[james_s_tayler]

That is a mildly fascinating story.

The fact you had some frame of reference you could use to reason about who was likely right or wrong in the given situation is interesting. I don't need an IQ test or to join MENSA to figure that out but it did take reading about about 10 or so books on politics, philosophy and psychology to figure out "everyones thought process is extremely busted, some more so than others".

Otherwise how the hell do you even get that frame of reference?

People in general have very little understanding how they're more or less a murderous political machine running a large set of very low resolution models on garbage in, garbage out.

If you don't understand that then you have very little recourse on breaking out of an unhelpful program or loop you might be stuck in. Even if you know that, it's still very challenging to break out sometimes.

I'm thinking to get an IQ test lately out of curiosity. Ive known some people personally who I reckon I just can't touch intellectually... like I can feel the difference when I talk to them. So, I've never really thought I was highly intelligent, but I'm starting to get the feeling perhaps I'm not smack bang in the middle of the distribution either. Deeply curious to find out.