More To Say Than A Comment Will Bear

Joe Huffman posted.

At issue is:

Once you hit about a 20-point IQ gap, communication starts to completely break down.

It’s not that the lower IQ person is “stupid” (although that can often be the case) or the higher one is arrogant, it’s that you’re literally operating on different systems.

A 20 point difference (roughly 1.3 standard deviations) means:

Vocabulary and abstraction levels diverge sharply. What feels like crystal clear logic to one side sounds like vague, pretentious word salad to the other. Jokes land flat. Metaphors get taken literally. Complex cause and effect chains get simplified into “this good, that bad.”

Different time horizons and pattern recognition. One person thinks in months or years and sees systems, the other is locked into days or immediate rewards. Trying to explain second order effects feels like speaking another language.

Also, processing speed and working memory gaps. The higher IQ person is already three steps ahead, getting impatient. The lower IQ person feels talked down to or overwhelmed.

Both walk away frustrated.

Both have wasted each others time.

Jøhnathan @Heavenly_Race_
Posted on X May 25, 2026

I have frequently been the person who's 20 to 30 points behind the person I've been talking to.  Marv's 152, for example.  The physics students who played in my Traveller campaign definitely had higher IQ's.  I dunno what FuzzyGeff or Technomad score, but I know it's higher than me.

I routinely tested around IQ 139, despite that being below the threshold for Mensa, I still passed their silly test.  I declined the membership because...  Have you been to a meeting?  It'd be faster to tattoo your score on your forehead so everyone can segregate properly and look down their noses appropriately.

I have noticed that I'm making connections that others do not see when figuring out something abstract and complex.

Because a draftsman is a translator between engineers and tradesmen, I learned to speak both languages.

And it's more of a dialect problem than a language problem.  Terminology not words.

But being smart doesn't give one the magic ability to suppress instant gratification.

Most of the smart people I know have poor savings skills.  But the ones who do have good skills in this regard have exceptionally good skills.

Many of us have extremely awkward social skills that have hampered conventional success.

Vocabulary is more a function of education than ability!  Those tradesmen include some VERY intelligent people who don't speak with a college vocabulary, but can understand and visualize what they're about to build and what they need to build it faster than I can.