Misnomer, the more I read your posts, the more i like you.
Anyway, about the pissiness and bitchiness - the majority of people like to be smartasses and like to be mean. Nice people - people who are nice by default - are harder to find. Bitchiness seems to be valued, at least in the US, it’s a sort of “I don’t take any shit” attitude.
There are millions of people that are smarter than me and most everyone on on this board if you consider all the people in the world. There are about 6 billion people in the world so that leaves plenty of room for some pretty impressive talents.
That said, let’s say you consistently score in the 99th percentile on just about any standardized test you take. I don’t know exactly what all of these tests measure but they are measuring something because people score consistently across many of them. They don’t just throw out random scores over time or from person to person.
That means that you are 1 in 100 for measures that most people consider “smart”. Now lets say that you read more, listen to news more, and generally do analytical stuff more than the vast majority of people too.
Intelligence and the desire to learn aren’t independent. It is so hard to combine the two sets of data into one figure with simple statistics. At any case, being more knowledgeable about all kinds of subjects and having high standardized test scores means that you are at least 1 in the several hundreds and probably more.
Unless you tend to congregate with unusually huge groups of people, that means that you will be the smartest one in most random groups and even some not so random groups that you happen upon. There is still a good chance that you will be at the top in something like work where other people have similar interests and skills as you.
It is the same with other things. If you went to an Ivy League school you will tend to find that you don’t run into other Ivy League school graduates very often outside of professions and functions where they tend to congregate. Yet, there are hundreds of thousands of them out there.
My main point was just simple math. Maybe it isn’t that we are that smart but that other people tend to set the bar so low you can’t help but look brilliant in comparison.
Lots of “average” people are pissy, due to frustration with circumstances, malevolent personality, bad day, stress, lack of sleep.
There is, perhaps, a correlation between intelligence and i)ego, ii)entitlement, iii)wealth, iv)creativity, v)obsessive-compulsive personality, vi)psychosis, vii)making social sacrifices (study rather than work), viii)having a job with relatively more independence and less social interaction/teamwork, ix)having a job where lack of social skills is less of a barrier, x)elitism
I am a genius with a heart of gold. But I don’t get much sleep or edit my posts. I get crabby when I’m tired, and spel bad too.
I think intelligent people are probably more pissy than average.
The Internet is more pissy than RL – more unsubstantiated claims, less politesse, few consequences for bailing on Yahoo Euchre. The Straight Dope is a bastion of civilized behaviour compared to the Internet. A few jerks, but Og love 'em. Debate is often restrained, eve though some folks are passionate about useless details or think they can change a petrified opinion.