scientific and “rational” approach to life. Additionally, people who come to lesswrong and write comments that fall short of what the users judge to be intelligent are generally not welcomed—letting non-elites participate in the discussion makes it more difficult for the elites to interact and make each other smarter. The common theme here is that those who are not part of the elite need to get out of the way so that the elite can carry out their tasks/discussions more effectively.
The charge of elitism against lesswrong implies that these individuals believe that the opinions of other people (in particular the religious, the conservative, other demographics which correlate negatively with low IQ) are not worthy of consideration. It also carries the insinuation that the self perception of lesswrongers as an elite intellectual group is unfounded … that the users are just a bunch of smart-mouthed kids suffering from dunning-kruger. Or, going further, a group of genuinely intelligent people who have gotten carried away with their intelligence and are trapped in a loop of self congratulating themselves for being so smart. I believe this is called an “affective death spiral” around these parts.
Note that I’m describing end-of-spectrum views here in both instances, not expressing them. I can express them in another post if you feel it will be helpful.
Thanks for taking the time to elaborate on these ideas. I agree that people use the word in the ways that you describe, but I have a specific issue with one of these definitions. I am not sure whether you hold the following view or mine or some other one, but since you are offering to express your views, I decided to accept your offer and to share mine as well:
View I disagree with: “When intellectuals / gifted people / nerds hang out with each other and don’t want non-intellectuals / non-gifted people / non-nerds around, they’re elitists.”
If you’ve ever talked to a vegetarian, you’ll know that they prefer to eat with other vegetarians. If you’ve talked to a hunter, you can guess that they would not appreciate a vegetarian coming along on a hunting trip. If you know everything about basketball, it’s going to be really boring to have a basketball conversation with someone who hates sports. If you’ve ever talked to a single mom, she’ll probably tell you that sometimes she just needs to be with the adults for an evening—the children can’t talk about the same topics and there are a lot of things you can’t say around them.
Gifted adults often have different views that mix with mainstream views about as well as hunters and vegetarians. They’re not able to talk about all of their ideas with everyone, just like people from different religions or political groups often can’t. They tend to accumulate an unusual amount of knowledge in areas they’re interested in, making conversations pretty one-sided. Everybody wants to talk to people at their own level—it’s not spite, that’s a phenomenon called “flow”—put simply, the brain rewards you for doing things that are challenging but not frustrating. For many gifted adults, especially in the upper ranges, having conversations with dissimilar people is either frustrating (because they can’t get their ideas across or are misunderstood) or tedious (because all the work involved in explaining everything and presenting it just right is tiring). Many of them simply cannot experience flow in conversations with most people.
It’s no wonder that gifted people like to gather in groups and talk to each other. Everybody from sports fans to Twilight fans needs the company of like-minded people. Everybody else does it. This is considered normal.
But when gifted people do it, they’re called elitists.
Trying to play football at a bingo game or sing in a classroom will get you booted from those locations—because like-minded people are all trying to do the same thing, and here you are disrupting what they are doing. Kicking them out is perceived as good.
Boot someone for side-tracking an intelligent conversation, and you get called a name that inspires hatred in many.
I think it’s unfair that people are politicizing the social needs of gifted people with the term “elitism” and instead of putting up with this or calling ourselves elitists we should say “No. You have your football buddies, your shopping buddies, your bingo buddies. These are my like minded buddies. I’m fulfilling my social needs the same way you are. Bug off.”
So, IRL I have exactly one good friend that I’d consider extremely intelligent. That’s not to say that my other friends are stupid...but, they aren’t like me, and that’s a peculiar kind of loneliness.
Before I met my friend, most of my intellectual conversations were, as you say, one sided. It was almost like I was trying to provoke people into intellectual conversation, gently steering them into a frame of mind where they could engage me. People thought that I was argumentative and enjoyed debate—but I wasn’t really, it’s just that taking a stance that someone disagrees on is one of the best ways to force them into an intellectual conversation.
This is really not a healthy way to interact with people, since it often triggers emotional outbursts and leaves hard feelings behind...but I did it anyway for my own amusement. What was the point of having friends, I reasoned, if you couldn’t talk to them? As I grew older and discovered better outlets for my intelligence, I stopped feeling the need to do this to people.
Even when people were willing and happy to engage intellectually however… after knowing them long enough I felt like a cat batting around a piece of string...or perhaps untying a knot. I was often able to predict what they would say and they rarely came up with arguments I hadn’t already considered. Imagine playing the same game with an NPC, over and over again. It was amusing, but not fulfilling. I can’t improve myself this way. (Although, every once in a while, these conversations help them...and when that happens it is pretty fulfilling, actually.)
Though I’m an extrovert and have many friends, I’ve gradually became socially withdrawn because most people cannot hold my interest. On the other hand, I need companionship to be happy. And my friends do provide most of the important facets of interaction … they care for me and will look out for me, they are willing to listen to me even if they can’t understand… and more importantly I can care for them. Being smart means you can solve other people’s problems to some extent, simply by virtue of heightened empathy.
Anyway, when my “intelligent” friend and I have conversations, we don’t leave anyone else out on purpose. Usually they just roll their eyes and say something like “there they go again, those two” and just go on to do other activities or talk amongst themselves. Once in a while they’ll get interested and say something, and we usually give them an earnest answer, rather than a dismissal.
I describe these personal experiences to you to demonstrate that I do understand why gifted people might want an environment all their own.
The crux of the matter is, there are real differences between an intellectually gifted person and the average person...but the average person may not be capable (or more often, not interested) in understanding these differences. These differences are as insurmountable as the difference between an adult and a child.
The primary difference is what psychologists call “need for cognition”. Even if someone isn’t particularly smart, if they have a high need for cognition you can still have an interesting conversation with them because they share your interest in having meaningful conversation. These conversations can be fun and can spur you to develop new ideas.
The secondary difference is “metacognition”. A gifted person is extremely self aware. what exactly am I doing, what are the reasons that I am doing it, what will be the results of what I am doing etc. This practice leads them to develop extremely good empathetic abilities, so they are acutely aware of the context of each situation, and of how their actions appear to others.
Ordinary people often act in ways that they themselves feel are “wrong”, that they can regret or feel guilty about later. They often are incapable of understanding their own emotions, and therefore are unable to regulate them appropriately. They are susceptible to conformity and authority, primarily because they either do not recognize or do not care when conformity/authority is acting on them.
It is the difference in meta-cognitive ability which makes the ordinary person …childlike? senile?… in comparison to the intellectually gifted person.
There are other quantitative differences, but I think I’ve hit on most of the qualitative ones.
By analogy, imagine people were interested in football (need for cognition). But only a subset of these people are physically fit (high IQ), and of these an even smaller subset have natural athleticism (meta cognition). Of these, an even smaller number of people are experienced in playing football (knowledge of the topic at hand).
Back to our question of elitism. I agree with you that it is totally understandable that people who enjoy football (high need for cognition) do not want to be disturbed by those who are uninterested in football (low need for cognition). But, i do not believe that is where the charge of elitism comes from.
If someone makes an on-topic and earnest comment on lesswrong, but the comment is judged as stupid, it is downvoted to oblivion. Often times, someone will write “this is not the website for you, sorry” or something equally insulting.
The person who made the comment probably has a high need for cognition. In other words, they want to play football with us, and we are being the mean kids who aren’t letting them because they are physically weak (low IQ), klutzy (low metacognition) or out of practice (low topic knowledge).
I know that when I was a weak, klutzy, non-sporty kid, I didn’t mind getting picked last at recess. I understood that I was not particularly good at the game, and I didn’t begrudge that other players chose players accordingly. But if my friends had told me that I couldn’t play at all or insulted me for trying… well, then I think I would have just cause to be angry with them. It’s not like I had asked to play for the NFL (get a PhD?)...all I wanted was to play (discuss) with some buddies at recess (internet forum).
The difference between associating with people with similar interests and elitism, is that in the former case you allow anyone who shares that interest to join you, whereas in the latter case you only allow people above a certain threshold to join you. That’s why Mensa is considered (and probably considers themselves) an elitist organization. Joining Mensa is seen as an act of snobbery, while doing the Putnam exam isn’t...and the reason for this is that anyone has the option to try the Putnam, but only an elite group can go to Mensa meetups. It’s not fun to be excluded from something you earnestly wanted to participate in.
For all that, the fact remains that it is also not particularly fun to play with someone who isn’t an equal.
I don’t have a solution to this issue, but I do empathize with what it’s like to be on the other side of the elite/non-elite coin. For my part...yes, I would rather play with equals. But I don’t desire to play with equals so strongly that I’m willing to hurt the feelings of someone who doesn’t measure up by excluding them.
If, say, lesswrong gets over-run by the lowest common denominator of the internet...then it will be regrettable, but not more regrettable than the harm that is done to an individual’s self esteem when they are told that they are too stupid to play. If it happens, there is not much we can do about it anyway, and there will be other forums.
Edit: Uh, this may be hard to read because it’s a bit drawn out… but at least this way you can see my thought process in its entirety, which I think is what you wanted from this conversation.
Oversimplified TL:DR—it’s only elitist if someone earnestly wants to participate in the conversation, but is excluded because they are too inept to make meaningful contributions.
Have you ever experienced alienation? I’m not talking about feeling a little bit annoyed. I’m talking about:
Half the time when you express your feelings, people misunderstand you.
Half the time when you explain an idea, it’s too complicated and they either stop listening or misunderstand.
You start to learn not to express certain thoughts and feelings. After a while, these add up, until you’re barely expressing yourself at all. Then you start to feel like life itself is boring, something very important is missing.
Your friends say they care, but you can’t escape the fact that they have no idea who they care about.
You try and try to find people who can understand, with any amount of explaining, and they never do.
You feel like you’re from a different planet.
For some people, the amount of loneliness or alienation they experience due to being gifted is very small, or they don’t notice it at all. I’ve noticed, however, that a lot of people with very high IQs are frequently alienated, settle for a social life that isn’t satisfying, or give up on ever finding anyone.
It’s not just that they feel that social enjoyment could be improved, it’s that they feel exhausted from being different.
I’m talking about burnout.
Some people are different enough that they literally burn out from having to interact with people who misunderstand them, who they can’t explain things to without frustrating themselves, who can’t truly care about them because they never understand their feelings, who don’t share their interests, etc.
Maybe you have never experienced this burnout. My whole life is that burnout.
Some people really do have a need to get away and be with people who are like minded. It’s not about power, it’s not about ego, it’s not a game. The need is real and I’m sick and tired of it being misunderstood and politicized.
I do not often feel that, but sometimes I do. It might be due to my young age (early 20s, although I suspect that’s the lesswrong median) or because I happen to have an unusually happy disposition. And though both are just an accident of biology, I take pride in having a happy disposition, much as I take pride in being intelligent.
But I recently had what I believe was an adverse reaction to a medication which triggered a period of depression for a couple months. I’m still in the recovery phase from that, but I’m getting much better.
During that period, I found it much more difficult to put up with the company of ordinary people … the only thing that would cheer me up was intellectual conversation with an intellectual equal. I didn’t realize what immense reserves of emotional energy a happy disposition gives you until I was robbed of it.
Depleted of emotional energy, it was much harder to maintain a conversation with ordinary people, and I would burn out and retreat to my room after a while. Before my period of depression, when my emotional reserves were virtually unlimited, I actually enjoyed talking to almost everyone...at worst, I’d get bored and move on to talk to someone else.
What you are describing sounds a lot like the “need for cognition” which I was talking about earlier, but it goes a step deeper because you also want to be understood by others.
It also sounds like your emotional reserves are generally at the low end of the spectrum, which makes it hard for you to find enjoyment among dull company—although I may be extrapolating too much from my own case.
For me, what drove the “burnout” for me was an immense feeling of cynicism. I’d talk to people, and every word would show me the weakness, laziness, and foolishness that makes up the nature of most ordinary people. And because I was depressed at the time, I saw a lot of that weakness in myself as well, which troubled me.
The happy, high emotional reserve me cared about understanding how other people worked, and doing my best to make their lives better. Even if they had dull intellects, I could make them happy through my actions and I could help them move forward, and that would make me happy as well. When my friends had problems, I put my intelligence to use in understanding and solving those problems.
The depressed, anxious, low emotional reserve me needed someone to understand me, to make my life better. But a complicated person often has complicated problems, and no one was really able to help me. A well meaning gesture of caring goes a long way and means a lot to me, but it can only go so far in helping me. I have to spend hours explaining “Today I am sad because person A did X, which reveals Y about the person’s nature, and I feel like everyone I know has Y as part of their nature” or “today I feel lonely because I care passionately about Z and no one else including you even knows what Z is” in order to get coherent help from anyone, and the response is usually something I’ve thought of before. Fighting hard to be understood didn’t necessarily improve my mood.
By the way, I’ve checked the data. Contrary to stereotype, there is no correlation between IQ and depression, even at the very high end. Sad people with low IQ, sad people with high IQ … they may attribute the sadness to different sources (and they may or may not be attributing correctly), but at the end of the day the overall rate of depression is the same.
So...to answer your question, yeah, I feel different. Sometimes it is lonely. I wish more people were like me, that would make life much more interesting. I’m glad I am intelligent in the absolute sense, but in the relative sense I wish that everyone around me was smarter than me.
At the same time, when I am in a healthy frame of mind, I do not feel burdened by having to associate with dull people. It’s only when I am in an unhealthy frame of mind to begin with that this is an issue. Healthy me has a need for cognition which is fulfilled by like-minded people, but healthy me does not have a need to be understood by others. We all go through life fundamentally alone, that’s a lesson I learned early on—and not just those of us who are intellectually gifted. Everyone.
And in truth, though my intelligent friend understands my intellectual thought process, he doesn’t always understand my emotions … it takes more than just IQ to understand that. You’ve also got to learn to read faces too. As you said, I’ve given up on the prospect of someone understanding me completely… there are some people who understand my intellect, there are some people who understand my emotions, but it’s too much to expect one person to fulfill all those requirements at once. This isn’t a cause for unhappiness, by the way—it’s just how reality is. One might as well be sad about the fact that their is no heaven, as long as one is going to be sad about the imaginary visions that reality doesn’t live up to. I’d rather appreciate what people are, rather than hanker after the gaudy vision of what I imagine they could be.
And when I’m under-stimulated...I do my science. I read articles, write articles. I think every smart person needs a hobby or job or some other creative outlet that they are passionate about in order to be happy. That way you don’t have to depend on another person—plus, you often meet interesting people this way.
Thanks for making the effort to try and understand. You’ve thrown one more variable into the equation—emotional energy. I don’t know if you’ve considered how these other variables would affect things, but:
Other Variables Involved in Gifted Alienation
Ability to communicate is something that will increase or decrease frustration / alienation / misunderstanding, depending on whether it’s low or high. Unfortunately, not all gifted people get the gift of communication, and gifts come in different sizes so they may not get enough of a gift in communication to compensate for the difficulty of communicating ideas and feelings that are as different as theirs.
Age of the person matters a lot. Supposedly, the speed at which you learn doesn’t change, but if you’re learning at say, twice the average speed, you’ll be much further ahead of your age peers at 30 than at 20, and so on. The gap seems to have grown as I have aged (I’m in the ballpark of 30 myself). It has become harder and harder to find stimulating intelligent conversation. Make sure to value your sources of intelligent conversation, you may need them more later on.
Amount of intelligence. If your IQ is 130, you’ll notice a difference between yourself and others but if it is over 160, you may feel like a complete alien. One interesting characteristic of the people I’ve met who have IQs in the profoundly gifted range is that they feel so very different that it’s like being stranded on a planet full of aliens. It can be very stressful for them. I don’t know what your IQ is, but it sounds to me like you can understand a little bit what this sort of problem would be like for them. You keep saying “need for cognition” but firstly, that’s a trait that’s more common to gifted people (it fuels the gift!) and not as common to non-gifted people. Secondly, have you ever been asked a lot of “why” questions by a little child and gotten burned out on answering them? Or can you imagine going a year without having a conversation that wasn’t one-sided? These are the experiences that some of the very gifted people might have with “need for cognition”. It’s better if the person wants to know what you have to say, and compensates a little for the difficulty of communication, but it’s not a substitute for having a conversation with an intellectual equal.
Also, understanding people’s feelings is a lot more complicated than reading faces. If I make a sad face, why did I make a sad face? Is it because someone said something that hurt my ego, and I need a compliment, or is it that the person was trying to hurt my ego, which kicked me in a deeper place—the part of me that questions why I bother to make a difference when the world can be so nasty. I get this kind of misunderstanding a lot. They read my face right, if I show emotion at all (I frequently don’t) but they interpret the wrong reasoning into it. People can be particularly stubborn in their interpretations. I can tell them “It’s not my ego” and they will insist that it and ignore the real problem. I’m different enough that my explanations sometimes seem unlikely to people, and they disagree with me about my own feelings. I find it intolerable.
If you imagine for a moment that there’s a wild variety of people here, all with different amounts of emotional energy, communication ability, different mental age gaps and different IQ gaps. Some of those people will be lucky, like yourself, and have a gap that’s not too difficult to overcome considering the communication and emotional resources they have. Others will either have gaps that are much larger than yours, or won’t have the same resources to compensate, or both.
Are gifted people more frequently depressed?
As far as whether gifted people are more frequently depressed, this really depends on the source that you read. A lot of things about gifted adults are not well-established. There’s not nearly enough research on them, and a lot of published research findings are false. One source of confusion is that there are a lot of prejudiced myths about gifted adults (before Terman did his research, apparently people thought that gifted people were ugly, unhealthy and all kinds of things) so there are studies that refute these myths and do not tell the whole story, and some of the sources disagree on important things. I’ve read a lot of stuff about gifted adults (I’m a psychology enthusiast and that’s my main psychology interest), and here’s my take:
For people with IQs under 145, I’d bet that they do have pretty normal rates of depression. For people with IQs over 145, from what I’ve read, I’d bet that they have elevated rates of existential depression. Whether or not existential depression was lumped in with depression, or did not qualify as depression might be something that influenced the studies you read. For a citation, I will select “Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults”. Here is an excerpt:
“There is relatively little inherent in being a gifted child or adult that makes them more prone to depression than others. Most often, it is a poor fit between the gifted person and the environment that creates the problems. A lack of understanding and support from teachers, peers, or family can precipitate very real problems of various kinds, including depression. Existential depression is an exception; it seems to emerge in most environments, though some circumstances prompt it more than others. Existential depression is particularly likely among the highly gifted, even though it is not a category of depression that is recognized in the DSM-IV-TR.” (Page 133)
Can anything (like intellectual activities) compensate for unmet social needs?
No. If you want a source, I will refer to Mazlow. His hierarchy of needs clearly includes various social needs. Further, his take is that you need to have social needs met before you can actualize your potential. Trying to channel your potential into intellectual activities without having your social needs met is likely to be frustrating. A lot of people (possibly everyone who is not a sociopath?) experience purpose in relation to other humans. This post by Academian explains that experience. The gist of it is: When asking “What is the purpose of life” this question implies a “who” so you need to have agents to have purposes to in order to have a sense of purpose. I experience this need, myself. I need someone to be close to, to have a purpose to. Random strangers and donations are not enough. I am a social organism. I need to bond emotionally with others, to need others, and to be needed by them.
Someone I know with a very high IQ said one key reason he hasn’t made anything of his potential is that he has to spend so much time trying to get his social needs met. This is a lot of work—it can be like rebuilding your social life after a move, except imagine that the social life you build never sticks. You’ll be constantly rebuilding your social life over and over again. Some people in that range are lucky and meet someone that fulfills their social needs. Others rarely ever find an intellectual equal, let alone one who is compatible with them (even friendship requires a certain amount of compatibility—though this may not be very obvious to people who aren’t really different). Some of them try marrying someone that’s not an intellectual equal, but the people I know who have tried this struggle with severe depression due to it.
There unfortunately appears to be no substitute for having your social needs met. Therefore, I regard it as important for people who are significantly different (any meaning of different, including different due to having a high IQ) to be able to participate in a haven where they can interact with like minded others without being made to put up with alienation.
On NFC—NFC is moderately correlated with IQ, it’s true. But personality traits turn out to be equally accurate predictors.
I’ll also point out that the loose correlation between NFC and intelligence is an implicitly made assumption underlying the worry that the quality of posts at Lesswrong will deteriorate with the new user influx...if it were true that NFC has an extremely strong relationship with intelligence, unintelligent people would simply would not be interested in participating in the discussion on the site, and there would be nothing for the older-user base to fret about.
We observe in everyday life that NFC doesn’t imply giftedness...there are lots of people who have extremely complicated but stupid opinions. Ever spend time on a white nationalist forum? Or argued with an intellectual fundamentalist christian? They write long sentences and cite academic papers, while simultaneously lacking even a basic understanding of how the world works. I don’t know whether people like this would score low or high on an IQ test—it’s possible that this faulty reasoning results from deficits which does not influence IQ scores—but it can’t be disputed that they’ve put a lot of thought into it.
On existential depression—This will naturally be correlated with intelligence, since you need to ponder philosophy in order to be identified as having this issue. However, is a social life really the cure for that? It seems to be like introspection is the only solution to existential depression … the issue arises via faulty philosophy in the first place.
Moreover...it would be really easy for someone suffering normal depression to attribute it to existential problems. We often feel emotions and then look around for the source afterwords. Naturally, only intelligent people would think to attribute the sadness to a philosophical issue.
On social life—I agree that smart people are more socially fulfilled when they are around other smart people.
In my earlier post, I was conveying that social needs and intellectual needs can be met separately. If I understand your post, you believe that in order for the social need to be met, one must be conversing with an intellectual equal.
From your post, it appears that you feel like an adult surrounded by children. The children tirelessly engage in activities which you do not find appealing, and will be unable to understand complex, adult matters.
I guess I feel more like a child surrounded by adults. The thing that bothers me about people is a profound unwillingness to engage and a stubborn lack of curiosity about anything. Yes, there are things that they don’t understand .. but that’s okay, those are my things and I can play by myself, like I always have.
I guess it’s not really a point that can be argued, since there’s no accounting for utility functions. Either you’ve got different needs, or the gap in intelligence for you is greater, etc...
Anyway, I’ll pick your brain on this, since you seem to have thought about it quite a bit - how does one create these safe havens for smart people? Is it really as simple as filtering out those who don’t pass an IQ test’s threshold?
Can anything (like intellectual activities) compensate for unmet social needs?
No. If you want a source, I will refer to Mazlow. His hierarchy of needs clearly includes various social needs. Further, his take is that you need to have social needs met before you can actualize your potential.
That’s a rather quick dismissal. Maslow’s hierarchy is a “most people are mostly like this” type of argument. I’d think you’d need something stronger to argue for “no people are ever unlike this”.
Elite—a group of people who are considered the best in a certain category. It’s a descriptive term.
Usage—Power elite are the most powerful. Intellectual elite are the smartest. The Navy SEALS are an elite team of soldiers—they are the best at what they do.
Elitism—the view that their exists an elite class which aught to be given some privilege or consideration which is not given to non-elite members. This is a normative term—note the word “aught”.
Usage—Obama is an elitist because he doesn’t think the opinions of people like Joe the Plumber are important. He is dismissive of them because they cling to guns and religion.
So, putting this in context:
The users of lesswrong (rightly or wrongly) believe themselves to constitute an intellectual elite. Thanks to the lesswrong polls, they reason to believe that the average user has an IQ that is two to three standard deviations above the mean.
A self described intellectual elitist may believe that this group (as defined by education, high IQ, and rationality skills) is best suited to make decisions for the rest of society. An ideal political system in the view of such a person would be one that brings these intellectual elite to power. There are in fact quite a few people on lesswrong who hold this opinion—that politicians aught to be high IQ individuals with a scientific and “rational” approach to life. Additionally, people who come to lesswrong and write comments that fall short of what the users judge to be intelligent are generally not welcomed—letting non-elites participate in the discussion makes it more difficult for the elites to interact and make each other smarter. The common theme here is that those who are not part of the elite need to get out of the way so that the elite can carry out their tasks/discussions more effectively.
The charge of elitism against lesswrong implies that these individuals believe that the opinions of other people (in particular the religious, the conservative, other demographics which correlate negatively with low IQ) are not worthy of consideration. It also carries the insinuation that the self perception of lesswrongers as an elite intellectual group is unfounded … that the users are just a bunch of smart-mouthed kids suffering from dunning-kruger. Or, going further, a group of genuinely intelligent people who have gotten carried away with their intelligence and are trapped in a loop of self congratulating themselves for being so smart. I believe this is called an “affective death spiral” around these parts.
Note that I’m describing end-of-spectrum views here in both instances, not expressing them. I can express them in another post if you feel it will be helpful.
Thanks for taking the time to elaborate on these ideas. I agree that people use the word in the ways that you describe, but I have a specific issue with one of these definitions. I am not sure whether you hold the following view or mine or some other one, but since you are offering to express your views, I decided to accept your offer and to share mine as well:
View I disagree with: “When intellectuals / gifted people / nerds hang out with each other and don’t want non-intellectuals / non-gifted people / non-nerds around, they’re elitists.”
If you’ve ever talked to a vegetarian, you’ll know that they prefer to eat with other vegetarians. If you’ve talked to a hunter, you can guess that they would not appreciate a vegetarian coming along on a hunting trip. If you know everything about basketball, it’s going to be really boring to have a basketball conversation with someone who hates sports. If you’ve ever talked to a single mom, she’ll probably tell you that sometimes she just needs to be with the adults for an evening—the children can’t talk about the same topics and there are a lot of things you can’t say around them.
Gifted adults often have different views that mix with mainstream views about as well as hunters and vegetarians. They’re not able to talk about all of their ideas with everyone, just like people from different religions or political groups often can’t. They tend to accumulate an unusual amount of knowledge in areas they’re interested in, making conversations pretty one-sided. Everybody wants to talk to people at their own level—it’s not spite, that’s a phenomenon called “flow”—put simply, the brain rewards you for doing things that are challenging but not frustrating. For many gifted adults, especially in the upper ranges, having conversations with dissimilar people is either frustrating (because they can’t get their ideas across or are misunderstood) or tedious (because all the work involved in explaining everything and presenting it just right is tiring). Many of them simply cannot experience flow in conversations with most people.
It’s no wonder that gifted people like to gather in groups and talk to each other. Everybody from sports fans to Twilight fans needs the company of like-minded people. Everybody else does it. This is considered normal.
But when gifted people do it, they’re called elitists.
Trying to play football at a bingo game or sing in a classroom will get you booted from those locations—because like-minded people are all trying to do the same thing, and here you are disrupting what they are doing. Kicking them out is perceived as good.
Boot someone for side-tracking an intelligent conversation, and you get called a name that inspires hatred in many.
I think it’s unfair that people are politicizing the social needs of gifted people with the term “elitism” and instead of putting up with this or calling ourselves elitists we should say “No. You have your football buddies, your shopping buddies, your bingo buddies. These are my like minded buddies. I’m fulfilling my social needs the same way you are. Bug off.”
So, IRL I have exactly one good friend that I’d consider extremely intelligent. That’s not to say that my other friends are stupid...but, they aren’t like me, and that’s a peculiar kind of loneliness.
Before I met my friend, most of my intellectual conversations were, as you say, one sided. It was almost like I was trying to provoke people into intellectual conversation, gently steering them into a frame of mind where they could engage me. People thought that I was argumentative and enjoyed debate—but I wasn’t really, it’s just that taking a stance that someone disagrees on is one of the best ways to force them into an intellectual conversation.
This is really not a healthy way to interact with people, since it often triggers emotional outbursts and leaves hard feelings behind...but I did it anyway for my own amusement. What was the point of having friends, I reasoned, if you couldn’t talk to them? As I grew older and discovered better outlets for my intelligence, I stopped feeling the need to do this to people.
Even when people were willing and happy to engage intellectually however… after knowing them long enough I felt like a cat batting around a piece of string...or perhaps untying a knot. I was often able to predict what they would say and they rarely came up with arguments I hadn’t already considered. Imagine playing the same game with an NPC, over and over again. It was amusing, but not fulfilling. I can’t improve myself this way. (Although, every once in a while, these conversations help them...and when that happens it is pretty fulfilling, actually.)
Though I’m an extrovert and have many friends, I’ve gradually became socially withdrawn because most people cannot hold my interest. On the other hand, I need companionship to be happy. And my friends do provide most of the important facets of interaction … they care for me and will look out for me, they are willing to listen to me even if they can’t understand… and more importantly I can care for them. Being smart means you can solve other people’s problems to some extent, simply by virtue of heightened empathy.
Anyway, when my “intelligent” friend and I have conversations, we don’t leave anyone else out on purpose. Usually they just roll their eyes and say something like “there they go again, those two” and just go on to do other activities or talk amongst themselves. Once in a while they’ll get interested and say something, and we usually give them an earnest answer, rather than a dismissal.
I describe these personal experiences to you to demonstrate that I do understand why gifted people might want an environment all their own.
The crux of the matter is, there are real differences between an intellectually gifted person and the average person...but the average person may not be capable (or more often, not interested) in understanding these differences. These differences are as insurmountable as the difference between an adult and a child.
The primary difference is what psychologists call “need for cognition”. Even if someone isn’t particularly smart, if they have a high need for cognition you can still have an interesting conversation with them because they share your interest in having meaningful conversation. These conversations can be fun and can spur you to develop new ideas.
The secondary difference is “metacognition”. A gifted person is extremely self aware. what exactly am I doing, what are the reasons that I am doing it, what will be the results of what I am doing etc. This practice leads them to develop extremely good empathetic abilities, so they are acutely aware of the context of each situation, and of how their actions appear to others.
Ordinary people often act in ways that they themselves feel are “wrong”, that they can regret or feel guilty about later. They often are incapable of understanding their own emotions, and therefore are unable to regulate them appropriately. They are susceptible to conformity and authority, primarily because they either do not recognize or do not care when conformity/authority is acting on them.
It is the difference in meta-cognitive ability which makes the ordinary person …childlike? senile?… in comparison to the intellectually gifted person.
There are other quantitative differences, but I think I’ve hit on most of the qualitative ones.
By analogy, imagine people were interested in football (need for cognition). But only a subset of these people are physically fit (high IQ), and of these an even smaller subset have natural athleticism (meta cognition). Of these, an even smaller number of people are experienced in playing football (knowledge of the topic at hand).
Back to our question of elitism. I agree with you that it is totally understandable that people who enjoy football (high need for cognition) do not want to be disturbed by those who are uninterested in football (low need for cognition). But, i do not believe that is where the charge of elitism comes from.
If someone makes an on-topic and earnest comment on lesswrong, but the comment is judged as stupid, it is downvoted to oblivion. Often times, someone will write “this is not the website for you, sorry” or something equally insulting.
The person who made the comment probably has a high need for cognition. In other words, they want to play football with us, and we are being the mean kids who aren’t letting them because they are physically weak (low IQ), klutzy (low metacognition) or out of practice (low topic knowledge).
I know that when I was a weak, klutzy, non-sporty kid, I didn’t mind getting picked last at recess. I understood that I was not particularly good at the game, and I didn’t begrudge that other players chose players accordingly. But if my friends had told me that I couldn’t play at all or insulted me for trying… well, then I think I would have just cause to be angry with them. It’s not like I had asked to play for the NFL (get a PhD?)...all I wanted was to play (discuss) with some buddies at recess (internet forum).
The difference between associating with people with similar interests and elitism, is that in the former case you allow anyone who shares that interest to join you, whereas in the latter case you only allow people above a certain threshold to join you. That’s why Mensa is considered (and probably considers themselves) an elitist organization. Joining Mensa is seen as an act of snobbery, while doing the Putnam exam isn’t...and the reason for this is that anyone has the option to try the Putnam, but only an elite group can go to Mensa meetups. It’s not fun to be excluded from something you earnestly wanted to participate in.
For all that, the fact remains that it is also not particularly fun to play with someone who isn’t an equal.
I don’t have a solution to this issue, but I do empathize with what it’s like to be on the other side of the elite/non-elite coin. For my part...yes, I would rather play with equals. But I don’t desire to play with equals so strongly that I’m willing to hurt the feelings of someone who doesn’t measure up by excluding them.
If, say, lesswrong gets over-run by the lowest common denominator of the internet...then it will be regrettable, but not more regrettable than the harm that is done to an individual’s self esteem when they are told that they are too stupid to play. If it happens, there is not much we can do about it anyway, and there will be other forums.
Edit: Uh, this may be hard to read because it’s a bit drawn out… but at least this way you can see my thought process in its entirety, which I think is what you wanted from this conversation.
Oversimplified TL:DR—it’s only elitist if someone earnestly wants to participate in the conversation, but is excluded because they are too inept to make meaningful contributions.
Have you ever experienced alienation? I’m not talking about feeling a little bit annoyed. I’m talking about:
Half the time when you express your feelings, people misunderstand you. Half the time when you explain an idea, it’s too complicated and they either stop listening or misunderstand. You start to learn not to express certain thoughts and feelings. After a while, these add up, until you’re barely expressing yourself at all. Then you start to feel like life itself is boring, something very important is missing. Your friends say they care, but you can’t escape the fact that they have no idea who they care about. You try and try to find people who can understand, with any amount of explaining, and they never do. You feel like you’re from a different planet.
For some people, the amount of loneliness or alienation they experience due to being gifted is very small, or they don’t notice it at all. I’ve noticed, however, that a lot of people with very high IQs are frequently alienated, settle for a social life that isn’t satisfying, or give up on ever finding anyone.
It’s not just that they feel that social enjoyment could be improved, it’s that they feel exhausted from being different.
I’m talking about burnout.
Some people are different enough that they literally burn out from having to interact with people who misunderstand them, who they can’t explain things to without frustrating themselves, who can’t truly care about them because they never understand their feelings, who don’t share their interests, etc.
Maybe you have never experienced this burnout. My whole life is that burnout.
Some people really do have a need to get away and be with people who are like minded. It’s not about power, it’s not about ego, it’s not a game. The need is real and I’m sick and tired of it being misunderstood and politicized.
I do not often feel that, but sometimes I do. It might be due to my young age (early 20s, although I suspect that’s the lesswrong median) or because I happen to have an unusually happy disposition. And though both are just an accident of biology, I take pride in having a happy disposition, much as I take pride in being intelligent.
But I recently had what I believe was an adverse reaction to a medication which triggered a period of depression for a couple months. I’m still in the recovery phase from that, but I’m getting much better.
During that period, I found it much more difficult to put up with the company of ordinary people … the only thing that would cheer me up was intellectual conversation with an intellectual equal. I didn’t realize what immense reserves of emotional energy a happy disposition gives you until I was robbed of it.
Depleted of emotional energy, it was much harder to maintain a conversation with ordinary people, and I would burn out and retreat to my room after a while. Before my period of depression, when my emotional reserves were virtually unlimited, I actually enjoyed talking to almost everyone...at worst, I’d get bored and move on to talk to someone else.
What you are describing sounds a lot like the “need for cognition” which I was talking about earlier, but it goes a step deeper because you also want to be understood by others.
It also sounds like your emotional reserves are generally at the low end of the spectrum, which makes it hard for you to find enjoyment among dull company—although I may be extrapolating too much from my own case.
For me, what drove the “burnout” for me was an immense feeling of cynicism. I’d talk to people, and every word would show me the weakness, laziness, and foolishness that makes up the nature of most ordinary people. And because I was depressed at the time, I saw a lot of that weakness in myself as well, which troubled me.
The happy, high emotional reserve me cared about understanding how other people worked, and doing my best to make their lives better. Even if they had dull intellects, I could make them happy through my actions and I could help them move forward, and that would make me happy as well. When my friends had problems, I put my intelligence to use in understanding and solving those problems.
The depressed, anxious, low emotional reserve me needed someone to understand me, to make my life better. But a complicated person often has complicated problems, and no one was really able to help me. A well meaning gesture of caring goes a long way and means a lot to me, but it can only go so far in helping me. I have to spend hours explaining “Today I am sad because person A did X, which reveals Y about the person’s nature, and I feel like everyone I know has Y as part of their nature” or “today I feel lonely because I care passionately about Z and no one else including you even knows what Z is” in order to get coherent help from anyone, and the response is usually something I’ve thought of before. Fighting hard to be understood didn’t necessarily improve my mood.
By the way, I’ve checked the data. Contrary to stereotype, there is no correlation between IQ and depression, even at the very high end. Sad people with low IQ, sad people with high IQ … they may attribute the sadness to different sources (and they may or may not be attributing correctly), but at the end of the day the overall rate of depression is the same.
So...to answer your question, yeah, I feel different. Sometimes it is lonely. I wish more people were like me, that would make life much more interesting. I’m glad I am intelligent in the absolute sense, but in the relative sense I wish that everyone around me was smarter than me.
At the same time, when I am in a healthy frame of mind, I do not feel burdened by having to associate with dull people. It’s only when I am in an unhealthy frame of mind to begin with that this is an issue. Healthy me has a need for cognition which is fulfilled by like-minded people, but healthy me does not have a need to be understood by others. We all go through life fundamentally alone, that’s a lesson I learned early on—and not just those of us who are intellectually gifted. Everyone.
And in truth, though my intelligent friend understands my intellectual thought process, he doesn’t always understand my emotions … it takes more than just IQ to understand that. You’ve also got to learn to read faces too. As you said, I’ve given up on the prospect of someone understanding me completely… there are some people who understand my intellect, there are some people who understand my emotions, but it’s too much to expect one person to fulfill all those requirements at once. This isn’t a cause for unhappiness, by the way—it’s just how reality is. One might as well be sad about the fact that their is no heaven, as long as one is going to be sad about the imaginary visions that reality doesn’t live up to. I’d rather appreciate what people are, rather than hanker after the gaudy vision of what I imagine they could be.
And when I’m under-stimulated...I do my science. I read articles, write articles. I think every smart person needs a hobby or job or some other creative outlet that they are passionate about in order to be happy. That way you don’t have to depend on another person—plus, you often meet interesting people this way.
Sorry if this is nonsensical...it’s late.
Thanks for making the effort to try and understand. You’ve thrown one more variable into the equation—emotional energy. I don’t know if you’ve considered how these other variables would affect things, but:
Other Variables Involved in Gifted Alienation
Ability to communicate is something that will increase or decrease frustration / alienation / misunderstanding, depending on whether it’s low or high. Unfortunately, not all gifted people get the gift of communication, and gifts come in different sizes so they may not get enough of a gift in communication to compensate for the difficulty of communicating ideas and feelings that are as different as theirs.
Age of the person matters a lot. Supposedly, the speed at which you learn doesn’t change, but if you’re learning at say, twice the average speed, you’ll be much further ahead of your age peers at 30 than at 20, and so on. The gap seems to have grown as I have aged (I’m in the ballpark of 30 myself). It has become harder and harder to find stimulating intelligent conversation. Make sure to value your sources of intelligent conversation, you may need them more later on.
Amount of intelligence. If your IQ is 130, you’ll notice a difference between yourself and others but if it is over 160, you may feel like a complete alien. One interesting characteristic of the people I’ve met who have IQs in the profoundly gifted range is that they feel so very different that it’s like being stranded on a planet full of aliens. It can be very stressful for them. I don’t know what your IQ is, but it sounds to me like you can understand a little bit what this sort of problem would be like for them. You keep saying “need for cognition” but firstly, that’s a trait that’s more common to gifted people (it fuels the gift!) and not as common to non-gifted people. Secondly, have you ever been asked a lot of “why” questions by a little child and gotten burned out on answering them? Or can you imagine going a year without having a conversation that wasn’t one-sided? These are the experiences that some of the very gifted people might have with “need for cognition”. It’s better if the person wants to know what you have to say, and compensates a little for the difficulty of communication, but it’s not a substitute for having a conversation with an intellectual equal.
Also, understanding people’s feelings is a lot more complicated than reading faces. If I make a sad face, why did I make a sad face? Is it because someone said something that hurt my ego, and I need a compliment, or is it that the person was trying to hurt my ego, which kicked me in a deeper place—the part of me that questions why I bother to make a difference when the world can be so nasty. I get this kind of misunderstanding a lot. They read my face right, if I show emotion at all (I frequently don’t) but they interpret the wrong reasoning into it. People can be particularly stubborn in their interpretations. I can tell them “It’s not my ego” and they will insist that it and ignore the real problem. I’m different enough that my explanations sometimes seem unlikely to people, and they disagree with me about my own feelings. I find it intolerable.
If you imagine for a moment that there’s a wild variety of people here, all with different amounts of emotional energy, communication ability, different mental age gaps and different IQ gaps. Some of those people will be lucky, like yourself, and have a gap that’s not too difficult to overcome considering the communication and emotional resources they have. Others will either have gaps that are much larger than yours, or won’t have the same resources to compensate, or both.
Are gifted people more frequently depressed?
As far as whether gifted people are more frequently depressed, this really depends on the source that you read. A lot of things about gifted adults are not well-established. There’s not nearly enough research on them, and a lot of published research findings are false. One source of confusion is that there are a lot of prejudiced myths about gifted adults (before Terman did his research, apparently people thought that gifted people were ugly, unhealthy and all kinds of things) so there are studies that refute these myths and do not tell the whole story, and some of the sources disagree on important things. I’ve read a lot of stuff about gifted adults (I’m a psychology enthusiast and that’s my main psychology interest), and here’s my take:
For people with IQs under 145, I’d bet that they do have pretty normal rates of depression. For people with IQs over 145, from what I’ve read, I’d bet that they have elevated rates of existential depression. Whether or not existential depression was lumped in with depression, or did not qualify as depression might be something that influenced the studies you read. For a citation, I will select “Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults”. Here is an excerpt:
“There is relatively little inherent in being a gifted child or adult that makes them more prone to depression than others. Most often, it is a poor fit between the gifted person and the environment that creates the problems. A lack of understanding and support from teachers, peers, or family can precipitate very real problems of various kinds, including depression. Existential depression is an exception; it seems to emerge in most environments, though some circumstances prompt it more than others. Existential depression is particularly likely among the highly gifted, even though it is not a category of depression that is recognized in the DSM-IV-TR.” (Page 133)
Can anything (like intellectual activities) compensate for unmet social needs?
No. If you want a source, I will refer to Mazlow. His hierarchy of needs clearly includes various social needs. Further, his take is that you need to have social needs met before you can actualize your potential. Trying to channel your potential into intellectual activities without having your social needs met is likely to be frustrating. A lot of people (possibly everyone who is not a sociopath?) experience purpose in relation to other humans. This post by Academian explains that experience. The gist of it is: When asking “What is the purpose of life” this question implies a “who” so you need to have agents to have purposes to in order to have a sense of purpose. I experience this need, myself. I need someone to be close to, to have a purpose to. Random strangers and donations are not enough. I am a social organism. I need to bond emotionally with others, to need others, and to be needed by them.
Someone I know with a very high IQ said one key reason he hasn’t made anything of his potential is that he has to spend so much time trying to get his social needs met. This is a lot of work—it can be like rebuilding your social life after a move, except imagine that the social life you build never sticks. You’ll be constantly rebuilding your social life over and over again. Some people in that range are lucky and meet someone that fulfills their social needs. Others rarely ever find an intellectual equal, let alone one who is compatible with them (even friendship requires a certain amount of compatibility—though this may not be very obvious to people who aren’t really different). Some of them try marrying someone that’s not an intellectual equal, but the people I know who have tried this struggle with severe depression due to it.
There unfortunately appears to be no substitute for having your social needs met. Therefore, I regard it as important for people who are significantly different (any meaning of different, including different due to having a high IQ) to be able to participate in a haven where they can interact with like minded others without being made to put up with alienation.
On NFC—NFC is moderately correlated with IQ, it’s true. But personality traits turn out to be equally accurate predictors.
I’ll also point out that the loose correlation between NFC and intelligence is an implicitly made assumption underlying the worry that the quality of posts at Lesswrong will deteriorate with the new user influx...if it were true that NFC has an extremely strong relationship with intelligence, unintelligent people would simply would not be interested in participating in the discussion on the site, and there would be nothing for the older-user base to fret about.
We observe in everyday life that NFC doesn’t imply giftedness...there are lots of people who have extremely complicated but stupid opinions. Ever spend time on a white nationalist forum? Or argued with an intellectual fundamentalist christian? They write long sentences and cite academic papers, while simultaneously lacking even a basic understanding of how the world works. I don’t know whether people like this would score low or high on an IQ test—it’s possible that this faulty reasoning results from deficits which does not influence IQ scores—but it can’t be disputed that they’ve put a lot of thought into it.
On existential depression—This will naturally be correlated with intelligence, since you need to ponder philosophy in order to be identified as having this issue. However, is a social life really the cure for that? It seems to be like introspection is the only solution to existential depression … the issue arises via faulty philosophy in the first place.
Moreover...it would be really easy for someone suffering normal depression to attribute it to existential problems. We often feel emotions and then look around for the source afterwords. Naturally, only intelligent people would think to attribute the sadness to a philosophical issue.
On social life—I agree that smart people are more socially fulfilled when they are around other smart people.
In my earlier post, I was conveying that social needs and intellectual needs can be met separately. If I understand your post, you believe that in order for the social need to be met, one must be conversing with an intellectual equal.
From your post, it appears that you feel like an adult surrounded by children. The children tirelessly engage in activities which you do not find appealing, and will be unable to understand complex, adult matters.
I guess I feel more like a child surrounded by adults. The thing that bothers me about people is a profound unwillingness to engage and a stubborn lack of curiosity about anything. Yes, there are things that they don’t understand .. but that’s okay, those are my things and I can play by myself, like I always have.
I guess it’s not really a point that can be argued, since there’s no accounting for utility functions. Either you’ve got different needs, or the gap in intelligence for you is greater, etc...
Anyway, I’ll pick your brain on this, since you seem to have thought about it quite a bit - how does one create these safe havens for smart people? Is it really as simple as filtering out those who don’t pass an IQ test’s threshold?
That’s a rather quick dismissal. Maslow’s hierarchy is a “most people are mostly like this” type of argument. I’d think you’d need something stronger to argue for “no people are ever unlike this”.