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I'm probably a standard deviation or so below you — I've met 2-3 people like you; it's really incredible and refreshing to converse with those people. I'll be making an argument, "Premise A, Premise B, Premise C..." and they'll often just just derive that I'm going to say D, E, F therefore G. On, like, quite novel arguments. When it's happened, I've always been like - wow. It's really incredible. Two thoughts. (1) I wonder if you could frame learning to communicate and get satisfaction from interactions with merely "quite smart" people as a challenge worth pursuing. You could brush up on negotiation, sales, rhetoric, poetics, etc. Perhaps slowly start converting those domains' messy forest of heuristics into some principles and equations, if your mind works that way. If you were able to, for instance, detect someone lying to preserve their own self-image around something they felt ashamed of, and then were able to navigate that to help them both renounce the lying without feeling bad about it and help them reintegrate their self-image around the concept — that sort of that is immensely cognitively demanding to be able to do, and it's pro-social (you might not care, some people do, but at least it's not pathological in any way)... in any event, that'd increase the amount of cognitive processing you'd be forced to do in any given interaction by an order of magnitude or two, which might make those interactions become enjoyable. You'd also rapidly become massively liked and trusted. (2) With your intellectual horsepower, if you were willing to, you could absolutely seek out and cultivate a dozen or so people on your level cognitively. It'd take a while — you'd need to think through exactly what environments you navigate at what times and in what ways, how introductions get made to you, etc — but if you were to meet ~1000 people in a thoughtful thought-through way, then I'm sure you'd find at least a dozen or so close friends and peers to associate with. It'd be a multi-year project, but not incredibly time-demanding on any given day or week. I imagine it'd be worth it. My two cents. Seems like it'd be terribly unfortunate and much less satisfying to not be able to fully actualize and explore all that raw capacity with other good people. |
I find being stoned out of my gourd is a good way to slow myself down enough that I don’t find myself bored and frustrated. Typical, I know.
I do have a circle, but they really are scattered to the winds - and I think that works, as they’re similar in their lack of desire to spend too much time with people. I’m happily married to a woman who I think might actually be smarter than me, although her education was poor - but she doesn’t put me on a pedestal, and has no bones with telling me I’m wrong. It’s incredibly refreshing. I feed her knowledge, she feeds me ideas, and together we achieve things.
You say it’s a pleasure when someone makes an inductive leap, but I find that it usually pisses people off - instead, I leave one ear listening for anything unexpected in what they’re saying, let them say their piece while I delve through the topic with the rest of my attention, and then respond - although I do catch myself far too often finishing people’s thoughts, still - speech is just so slow.
As to the “soft” side of things - I was the CTO and sales lead at my business until I ran out of novel problems to solve, and left, as we’d built a self-sustaining machine - sold tens of millions of pounds of our software over the years, and it was my shoulder clients would want to cry on, as part of my curse is understanding people far too damn well - hence my analogy to lightbulbs, insulting as it may be - the psychology of others is generally predictable, en masse or singularly. I also write fiction, which to my shock and surprise got published late last year. Like most of my output, I saw it as no damn good - but apparently people like it enough to pay money for it. Bizarre.
Anyway - I appreciate the input!