If you think you’re smart, is it based on internal or external reasoning?

[Tigress1039]

[Chazmatazz269]

Mostly external. Being smart or being dumb, it’s something you can’t really know. First of all, it’s relative. Put someone with average IQ in a room full of 70s, and that average person seems like a genius. Put the same person in a room full of geniuses and he most likely ends up feeling like a moron. That’s not even accounting for context. Just having a genius IQ doesn’t mean you know everything. An idiot can teach a genius a trick or two if the former is clever and the latter is open minded.
All of that in mind, as you move through life and find yourself in a variety of circumstances meeting a wider variety of people, you start to detect patterns in context. The first time i felt smart, my extended family had gotten together for a major holiday and my uncle had brought the board game “Trivial Pursuit”. We decided to split up into two teams. My maternal grandmother, the oldest, most experienced and arguably most well-read person in the room was democratically chosen as one team captain. I was chosen as the other. I might have been all of twelve. There were plenty of other adults from which to choose, but they chose me. It was confusing, but i was more enthusiastic about playing the game than i was confused about that choice. So we played and we played like kids. People just kind of shouting out answers when they were sure, and turning to their respective captains with hope and, to some extent, trust that we would at least have a smart guess. Then my team won, and i might have felt meaningful pride for the first time in my life. Everyone congratulated me, but i knew i didn’t do it alone. There were probably eight or ten people around that table. Might have even been an odd number and my team had an extra player because i was, after all, just a kid. I luv knowledge, information, facts, data, whatever. I always have. I read the majority of the World Book Encyclopedia before i was enrolled in skool. I would have read it all, but we were missing at least a couple of volumes. But being the kid who adults looked to for answers opposite the smartest woman i knew. Well, that had a profound impact on me. So, i started acting smart. Ell oh ell! I was more annoying than smart. I was still just a kid, but opportunities came for me to take advanced classes in middle skool. Suddenly i had corroboration that i was smart! That continued into high skool. This is where it gets weird. I was lazy. So i didn’t work any harder than i had to at anything in skool. If i mastered the lesson in class, i didn’t bother to do the homework. However, i usually aced the tests. Zeros on homework and aced tests made me a ‘C’ student. I was asked to retake multiple tests throughout high skool because teachers assumed i was somehow cheating on the tests. Eventually word got out that i was “gifted” and they stopped forcing me to prove it. Then they stuck me into even more challenging classes. I actually had to work at those and i didn’t much like it. I even dropped out of physics because i just wasn’t grasping it and the teacher, who was extremely smart, couldn’t teach me because to him it was terribly simple. And that might be the first time that i realized intelligence is relative. For what might have been the first time in my life, i wasn’t the smartest person in the room and learning something new was truly challenging. In hindsight, my intellect was less the problem than my laziness and i think that teacher knew it. I could totally do physics. I just didn’t like having to work at it. I liked it best when being smart was easy. 😂😂😂
Eventually i had to be tested. At fifteen i scored 132 on a proctored IQ examination. I’m fairly confident that it was a Stanford-Binet, but i don’t know for certain. I became fascinated with the idea that intelligence could be quantified and i tried to learn as much about IQ tests as i could; including proven methods for improving your score. I took several more exams but none of them proctored. When i scored 150 (something) i asked my counselor to proctor another exam for me. I scored 146 and that was the highest i ever scored on a proctored exam. I have since tested myself on practice tests for the various standardized tests. To this day i do not know which standard i scored the 146 on and it eats at me a little. The highest i ever scored on a practice test was just under 160, but there is significant debate about which standard is the most consistently accurate. It’s also more than a little egotistical to reflect on it. Being unproctored, it’s kind of like claiming a hole-in-one when nobody else was there to see it. 😂😂😂
Not to mention that i didn’t vet the sources of my tests, and i most certainly could have been scammed because i didn’t pay for any of them.
I actually question whether or not i’m losing my faculties from time to time when i don’t get the external validation on my intelligence. I have “brain games” on my phone and if i have a bad game, i worry that i’m becoming average. 😂😂😂
Arguably too much of my self worth is tied up in my brains but besides funny, i got nothing else!

[MrChinaski]

Here's my rough guide to intelligence.

Low intelligence: You can function fine in life. Things you don't experience in your everyday life you don't understand.

Moderate intelligence: You can function fine in life, learn new skills, you draw connections between your experiences and things in the wider world, you can set and work towards goals.

Higher intelligence: You naturally think abstractly, draw connections between different ideas, can bring a conceptual frame to issues you haven't considered before, learn new skills easily.

Below or above that you probably have trouble putting on your own shoes.

[MrChinaski]

Why all of the questions about intelligence?

[slatyb]

Not sure what you mean by internal vs. external reasoning. I am able to grasp concepts more quickly than most. I was doing algebra at 8, calculus at 11, learned without instruction from my mother's textbooks. I get perfect scores on standardized tests. We can argue about the definition of intelligence, but most people consider me highly intelligent.

[NathanDavis]

it was my endless curiosity...

[Agape93]

Both. I know im smart.
@Ez-Bri-Z_v2 @SecretsofKB

[Nikki1989]

True confidence in one's intelligence usually occurs when internal and external reasoning converge.

[Iron_Man]

I know because I know how I am and how I communicate compared to others

[Anonymous]

Smart people know before anyone else ever says anything

[Anonymous]

No. But the amount of stupidity i encounter just makes me look that way.😆

[Nuclear_Warhead]

The two are never separate.

[exitseven]

I dont even know what that means.

[Chazmatazz269]

😂😂😂

[AgentG111]

Experience