The first time I heard the charge, “You’re too smart for your own good,” came when I was a teenager. I had just defeated a local chess champion and he seemed to be angry at both his loss and at me, personally. I didn’t understand why he was angry, because the loss didn’t mean he was a less capable chess player than I; it just meant that he had lost a single game. He could win the next game.
In the years that followed, I pondered the expression “too smart for your own good,” and it seemed to be a kind of oxymoron. That is, how could high intelligence be self-defeating? Wasn’t “smartness” a quality that everyone sought because it came with great rewards?
In the decades that followed, I observed average people, intelligent people, and brilliant people, studying their differences, their emotional proclivities and their wins and losses in life. Gradually, I became aware of a couple of self-defeating factors that can impact people of high intelligence.
The first of these is the fact that we live in a world where most people travel in a circular orbit around a centre that we call “average” or “normal.” Their opinions are usually absorbed through the consensus of the tribes to which they belong, because they don’t feel enough confidence in their intelligence to deviate dramatically from the norms. Highly intelligent people, on the other hand, aware of their intellectual powers, form their opinions independent of others, relying on their own observations and challenging accepted beliefs. Such people orbit in elliptical trajectories around a focus different from the centre of the normal circular orbits. To use a mathematical term, the eccentricities of their orbits are sometimes so large that these brilliant people like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Gödel and Einstein are seen as heretics at worst or weird and strange at best. The good news is that such people are the ones who create new paradigms that free us from the fetters of tribal consensus. The bad news is that such people pay a huge personal price, because they are misunderstood. As Friedrich Nietzsche observed:
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
Highly intelligent children are particularly vulnerable to persecution from other children who see them as different. The brilliant child often feels isolated and doesn’t understand why they are not accepted as part of the social groups. Some find other “nerds” with whom they can socialize, as in the case of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Some develop social skills and learn to avoid flaunting their cognitive advantages and receive social acceptance, while others never recover from the ostracism. They are “too smart for their own good.”
Another insidious pitfall of high intelligence is something called “the intelligence trap.” Sometimes, brilliant people overestimate their intelligence relative to others and assume that their brilliance in a particular field means that they have a superiority over others in all fields, even though they lack the adequate preparation.
Quite frequently, Nobel laureates or winners of other prestigious awards, make scientifically unjustified assertions within or outside their field of expertise. This phenomenon, often described as “Nobel disease,” is a common result of confirmation bias. Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who won the Nobel Prize in 1983, describes how a scientist may fall into this cognitive trap:
These people [winners of prestigious awards] imagine afterward that the fact that they succeeded so triumphantly in one area means they have a special way of looking at science that must be right. But science doesn’t permit that. Nature has shown over and over again that the kinds of truth which underlie nature transcend the most powerful minds.
The antidote to the intelligence trap is the deep humility that often accompanies high intelligence–what is sometimes referred to as “knowing what you don’t know.” As highly intelligent individuals learn more, they come to appreciate the deep complexities of the world around us and that imbues them with a sense of awe, making them slow to reach opinions, and less dogmatic in the opinions they hold. Such people are not “too smart for their own good.” For more information on the intelligence trap, visit: Does intelligence increase your ability to fool yourself? – Intelligence and IQ
