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Comment by honkycat | Hacker News Reader

This feels like it belongs on /r/iamverysmart. I hate to break it to you: you are not nearly as smart as you think you are.

You can't talk to a single person at the party who has an interesting world-view, experience, or education? Isn't that the heart of creating characters? Empathy and experience?

It's fine to not enjoy socializing but acting like it is because you are too creative and smart for everyone else is delusional.

When I go to parties I talk to people about ethics and philosophy and creating music and creativity and cooking, and I trade stories from my past and make jokes.

Acting like watching a lecture on YouTube or reading your thousandths book is somehow superior to talking to living breathing humans because "ideas" is bizarre.

You can do both. Read a lot of books and also socialize.

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> I hate to break it to you: you are not nearly as smart as you think you are.

As I've gotten older, I've gotten more used to the opposite idea:

Relative to other people (which is implicitly the metric we are using here), you are really smart.

Why do I think that? Because of the data.

The data is pretty solid that, whenever you survey the population, the level of intellectual sophistication is extremely low.

So low that many of the words I'm using in this comment would not be understandable to a significant chunk of the population. So low that, while knowing how to do a wordy math problem is table stakes on HN, knowing how to solve (x+5)*3=21 places you in the 'elite' of the general population.

It's got nothing to do with how we feel about it. It's just a fact that, when we look at the problems that 50% of the population cannot solve, the bar is shockingly low.

So based on that, yeah: the people who are reading this, who know how to write a 'for' loop on a computer, who read way above a 6th grade level, who could say 'yes I know what an imaginary number is', are really smart.

Yeah your right I am so much better than other people because of my education. I now can't relate to anyone who can not solve this equation.

Solving the equation is not intelligence, it’s education. There’s a huge difference. You are not smart because you can solve the equation. Someone showed you how to solve it.

In my late 20s I moved from a relatively uneducated city to one with 5 universities and an intense intellectual culture. I went from being intellectually alone to being super stimulated and connected with people intellectually. So while I appreciate your point of view, sometimes you ARE just living in an intellectual waste land.

I basically agree with this, but honestly there’s actually a big snob factor as well.

Some of the best post-age-forty conversations I’ve had came out of me asking someone, “what do you find hard in that job?”

The more hands on the better. And these things - these kinds of discussions - aren’t generally available on YouTube lectures or whatever. In person you can get people to drop the facade or the spin and just talk.

I wonder how old the author is. I had a phase like this in my early twenties that grew out of eventually. I realized there’s a certain kind of wisdom hidden in people that you can’t find in books, if you just ask the right questions. If you find that every party you’re going to is full of boring people then maybe it‘s you not them.

This needs to be the top comment.

The OP is ONLY interested in a subset of topics he feels is interesting. This is the opposite of intelligent. A hallmark of intelligent people is to find fascination with everything. I recently went to a party where I met a guy who worked in a chicken processing plant. I know nothing about processing chicken. I literally spent an hour talking to him about his job. (By the way, he works way harder and takes way more garbage than us white collar guys).

This comes across as very defensive and reactionary. I didn't draw any of those conclusions from that reading. I don't think op is necessarily proud of not being able to relate to people, much the opposite in fact. Rather, you seem quite proud of your social abilities and the riches you have mined from these social interactions. Good for you. I think op's point is that he can't derive the same rich experiences from these interactions. No need to attack him.

Explain to me what the title of the piece: "Intellectual Loneliness" means.

Intellectual as an adjective, relating to the intellect. Without any claim to degree of intellect. So as opposed to emotional, physical, or spiritual loneliness. This is a loneliness of the mind, intellect. I see it as a product of specialization. So many of us put so many hours of our life into things that few other people can understand or relate to. It's not that these other people aren't smart enough to understand what we do. It's simply a matter of hours of attention dedicated to a specific topic. Think of it like branches on a tree. The tree of collective human knowledge keeps growing and consequently, individual knowledge becomes more disparate.

Maybe the communities you're a part of are different?

It took me a few minutes of browsing this guy’s blog to determine what sort of “intellectual” this guy is, and I can’t say in surprised to find it on HN.

Oh yes.

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