This is called Lake Wobegone effect named after the town where all the children are above average. I was reading an article recently on the Dunning Kruger effect which essentially says that less competent people rate their competence higher than it actually is, while more competent people humbly rate theirs lower.
Basically the stupid are too stupid to realize their stupid.
Exactly!
It was an accident. I was on my phone on the toilet. I accidentally pressed the “poster” button, and the threads sorted by the poster. I saw this one and clicked on it. Seemed relevant, so I bumped it.
Now, back your regularly scheduled programming…
Freudian slip?
Yup. How else do you think people would blame their lack of success on the system? The system is rigged! The man is holding me down!
I am quite sure I am in the top half of intelligence. Big deal.
Top decile: Driving (50 years old and no tickets or accidents)
Bottom decile: Flying an airplane. I am the rare case where you are much safer driving with me to the airport than flying with me. I have never had an accident, but flying does not come naturally to me.
Top decile: Height. Just how God made me.
Bottom decile: Disposition. Sometimes I am not much fun to be around.
I am above average at grammar
its not their fault, it’s their carb heavy diet amirite?
In true AF fashion.
LOL, yeah that’s one factor. Around 10,000 years of high carb (lack of meat) shrunk cranial capacity 11%, and the correlation with IQ is .4, so yeah carbs made them dumb before they were born.
So sad! 
Top decile: Weight. Just how God and Whataburger made me.
Bottom decile: Ability to throw a football. I have a strange mental block when it comes to throwing a spiral. I have tried and I cannot do it. I hope my son never asks me to teach him.
^isn’t that grounds for deportation from Texas? What are you, one of them fancy boys?
^Not if you can play on the offensive line.
[video:www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGzJZFTwIN0]
^ BSD
Part of the problem is that people don’t really have a good sense of the true distribution, and can’t really sense where the average lies.
People who are bad drivers, probably grew up with other people who are bad drivers, which is why they don’t value being careful on the road. Dumb people likely grew up and hang out with other dumb people, and figure that they are smarter than their peers.
Some people are too dumb to know that they are dumb, and some smart people are so full of doubt because they know all the things that they don’t know but need to, and thus figure they can’t be all that smart.
There is a combination of smarts and guts that seems to interact with each other. If you’re too smart, it’s too easy not to act on your insights because you know they’re incomplete. Smart people that are somewhat impetuous probably end up being the most successful, provided that they have adequate support in case of failures/missteps early on in their lives/careers.
I concede this is more “philosophical” than your post intended, but what does the word smart or intelligent mean? Ok, you can say GMAT and be done with it, but what are we signifying with our answer? What is a smart person? What can they do that others cant? What could they potentially do that others couldnt? These are typically unanswered questions, and we use the term “smart” in only a vague sense, perhaps differently from person to person.
In order to be a person who has impact in their professional life, an important quality is a wide knowledge base. A wide knowledge of both known (domain specific) facts, and broad personal experience in that domain. This could be “smart”.
The ability to quickly learn new material and achieve high test scores is a different quality. This quality can also be (and usually is) present in certain domains (like math) but not others (social sciences), such that the quality is not a generalized one. The high test scoring is often what is impressive enough to warrant assertions of intelligence. This could be “smart”.
A third quality that is very important to success is interpersonal and social skills. Arguably this is the most important quality in achieving what is generally considered as success. This could be “smart”.
Now, all these things are usually conflated into the one quality - smartness/intelligence, simply by extension. He/she has a high position, wealth, therefore they must be “smart”. If smart is used as a synonym for successful (in the ordinary sense of that word), then that is correct. It is simply a label being used to describe an outward state.
(Of course, some people are labeled smart simply because they can perform some coginitive “tricks” at greater than average ability/speed. Handily calculating odds in poker would doubtlessly warrant a label of smart in many cases.)
But few people are “smart” in the sense of grasping some fundamental truths of our existence and of our peculiar behaviour, and I would argue that this is the sense of the word “smart” that is both rare and meaningful (since we, as a society, attach significance to the idea of “intelligence” only because we implicitly assume it is quite rare). The vast majority of “smart” people are only capable of unthinklingly regurgitating accepted mantras and theorems, doubtlessly with an impressive ability to do so, perhaps performing some cognitive tricks, but with no desire (or ability) to independently explore the building blocks of our knowledge and beliefs.
I mean, in the end, if you side with Derrida, language itself is fundamentally flawed and we’re all usually talking about different things.
^4,000 years of ancient Egyptian wisdom.
Intelligence is pattern recognition , as simple as that.
Education, wisdom, professional success, are separate things that people are always confusing with intelligence.
I agree on the many different types of “smartness”.
short term memory/ brute force memorization
spatial
interpersonal
adaptation - learning and application