9 Subtle Signs Of Low Intelligence You Need To Be Hyper-Aware Of

the average person meets somewhere around 80,000 people over the course of their life and actually speaks in depth with somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 of them.

that’s a lot of human contact. and somewhere in this mountain of people, you’re going to find people who say shit that does not make sense in the slightest.

and some of these people can hold you back.

especially if you get close to them.

if you get too deep into a conversation with them or if you fall into a long-term relationship with them.

it can be hard to figure out why an interaction with a person can make you feel like you just ran into a brick wall.

and this isn’t even coming from a place of “i’m better than you,” or anywhere near that

this is the understanding that you need to be able to recognize signs of low intelligence in others, so you understand the relationships you have with them and how they might approach it differently.

this is especially true if you’re in the business of building something up and looking for a partner to help you do it.

or if you’re looking for a life partner to share your remaining years with.

if you’re able to notice these traits in people early on, you might save yourself a lot of heartache, headaches, and wasted time in the long run that you otherwise would’ve had to put up with over and over again in a number of different circumstances.

i don’t want this to turn into a checklist of people you should judge by any means and ridicule but rather to understand the characteristics of these kinds of people and recognize them in a timely manner so you can save yourself time.

and potentially help those people in turn later if you really want to.

because at the end of the day your relationships with others are going to define your relationship with your own mind.

and that is going to dictate everything you do, everything you say, everything you believe, and everything you end up becoming.

mood is set for today’s writing session. japanese denim by daniel caesar playing softly through my speakers.

i’ve had a few stimulants to boot so let’s get into it.

"The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life." — Confucius

you will never find someone who is actually ahead of you in a given area of life criticizing you, laughing at you, or mocking you for trying something.

you will not find someone who has started their own business and made it all the way to the top, laugh at or mock somebody else for starting their own business.

they’ve been where that other person is at some point in their life and they know what it’s like.

it’s always the person who has done nothing who has the most to say about those who are doing.

the biggest person at the gym never mocks the newcomer who doesn’t know how to do anything, because the biggest person at the gym was once the newcomer who didn’t know how to do anything.

one of the stupidest things a person can do is mock another person for trying something new, and especially for trying it publicly in front of others who can see them.

i think it’s important that you understand that when someone mocks another for trying something new it’s often due to the fact that they themselves repressed the desire to try that thing.

they lash out in mockery at someone else doing it as a means of dealing with their inability to do it themselves.

mistaking a subjective, anecdotal experience for objective reality is something you need to watch for.

if a person can't perceive reality or process information outside the lens of their own personal experience that is a sign.

you usually see this in the form of people dismissing statistics and averages with their own personal experience.

for example, on average it’s a better decision to stay in college than drop out because on average college graduates make more money that dropouts over their lifetime.

however, someone who is unable to make the distinction between objective and subjective reality would use the anecdote of bill gates dropping out and becoming a billionaire as an argument in favor of dropping out, simply because they are unable to grasp that an outlier can be an outlier without being indicative of a general trend.

sometimes it’s more subtle and sometimes it’s less subtle.

it really does depend on the person.

an example of the latter would be someone who has never seen the ocean saying that the ocean doesn’t take up 70% of the earth, simply because they’ve only ever seen land, and therefore “it can’t possibly take up 70%.”

on a less blatantly obvious scale, it happens when people confuse opinions with objective reality.

not being able to distinguish between subjective opinion and objective fact is itself an inability that leads to the ability to be easily fooled and is the reason why people fall victim to marketing so easily.

if i say you’re wrong for not liking books and preferring podcast, i’m conflating a subjectively-formed opinion with objective reality.

i’m assuming that there’s an objective right and wrong when it comes to preferring one medium of information consumption over another.

sure, there could be an argument made for which one is more beneficial, but it’s not a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ type of ordeal.

bill gates is not a controlled experiment, your grandfather who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and lived to be 97 is not a controlled experiment, and one data point does not constitute a trend, no matter how much you want it to.

this one goes hand-in-hand with the previous point.

just because two things happen at the same time does not mean that one causes the other.

if you’ve ever taken a statistics class you’ve probably covered this concept and seen this example.

just because ice cream sales go up during the summer, and so do drowning rates. this does not mean that ice cream causes drowning.

it means that a third factor, the warm weather, causes both of these things to happen.

you see this all the time with people’s reasoning in regards to things pertaining to themselves.

“successful people wake up at 5 in the morning, therefore waking up at 5 in the morning makes you successful.”

maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t

it’s entirely possible that successful people just have a certain set of characteristics that happen to include waking up early as well.

“i started taking this protein powder and i felt better two weeks later, therefore this protein powder healed me.”

maybe it did, maybe it didn’t.

it’s entirely possible that those two weeks were the period of time when their stress levels decreased and their sleep schedule improved at the same time, and they’re conflating the two events.

the human brain loves patterns, and it’ll often fabricate them when there are none, simply so that we can have something to hold on to.

it’s much easier this way, really.

you don’t have to think too hard about something to realize that one thing caused another when they conveniently occur at the same time, and you can move on to the next thing in life without putting much effort into determining the specifics.

life is much more inconvenient and nuanced than we often care to admit, unfortunately.

i want to be careful here, because to some degree this reaction is genuinely primal in our nature.

doing this isn’t directly a sign of low intelligence but the reason i included this is that the absence of it can indicate high intelligence.

when someone disagrees with us, we feel attacked.

our brain immediately wants to throw out reasons as to why the disagreeing party is incorrect in their stance, to the point that we can often feel physically uncomfortable in the wake of such a disagreement.

the reason we feel this way is that we treat disagreements as though they are conflicts.

we feel as though our personal opinions and convictions are somehow being threatened by a disagreement, which prompts us to defend ourselves.

our opinions are formed through years and decades of our lives, and many of us hold on to them quite tightly.

it can be difficult to accept that we may be wrong about something especially if we feel as though we’ve held a certain belief for a long time.

people who chronically resort to this are the people to watch out for.

they are unable to separate the stimulus (the disagreement) from the response (defending their opinion).

they are unable to see another point of view and they are unable to engage in a mature debate.

they will immediately dismiss the disagreeing party and attempt to shut the conversation down as soon as possible.

disagreeing with people is a deeply personal matter for everyone, and the way we handle disagreement with others defines our ability to have nuanced conversations with people.

the ability to hold differing ideologies in the same room without feeling pressured to immediately walk out the door.

some of this is natural and you will see it your entire life.

when you meet somebody who can disagree with you without feeling the urge to immediately defend themselves, you can recognize them as someone who holds a higher level of intelligence.

they truly saw your statement and formed an opinion on it, rather than feeling attacked and shutting you down before you had a chance to explain what you meant.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

this is probably the most important point of this entire article.

the inability to see nuance.

they can’t hold the opposing sides of a debate in their head at the same time, and they feel as though everything has to be black and white.

these people will often use words such as “always” and “never” when forming their arguments, and will always try to push you to “their side” of an issue.

there is a term in psychology that refers to this and it is called cognitive complexity.

it is your brain’s ability to hold multiple points of view at once, rather than seeing the world as a simple “this is good, everything else is bad” type of scenario.

the higher your level of cognitive complexity, the more nuance you are capable of seeing in a topic.

there is another term related to this one, and it’s called dialectical thinking.

it refers to the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time, and to understand that both are partially correct.

it is an advanced form of cognitive complexity, and it is what a lot of people who are politically involved lack when it comes to discussing their ideologies with people from the “opposing side”.

left versus right is one of the most prominent examples of this one.

there are certain ideas that are “left-wing”, and certain ideas that are “right-wing”, and people believe that anyone who subscribes to one set of ideas cannot ever subscribe to the other set.

no matter how reasonable some of the ideas from the “opposing side” may be.

it comes down to ‘you have to choose a side and stick with everything.’

it’s just not something you should do. feeding fully into that tribal instinct.

in reality both sides have good and bad ideas and you’re not obligated to adopt all the ideas from one side wholesale just because you like a few of them.

and the same goes for the other side.

there is nuance to be found in everything, which is why it’s important to understand that just because you’re taking something from one side of an ideological debate, it doesn’t mean everything from the other side is objectively wrong.

it just means you like this particular idea less.

people who can’t hold two opposing ideas in their head at the same time, see everything as a battle of good versus evil, black versus white, right versus wrong.

as socrates once said, “i know one thing, and that is that i know nothing.”

there’s a type of person who actively doesn’t want to know something, and it’s not because they’ve been denied the opportunity to gain knowledge.

these people are the ones who will never ask questions, who will never seek answers on their own, who will never update their beliefs when presented with new information, and who will hear something once.

they will believe it for the entirety of their lives and never think to question it.

curiosity is the realization that your knowledge is incomplete.

if a person is unable to realize that they don’t know something, they are in a very bad position when it comes to learning new things.

they’re unable to grow.

the smartest people you will ever meet are often the ones who realize they know the least.

"The measure of intelligence is the ability to change." — Albert Einstein

one of the biggest sings of actual cognitive intelligence is your ability to learn and adapt to new information.

especially when the old information clearly doesn’t apply anymore.

say you’re trying to find a job

you send out a hundred applications and you hear back from none of them.

at this point, you have two options.

you can either send out another hundred applications, and hope that this time, you hear back from someone.

or you can realize that something is not working and you need to figure out what it is you’re doing wrong.

you update your application, you acquire new skills that you didn’t have before, you send out applications directly to people instead of using the generic job portals, and you apply to jobs in entirely different spheres of industry than the ones you originally intended to enter.

that is adaptation and updating your approach based on what works and what doesn’t work.

it’s an important skill and one you will see demonstrated everywhere once you actually look for it.

people who’ve transitioned from one type of work to managing people have to update their approach when communicating with others, because talking to machinery does not talk to people.

people who’ve gotten fired out of nowhere and have to move on to an entirely different industry because the one they were in no longer exists and they have to update their approach to work.

people who’ve heard feedback about their approach to a certain task and have to update it, instead of getting defensive when hearing that something they’ve been doing wrong this entire time.

it shows up in how people respond to everyday inconveniences, as well.

someone’s flight gets canceled and they rearrange their plans instead of standing at the gate fuming.

money gets tight and they find ways to live within their means instead of pretending it hasn’t happened.

a parent updates their approach to parenting as their child grows up and grows out of childhood and develops needs and wants that they never had before.

an argument begins, and someone updates their approach to talking to the other person in order to stop the argument.

the person who is incapable of doing this stands frozen in place in the face of new information and will fail to update their behavior in accordance with what they’ve learned.

this is a subtle one, and i want you to understand that being serious is not a sign of low intelligence.

quite the opposite in fact, as people who are genuinely intelligent often have a cynical view of the world.

what i’m referring to here is fragility.

a lack of the ability to laugh at yourself when you’ve messed up, or are in a situation that you yourself have placed yourself in.

someone messes up a pronunciation in front of someone else and everyone laughs instead of laughing along and moving on, they get angry.

someone points out an obvious mistake they’ve made, and instead of acknowledging it, you have a 25-minute long argument about how that mistake was not actually a mistake at all.

there is immense value in being able to view yourself objectively enough to admit to yourself that you were wrong or embarrassed and move on from that feeling afterwards.

people who can’t laugh at themselves often can’t be corrected either because the correction itself is too humiliating for their ego to handle.

this one is essentially the accountability umbrella.

i might dedicate a full post to it one day but here’s a short version.

you can tell a lot about someone by how they tell you the story of their life.

are they always the victim in every single version of events they tell you?

are every single one of their exes crazy?

is every single boss an asshole?

is every single business associate backstabbing them?

is every single friend two-faced?

is every single setback a result of the other person doing something intentionally?

sometimes people are genuinely the victim in situations and things genuinely do happen to them.

i’m not saying that people who say things like this aren’t victims in most situations.

but the point is that can they ever find themselves anywhere inside their own story as a cause of anything?

are you ever responsible for anything that’s happened to you?

what are you responsible for?

do you genuinely know what it is that you did wrong?

is it always something else?

is it always someone else?

if the answer to these questions is always something else and someone else in every version of events, it’s worth looking into.

when something goes wrong between you and that person in the future they will always be the victim in that situation as well and they will always blame you for it.

because it will always be someone else’s fault, and it always has been.

so what do you do with these signs?

i’ll tell you what not to do.

don’t just go walking around diagnosing people that you just met with low intelligence and as incompetent.

it usually takes more than a couple of conversations to really even see these patterns.

but besides that, everyone does some of this shit sometimes.

i’ve done some of this shit. you’ve probably done it too.

intelligence is a big umbrella that includes cognitive, emotional, social, physical, etc…

these are just things to spot out to see how expanded someones mind is. if you’re able to see these things before committing to something long term, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble.

the point was never to catch someone using one bad anecdote a single time and immediately decide they’ve got the cognitive horsepower of a wet sock.

we’re human at the end of the day. one behavior means absolutely nothing.

but years of the exact same behavior repeating in every argument and relationship?

that’s something worth looking into.

because intelligence always shows up eventually, in conversation.

especially the second things stop going someone’s way.

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