I don’t claim to be book smart or have a high IQ or whatever but I feel this way about small things that I feel are common sense. It’s maddening to me to watch people fumble around. Or do X when obviously it will result in -Y a bad thing. I really have learned to just not vocalize it, most of the time. It’s especially unhealthy for my close family relationships as I just see so much of it that I could nag them to death.
Just the other day I was watching a video on youtube, of someone absolutely struggling at a task that had a built-in checklist, verification steps, pictures, and basically (in my opinion) perfect guidance. This is something where, if I was doing it, I would just... do the steps. in order. and it would work, probably... 99.9% of the time, the first time, and relatively quickly, to boot.
I watched them fail to succeed like... 5 times in a row. At no point did they actually complete all the steps and verification in order. And this was a reasonable, intelligent, thoughtful, thorough person. They just could not follow a checklist, visual or written instructions, probably to literally save their life.
my wife and i have two non-overlapping sets haha you can imagine how that plays out
Yesterday she literally failed miserably at a single task. Her mission was grocery shopping. She drove to grocery store, shopped, and came home and left the groceries in the car. Didn’t realize it until she was making breakfast the next morning and there was no milk.
I see this two ways; 1) I would never make that mistake 2) I know her quite well, partners for over 20 years now, and this kind of thing is just her normal par for the course type of “oops”. The second part is what frustrates me the most, I like to learn from my mistakes and she treats it as a given that she’s just spacey/dimwit by nature and leans into everything being an “accident”. Obviously not healthy if I treat her like a child so I just watch her fumble through life and try to have a sense of humor about it all.
However... NONE were "the 10x developer" who built up a huge mess. Which a team and I had to spend months and months cleaning up after.
I somehow suffer from both simultaneously!
Many devs choose to just do their day job or decide to follow a cargo cult.
Probably not every dev can have the same output, but if you decide to keep thinking beyond what is the cultural average, then everyone could be smart in their own way.
Most people don't realize they can do that.
The first is that you aren't as smart as you think you are, because if you actually understood the people around you in any real way, you would instantly find them less frustrating. But instead you are using flawed heuristics, built out of your own insecurities, to interact with the world.
Possibility two is that you are smart, but you have developed a malformed coping mechanism whereby you take all your negative traits (social ineptness, anxiety, impatience) and treat them all as simple the nature outgrowth of your prodigious intelligence. This is a common coping mechanism, and the neat thing is, it has nothing to do with intelligence. You can be dumb as a brick and still feel like you're in a world of morons who are inferior to you.
In fact, I suspect these two explanations are one explanation.
Personally, if I had to choose between a world of people with "low IQ" who are self-aware and one of people with "high IQ" or are extremely un-selfaware, I would choose the former every time.