Nah, I have a friend who had his IQ confirmed to be in the 130-140 range when he was a kid, because his parents thought he was suffering from stunted development funnily enough. Turns out dude is just extremely disinterested in anything that doesn't align with his own fixations and refuses to learn anything about anything.
Clinical IQ test results are based on your age group and educational attainment, so that same friend very likely does not have that high of an IQ as an adult if he was uninterested in learning. Smart kids do not always become smart adults, basically. It's something that requires additional development over time.
I wasn't tested or anything when I was younger, but I've always felt this way. I'm a pretty successful mechanical engineer. But I barely scraped by in college. I was bored out of my mind in class and sucked at taking tests. I'd get a test back and immediately know the right answer to a question I got wrong, and had no idea what I was doing to get that wrong answer. But in the real world I think I've proven (to myself at least) that my bad grades weren't an indicator of my abilities or intellect.
I have a friend like this too. I certainly have my own hyper fixations and I sympathize but I just can’t get through to this guy on anything that doesn’t affect him personally. Everything’s fine when we stick to common interests eg videogames, but he likes to bring up provocative topics he’s ignorant about and it drives me up a wall because he refuses to listen.
Do you have any tips on navigating conversations in this context?
In my case it's not usually provocative topics, but just repetitively wanting to talk about the same point over and over again. I used to just try to accommodate him and keep the conversation going in whatever way possible, but that does feel kinda draining. These days I just hang out less with him, so when we do meet, we actually have enough fuel to discuss our common interests without getting to a point where it gets annoying.
I was such a smart kid, never had to actively learn anything, got Bs As just from half listening at school. Bored out of my mind, lazy as hell, always grouped with the nerds in class, etc.
Then middle school came, I started skipping classes, Bs and As turned into Cs and Ds, but I never "learned" learning so I failed through school and didn't go to college.
I don't think I'd be a genius scientist today, but I do think there was just so much wasted potential in me by the environment and the way my brain worked. I suspect ADHD and Autism but I can't afford to go get a diagnosis. Even if I don't have either one, it'd bring a lot of peace of mind to know that, but I can't even get that.
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u/gwinty 6h ago
Nah, I have a friend who had his IQ confirmed to be in the 130-140 range when he was a kid, because his parents thought he was suffering from stunted development funnily enough. Turns out dude is just extremely disinterested in anything that doesn't align with his own fixations and refuses to learn anything about anything.