I have no idea how true it is, but it's a really interesting idea. At least in my experience it's a probabilistic thing: as people get more different in IQ communication becomes harder, with a few exceptions.
What do you all think?
> Model 4, the intellectual stratification model, expands on the fact that the mean group IQ varies across different groups and, consequently, predicts a high correlation between the group mean IQ and the IQ of its most influential member, with a leader–follower gap of between 8 and 20 points, depending on the submodel.
The theory is that one's influence over others decreases as the intelligence gap between one and others increases. Simonton theorized that this is probably due to the increase in the complexity of ideas as IQ increases.
The reason I say it is probably over-generalized in this case is because I don't think influential communication necessarily counts as "meaningful communication".
In a sense this concept (the window of comprehension), reductive as it seems, would be more likely to reinforce the problems the individuals mentioned have, by emphasizing human communication as an intellectual rather than a social activity.
In general my experience of very intelligent people is that they have an excellent ability to interact with people of all types, including people with relatively undeveloped powers of abstract thought. After all understanding context is to my mind a strong indicator of intelligence.
On the other hand I'd be interested to hear more from people of very high IQ on this topic - if they think they can get their ideas across to me over the 30 point barrier
In my imagination a hell of a lot of that difference would become meaningless within the first week or so.
Aside: it appears that, rather than describing only the article's subjects' problems with very high IQ, there may be a variety of problems being expressed here by posters, varying from a very high IQ to grandiosity, ADHD, autism, indeed the full spectrum of psychological disorders plus normal behavior. It's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
rationality (what intelligence is good for) is only one input to our decision-making, and i believe intelligent people particularly need to periodically remind themselves of that (rather than allowing supposed rules like this to short-circuit our behavior).