It’s hard. I always knew I was different but I didn’t know why until I was 14 when I took an IQ test and found out I had an IQ of 73. At first I was in denial but overtime I came to terms with my learning disabilities and started to understand what was wrong with me. It’s affects you in a lot of ways. You learn slower than everyone else. Things that come easy for everyone else take you forever to get a grasp of and I get overwhelmed with information very easily.
It’s held me down my whole life. It gives me a massive a inferiority complex and it limits my opportunities. I really wish I had a normal IQ like everyone else.
You get to lead the most powerful nation in the world
You’re always playing catchup when in a conversation with others; they’re racing ahead on the topic, already knowing both sides of the discussion and throwing their own spin on it, and you’re just sitting there staring at them mouth-agape as you try to process what is being said in realtime, but can’t quite grasp even the base concepts nor the terminology of what they’re talking about because their shop talk is so far removed from the baseline that it’s practically a whole subject in itself.
The smart thing to do is to just interject quickly with simple questions to highlight your supposed ignorance, and get some quick definitions to keep you at least somewhat up-to-date in the conversation.
But you don’t… either too ashamed of your own ignorance to draw attention to it, or rejecting it outright instead of facing the humiliation and telling yourself that you’re not that interested in the topic anyway.
That’s how it feels to me, anyhow
In my experience, people are generally unaware of current events and history. They don’t understand basic math. They are very poor at critical reasoning and don’t comprehend things like evidence or facts, so they’re easily convinced by hunches or baseless claims prominent people make.
There was a guy on youtube once who uploaded a video talking about this who has the channel name “crazydumbsick”.
Unfortunately I can’t seem to find the video as it looks like he regularly deletes content, and it currently only goes back about a month on his channel at present.
Take everything below with a block of salt because this is from memory, and it was a few years back where I watched his video once, so I could be misremembering one or more things here.
If I recall correctly he has Schizophrenia, Crohns, and an IQ of ~45, hence his channel name. He talked a lot about how hard it was to live, particularly pertaining to his IQ. He said that he has a hard time with remembering things and therefore most of his meals are made from pre-made microwaveable packages as he is capable of operating the microwave without too much difficulty, and he found it generally easy to follow the instructional lists on the packaging.
He made note that operating any kind of machine much beyond a microwave or TV remote was largely beyond him, except his computer and camera which he had recently figured out well enough to be able to record and upload content - but outside of those actions, he really had no idea how to use them.
I believe he also said that due to one or more of his conditions, he could not drive, which largely compounded the difficulties of his life.
He talked about how finding work for someone in his situation is basically impossible and just as impossible to hold onto for very long. I believe he talked about a couple jobs he had been fired from and why, and while I don’t recall the specifics, I believe he had talked about how he was not even entirely certain why he had been fired. I think he said that he had done some things incorrectly, and at the time, had some vague concept of them being incorrect, but despite this, he was unsure why he had gone ahead and done them anyway.
Overall, he seemed very sad in the video; he was terribly aware of how hard it is to live life being himself, and knew that there were basically no solutions to it.
Having said all of that, he continued to upload videos and there were some good events and some bad events. I believe at one or more times he discussed having tried to take his own life. Other times he seemed fairly upbeat and was trying to better himself - trying to read through a textbook on auto work for example.
Anyway, I think the original video I spoke about is one of the better videos I’ve seen uploaded to the internet. It was somewhat sad, but it was highly enlightening and certainly one of the most honest videos I’ve ever seen someone upload.
IQ is pseudoscience
All psychology is.
Not saying it isn’t useful before a psych major jumps on me. But the entire field is basically explaining how to cope with a society that is hostile to human nature.
The entire field isn’t therapy.
That’s about its only useful contribution.
How to learn better? How to organize teams better? How to write text or make presentations so that it aligns with how the brain best receives information? How to evaluate candidates for a role while minimizing the halo effect and the bandwagon effect? How to nudge people into leaving public spaces cleaner? How to make spaces more attractive for people to spend time in? How to increase adherence to lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise after cancer treatment? How to increase the odds of achieving a task you want to do? How to make computer interfaces easier to use for people, including people with disabilities? You’re saying that psychology has not studied these nor contributed to them?
Yes, there are a lot of problems in the field. But there are also brilliant people cutting through the bullshit and using their findings to improve the world. I’d be more than happy to show you robust findings that the field has gifted the world.
I agree, it’s a fairly productive social science, but is there actual evidence that psychology has made an impact in organisation and management?
There’s plenty of anecdotes and some hard numbers that suggest management is replete with bullshit artistry. For example, most office managers rely on in-seat time as their only measure of productivity.
I agree that there is plenty of nonsense out there. There are many interventions veiled as “scientific”, and most people don’t have the ability to lift the veil and recognize the pseudoscience beneath.
Unfortunately, the answer to your question is, partly, no. Psychology has not inoculated the world from pseudoscience. However, the answer to your question is also, partly, yes. There are people who have learned from the most robust evidence in psychology.
To the extent that organization and management adapt to robust findings in psychology, there are many contributions that psychology has made to organization and management.
- Clear goals. Things like SMART goals, specific goals, vivid goals, implementation intentions, mental contrasting, or otherwise things that help you be clear rather than vague about your goals— all of those tend to have a moderate effect on outcomes.
- CBT, ACT, and mindfulness. You will probably groan at this, because you have probably had watered down, simplified to the point of being unrecognizable versions of these. At their best, these have shown improvements in the way workers approach their work
- Psychological safety. You will probably also groan at this, because ironically psychological safety interventions, when done poorly, can make some people feel unsafe. However, the correlational and longitudinal data is quite clear: psychological safety leads to better results. Unfortunately, the experimental evidence has, to my knowledge, stuck to health-related organizations, where not speaking up costs lives. I wonder if there are good studies elsewhere now.
- Feedback strategies. There have been good experimental studies showing that the way you give feedback can change your organization’s capabilities over time. This is similar to psychological safety but arrived at from a different lineage in the literature.
- Multitasking and task-switching. This one probably goes without saying, because there has been more than extensive research on this. Minimizing distractions, focusing on one thing at a time, having a pull-based workflow…
More broadly, you could look for good resources for Evidence-Based Management.
I bet it’s fucking awesome.
Some idiot says “this is how things work” (and explains things in a way that aren’t true at all)
And then I’d be like “yeah that’s good enough for me.”
And I’d watch sports and not be worrying all the time.
As it is, I unfortunately see through most bullshit and realize im surrounded by people who don’t.
I am the scientist at the beginning of every disaster movie. Ignored until it is too late. Then blamed.
