I’ve had some flack recently for posting low quality threads, but I reckon that whenever I had an idea for a thread that was like a poll there was never any criticism aimed at it. So I have decided it’s ok to post this one.
If this is about my parents. I’m pretty sure I’m more intelligent than my mother. But I’m not sure about my Dad. When it comes to advice about what to do about a situation he has literally always had better advice than what I had for myself. On the other hand he’s computer illiterate. That’s not surprising for someone mid-fifties.
If this is about my siblings. I have long known that my oldest brother is pretty damn intelligent. But I think in his case it takes the form of being wise as opposed to being able to work things out well. He also lacks intelligence about computers which I don’t.
My other brother is the one who got looks and common sense when people were queuing for qualities. But he also displays intelligence you don’t normally find in those who “Got the looks”
My (oldest) brother has three children. All girls. One of them is very smart. Another of them has what a non-biassed person might admit to be the better looks. The third is I think to young to determine whether she got looks or intelligence or both.
Of course I may be biased in all of the above. If it means anything I did learn that intelligent-niece was top of the class in a few subject, and I could be mistaken but I think looks-niece was also top of the class in one or more subjects.
Thoughts please.
ETA: And please, if this whole thread reads as being rather arrogant? I know it is, but I took that risk because I beleived it would also be a thread worth posting to. I am looking to entertain myself and others.
I would like to point out (which I should have done in the OP) that this thread was inspired by Prison break, which has one brother who has all the brains, and another brother who has all the brawn. Clearly genetics work in such a way that a person gets a random, roughly 50% selection of what each parent has.
if it’s any consolation [quartz] (and everyone else) I believe intelligent people are nearly always unhappier than those who aren’t. I often wish I was blissfully ignorant… Sometimes I even wish I had religion. Many people who have religion seem to be good and/or happy people.
My brother is more intelligent than I am. I’m really wary of making that statement to anybody, though, because they always assume that I’m denigrating my own intelligence and end up trying to reassure me that I’m smart too. Which is really weird, because if I say my brother is smarter than I am, I’m not dicking on myself. I’m bragging about my brother!
I’m very intelligent by any standard. My brother just happens to be even smarter.
In order to explain why I am being so neglectful I have to admit that I’ve been drinking. That revelation is for another thread (please, if you intend to bring it up make it another thread)
Now, I have been neglectful. I have neglected to mention why I was explaining my Dad’s computer illiteracy. You see it was because there was a context. The context was that I have a certain problem-solving ability with computers that means I (not in the IT industry) am someone who has been known to be approached by people who are in the IT industry when they have a problem they’ve been unable to solve by themselves.
In other words, My dad, whom I consider cleverer than I, does not have the same ‘cleverness’ with computers as I.
My parents are much more educated than I am. They both have advanced degrees, and they have both collected a great deal more information than I have. Both of them are knowledgeable in certain subjects to the point where they could go on for great lengths without me having a single idea what they’re talking about. There are also many everyday skills and situations in which they will be much more efficient and successful than I would.
My middle brother is more creative than I am. He has a truly artistic eye. He learns to play instruments quickly, and unlike myself is able to devote time and energy to studying them and learning their inner workings. His music and art are both refreshingly original, as in ‘I’ve never seen anything quite like that’ original. He has a grasp on design that I can’t match. He can point a camera at the exact same thing as me and turn it into a work of art whereas my photo will look amateur. He hasn’t had any more training than I have, he just has a natural ability.
My youngest brother is a mathematical genius, nearly a human calculator. His party trick is doing multiplication with large numbers in his head. He also has an extremely large vocabulary for a kid his age (he’s a freshman in high school) and writes very well. His current passion in life is video games – and I don’t blame him, the kid’s fourteen – and he racks up high scores and finds all the secret endings and extra bonuses the games contain.
My mother is incredibly talented as a motivational speaker. She has two two published books and speaks in 48 U.S. states and all the continents except for Antarctica. She is on tour and planes touring about 180 days a year yet somehow she is jealous of both me and my stepfather who is smarter than she is and we both take subtle jabs at her. She is really, really insecure about it. My stepfather is a college professor and I think I am smarter than he his and he acknowledges it. Oddly enough, my 84 year old grandfather functions like a 50 year old and he is brilliant. My mother’s brother is also brilliant but he has terrible social skills so no one acknowledges him. I guess I am #1 intellectually and academically even most though most people in my family are superstars in what they do. My two younger brothers get really pissed when I shoot them down on any type of nonsense however.
[Electric Warrier] My oldest brother is the human calculator in my family. He doesn’t even know how he does it, but he can do complex arithmetic with ease. I have trouble adding two sub-100 numbers together.
(but, as if to make myself feel better right now, I can work wonders with many programming languages)
No one in my immediate family yet, although both of my kids threaten to usurp my throne in certain areas. In my wife’s family there are probably a few, although I don’t have enough exposure to them to know for sure. They certainly have more education although it tends to be specialized.
I spent an unfortunate and inordinate amount of time in my youth defining myself and who I most essentially was in terms of my intelligence. (Turns out that when surrounded by equally and/or more intelligent people there was absolutely NOT any immediate “home at last” kind of recognition).
My Dad is more intelligent. Almost scary more intelligent. Grew up on a rural/semisuburban farm near a town, ancestral family being farmers, his own Dad becoming a policeman in the nearby small town. Despite complete lack of background selecting him for such a career, he obtained a PhD in physics and got a job as Los Alamos National Labs developing new devices to go boom in a predictable yet spectacular way down in the Nevada test area.
My Dad, despite the intelligence, has vast portions of his consciousness walled off to any conflicting ideas, and has made a career of being muleheaded and contemptuous of people who did not think exactly as he does on issues ranging from the ideal density of a nanosecond shell of specified density in a thermonuclear device at 37 microseconds to the proper components of a good peanut butter and jelly sandwich or the right music to be listening to.
My Mom and my sister are both technically less intelligent than me. I am much better than either of them in taking a complicated understanding of something, assigning it temporary axiomatic quality and treating the entirety of it as a noun and considering the relationship (and therefore the implications) of that noun to other similarly-constructed nouns. It’s like they can’t manipulate the meaning of possible postulates to think out the ramifications in any formal sense.
And yet I have impairments and mental shortcomings that they don’t have. Both of them are far more adept than i am at predicting how a social environment of known or partially-known composition is likely to react, and how to position one’s self within that milieu for optimum outcomes of several different sorts. Both of them have 1000x times my ability to recognize faces they’ve seen before and figure out what context they recognize them from.
I am not sure “intelligence” is quite a measure of all that is attributed (formally and informally) to it; on the other hand, it’s a factor, a real one; characterizing it may require further thought and info but there’s a very real thing that the devised tests do measure. I’ve got a fair amount of it but not stratospheric performance. I have other talents and mental capacities that are less measured by intelligence tests but which are also “real” in the sense that having those capabilities is a definite asset. My sister and my mom also have some impressive skill sets that I (and to a lesser extent my Dad) are negligibly able to perform in, and those also are meaningful and significant skills.
And my paternal grandfather. He had practically no formal education, and (literally) couldn’t find his way home from the grocery store, but the man was a mathematical and mechanical genius.
One of my cousins is at least as intelligent (in IQ terms) as I am, but he’s more cynical, smarter (that is, intelligent in practical terms) and has a more rounded-up life. He’s reproduced four times; I’m not going to. His wife is helluva nice; the mother of his first daughter, otoh, is a damn bitch who took advantage of him and of anything and anybody else she could, which is one of the factors that triggered the cynicism. Before he got burned up and smarted up, I would have considered myself both more intelligent and smarter than him.
If you’re defining intelligence by IQ, then I’m the most intelligent in my family.
The rest of my family are probably all at a similar intelligence level to each other. My brothers both performed averagely at school, and have gone on to have successful and rewarding careers and lives. They are both good with their hands and enjoy doing manual stuff around the house.
I performed well-above-averagely at school, was put up a year and was recommended for a specialist school for gifted children, which my parents decided against. I gained a university degree, the only one in my family to do so. Whilst I probably currently earn the least of all my siblings, I’ve had a more varied career, travelled more and live a more ‘intellectual’ life than them.
I know I’m just a data size of one, but the difference in my life and goals compared to my parents and my brothers makes me veer towards the genetic side of the genes versus environment debate. I’m adopted.
I think my family and I are about equally matched in intelligence, overall.
My dad was like AHunter’s - he grew up in a rural area, attended a one-room school house, yet went on to go to college and eventually attained a PhD in strutural engineering. He’s very intelligent in many ways, including being a brilliant professor (being able to teach others, IMO, is a very special skill).
My mom was a professional journalist, so her intelligence was manifested in different ways - she also was a musician and photographer. She was exellent at interviewing people; always knew just how to draw them out. She took some damn good photos, too.
My siblings are involved in many different things, and excel in different ways which I’m not going to bore you with the details of. If I had to give the edge to any one of us I would probably say my oldest sister; she’s got two bachelor’s degrees and a law degree; had a long-running career as a dance instructor and now is an attorney with some Battery Park firm in NYC. Each of us has areas in which our analytical or social skills are better than another’s, but nobody really stands out from the pack.
My kids might be a bit smarter than me; again, their interests are varied so that no two of them excel in the same thing.
My husband is more intelligent than I am when it comes to machinery and how things fit together & work together. I am better than he is at abstract thinking and higher math.
I’m the only one in my family with a degree. But I usually attribute that to the fact that I am just “good at school.”
My dad’s a pretty smart cookie, considering that he doesn’t even have a high school degree. I think I am more intelligent than him just because I’ve had more schooling.
I work with my brother, and when it comes to the things I do at work (programming, server stuff) I am leagues smarter. BUT he is vastly superior in his knowledge of sports and music with a great memory for details.
We both react to problems differently, too. He tends to get frustrated more quickly and I am willing to take on problems head on. I think that’s why I did better with schooling than he did. On the flip side, he reads more than I do and tends to read at a higher level. I have a short attention span for a lot of things.
So, I’d probably score slightly higher on an IQ test than my bro - but I am good at taking tests. All in all, I like to think we’re equally as smart.
I was the first to go to college, no wait, still the only one to go to college. The second to graduate high school, 2 drop out brothers, 2 barely skimming by sisters and 1 sis that did well but went no farther.
DK about Dad, he died when I was 7, but he was a factory worker.
Mom got a GED when she hit 60, no real idea just how smart she is, but IQ has to come from somewhere, she reads constantly. On the standard IQ test I came out 30+ points above everyone in my family.
I also earn more than 3 sisters, 2 brothers, and a couple of cousins all put together.
FWIW, my background is from a tiny East TN tobacco farming community.