I went through a battery of IQ tests as a kid and got a _high_ score (139). But that was when I was seven years old. I'm 30 now, have a master's degree (which was pretty pointless) and make 25 bucks an hour as a temp (more money than I've ever made in my life). I think my life and prospects have dimmed because I haven't been able to get over the anxiety and the depression that impact me every day. Interviewed for jobs for 14 months and didn't get a single offer. Haven't had a girlfriend in 3 years, lazy as shit, can't even look at myself in the mirror. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is IQ is bullshit, and discipline, social skills, and connections are priceless.<p>But we grew up in the world told we could do anything we wanted! I think it's that sort of expectation that is screwing with us (at least those of us that didn't become comfy SWEs).
Ugh, this study selected its "superior iq" group by surveying Mensa members. Study (<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616303324#!" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...</a>) makes no mention of this selection bias, though even the <i>article</i> does.
> It turns out that the people who join Mensa and attend meetings are, on average, not successful titans of industry. They are instead – and I say this with great affection – huge losers. I was making $735 per month and I was like frickin’ Goldfinger in this crowd. We had a guy who was some sort of poet who hoped to one day start “writing some of them down.” We had people who were literally too smart to hold a job. The rest of the group dressed too much like street people to ever get past security for a job interview. And everyone was always available for meetings on weekend nights.<p><a href="https://woodrow.typepad.com/the_ponderings_of_woodrow/2006/11/scott_adams_on_.html" rel="nofollow">https://woodrow.typepad.com/the_ponderings_of_woodrow/2006/1...</a>
Using Mensa members as the study group seems fatally flawed.<p>Mensa seems to attract people who define themselves by their intelligence, instead of by their success. It wouldn't surprise me that they would be more anxious and depressed than average.<p>Higher rates of allergies could be explained by socioeconomic, racial and cultural biases in those who gravitate towards Mensa.
I have managed many people in industries that attract low IQ (70-90) workers. I also know a lot of high IQ people since I went to a gifted high school.<p>I'm not a psychiatrist, but I believe the low IQ have WAY higher rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders, but almost none of them are diagnosed. Their lives run without much thought or planning so they often end up in very stressful situations. Sometimes they don't even realize that something is wrong or not normal. Or even if they do manage to figure that out, they cannot describe what they are feeling or communicate effectively which can be stressful in itself.<p>I still think high IQ people have mild to moderately higher rates of mental disorders than normal IQ people, but with low IQ I think it's massively higher.
I’ve had this little pet theory about high achievers and depression for some time. It boils down to:<p>They apply the same thinking patterns that make them excel at work (= very controlled environments with binary answers, requiring perfectionism and attention to detail - e.g. programming, maths, fact-checking, engineering, arts) to every area in their far less binary lives.<p>If you have very high standards at work you likely apply very high standards to yourself. How you view yourself is frequently how you view others, which can be destructive for relationships.<p>If your job is searching for bugs 8h a day you likely develop the thinking pattern to take even the smallest issue very seriously.
I have a theory about high IQ and anxiety:<p>The more intelligent and creative a person, the more sensitive to negative emotion they're going to be, simply because their subconscious mind will see more connections between their negative emotions and the things, people and places the person has, sees or frequents. In other words, they'll naturally realize the world is more inhospitable than the average intellect, so their subconscious will have more negative data points to track. When something bad happens, they'll need to work harder to convince their subconscious that it won't happen again.<p>Anxiety itself is therefore because the subconscious currently sees familiar patterns it saw before, during painful experiences, and it throws out feelings of anxiety to slow down the conscious mind to force caution, as if the person is looking at a minefield and may not know it.<p>Edit: And the key to living anxiety-free, at least for my own personal experience, is understanding every negative emotion in my past, why it happened (whether my fault or not), how I reacted, and how I would react today In a way that would avoid the same terrible outcome. Usually it requires forgiveness, either for something someone did to me or to forgive myself because I was ignorant but no longer am and most importantly I/my subconscious knows if my forgiveness is genuine, namely when I'm ready to sympathize with someone else in the same situation. It's incredibly liberating.
When I was involved with The TAG Project, this was common knowledge in gifted circles online. This is not limited to Mensa at all. Some fairly well-known names in the gifted community referred to issues like OCD and ADHD as "co-morbidities" for lack of a better word.<p>The higher the IQ, the more likely there are to be other issues and the more likely they are to be severe.<p>Similarly, Ashkenazi Jews win some inordinately high number of Nobel Prizes and happen to be a population with a high risk for genetic disorders, some of which have been proven to have impact on cognition.<p><a href="https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Jews-constitute-20-of-all-Nobel-laureates-despite-being-0-19-of-the-worlds-population-What-specific-sociocultural-elements-are-the-root-cause-of-this-phenomenon" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Jews-constitute-20-of-all-Nobel...</a><p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligenc...</a>
This study shows that being in Mensa is associated with mental and physical disorders - based on self-reporting.<p>I appreciate the irony of this study having been done by people who were being very very dumb.
Saw an interesting talk on youtube about high IQ and underachievement, shame it is in Belgian dutch (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFCLdJVoHVg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFCLdJVoHVg</a>).<p>She states that an high IQ is most likely going to be an impediment to a succesful career rather than an advantage if unmanaged, because education is set up for the average kid. She makes an interesting car analogy: it doesn't matter whether you are too long or too short, if you deviate too much from the average length your seating is going to suck.
Likewise, high IQ kids placed in the average education environment are going to get bored quickly, which if not overcome compounds over the years resulting in unsatisfying academic achievement.<p>Another interesting analogy she makes is regarding athletes. When a recruiter finds a kid with high athletic potential, they get special training to transform that talent into superior skill. But children with a high IQ people are stuck in the school system designed for the average IQ kid, because in education they tend to think that "everything is so easy for them" instead of "they require special attention to let that talent bloom".<p>So she claims that a high IQ warrants special attention to turn it into an advantage, otherwise there is an considarable risk of an unsuccesful life, which i personally can attest to.<p>I was tested with an IQ of 140, almost dropped out of college, still managed to finish it at the age of 30, way too late. And while I have a decent job, chances of promotion are low because employers tend prefer the candidates who did finish their education in the avarage timespan. So now I am stuck in a dead-end and that is very frustrating because I know I can do better than most, and have gained the required displicine but get passed over because in my professional area they prefer the kids who did everything the way society set it up for them. My parents where even told that I needed special attention, but they couldn't afford it, so now I have to deal with it. Sucks but thats life for me I guess.
Isn't it a likely explanation that society is generally structured (consciously and unconsciously) for the average person and therefore the further you get away from the average, the less ability to have to connect with the broad group/culture identity, ergo leading to isolation and thus more social and psychological issues?<p>For example - imagine that you have an IQ of 150 in a society where the average is 100. If suddenly everyone else's IQ jumped 50 points, the society would then change to reflect this new increase in intelligence - jobs, social roles, and other aspects of culture would be different than those from the 100 IQ culture.
I always thought that high IQ is correlated with high anxiety, because the smarter a person is, the better he can imagine all possible things to go wrong. On the other end of spectrum are people with IQ comparable to children, who presumably don't worry about too many things - ignorance is bliss.
Anecdote:<p>My Dad was a MENSA member for a couple of years, but he was mostly taking the piss - he put down his "special interest" as "carved Dravidian lapis lazuli", which is not as far as I know a thing. He was an RAF V-bomber captain and never as far as I could see suffered from depression or other mental health issues (which would have affected his security clearance) - much the reverse.<p>Edit: The lapis lazuli thing is (per Google) actually a thing, but in the early 1960s I don't see how my Dad could have come across it, but obviously he did.<p>I could have joined MENSA (had the IQ) but thought it was all too silly and didn't. I've suffered a lot from depression.<p>Go figure.
Advice to parents: Don't tell your kids their IQ. There are good reasons not to whether it is low or high, plus it doesnt mean that much. My parents offered to tell me my first year of high school after a big science fair win, but I didn't want to know. At the time I think I needed to believe I had the hardware needed to keep chewing what I had bitten off. A few years later, I had the luxury of still feeling like my achievements were born out of patience and passion rather than talent. I didn't finally ask until I was in grad school and knew myself well. Im grateful to have been given that choice.
When I was 18 I tested 135 on a FRT based on Raven Matrices. I briefly joined Mensa and what I saw was quite depressing. Dysfunction upon dysfunction and wasted potential. Except for the dysfunction it reminded me too much of myself and I had to quit. This is of course a limited data set so take it with a grain of salt.<p>I would recommend <a href="http://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/" rel="nofollow">http://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/</a>
Even for those with a normal IQ range and properly more so for those with better ability to recognize patterns - the world is a scary place sometimes.<p>Being able to predict mind games, deception, passive aggressiveness without those at fault will admit to it can make you question your own sanity easily - now what if you had sharpened senses that picked up on these things.<p>How I see it, the bottom line is this. If you are surrounded by a good and suppprting tribe it can be a gift, but at the other end it can seem like a mean curse.
when i was in grade school, i was tested and put into the "gifted and talented" program which was mostly just a one hour session once a week with about eight kids. it was mostly just brain teasers but then they literally spent an entire year explaining and stressing the importance of charisma. they also told us that "this is easy for you now, and you may not have to work hard, but you need to learn how to work hard because one day you'll be taking classes that you can't just breeze through and if you don't know how to study you will fail."<p>they were right on both counts. many times later in college and in working life i've thought back to these moments.<p>also, "overexcitability", yup.
I hate when IQ comes up on Hacker News because it's a topic that everyone feels like they have something to contribute on, and there's so many misconceptions floating around it's hard to know what's "orthodox" so to speak.<p>Does anyone have a good reference about what the current, academic general understanding with regard to intelligence is? Are there any surveys of practicing psychologists, etc?<p>The best I've found is the "Intelligence Knowns and Unknowns"[0] task force report published by the American Psychological Association in 1995, but I'm not aware of any such report since then.<p>My takeaways from that report, are that IQ does capture the concept of "intelligence" that most people understand exists, that the tests aren't biased or flawed anymore, that IQ can't really be changed with any known interventions, and that it correlates well with success in school, jobs, and life.<p>I'd love to know if that's still the academic consensus. You'd never know from these threads where people chime in with their own anecdotes <i>what's</i> real.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unknowns" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unkno...</a>
The old trope is that there is a "fine line between genius and insanity". I was testing with above average IQ at a young age (6th grade, 11yrs old) of 160 or in that range many times since. But I have noticed that many of my family members, friends, associates and coworkers seem to look at my behavior with skew towards that bias. In my view, I think this idea that genius and insanity or abnormal behavior has been so ingrained in peoples minds that when they meet someone with elevated IQ they look for indicators to support their bias (bias confirmation). I think I am no weirder than other people, I know several people who clearly do not have elevated IQ's and they seem to "get away with" various strange behaviors but because they are "normal" it goes without notice. In my experience, once you are labeled with the big brain you come under more scrutiny than norms.
Also, I don't think Mensa is a good sample, my experience is that people who seek the big brain recognition through things like Mensa may also have personality traits that trend towards those types of disorders. A true double blind study would need to be peer reviewed before I would lend any credence to this hypothesis.
As a "gifted child" of the 80's, this is obvious to anyone who was identified as one or had friends who were. Depression, OCD, anxiety, etc. are all very common in that crowd.
I scored 166 when they gave us an IQ test in the 8th grade. Two years later I gave myself an IQ test from a book in the local library, and I scored 149. Following that trend line, my IQ is now approximately minus 300, but the headline gives me some hope that my various disorders have slowed my rate of IQ decline.
The kind of people that join a club to prove they are high IQ are likely insecure and feel the need to peacock. No wonder there's a higher incidence.<p>Most high IQ people I know think Mensa is stupid and just want to have normal lives and hate talking about intelligence and think it's irrelevant and a cringe-worthy topic.
" example, people preoccupied with intellectual pursuits may spend less time than the average person on physical exercise and social interaction"<p>...or Mensa members are more interested in analyzing themselves as a whole, and will seek diagnosis more often than the general population.
Sampling the set of Mensa members is not the same as sampling "superior IQs".<p>digression: My personal preference is to call IQ a testing quotient and not intelligence quotient--it's more specific and less qualitative, for "intelligence" is overloaded.
Late Dr. Oliver Sacks, a famous neurologist, became a neurologist because his brother had schizophrenia. Many of his books contains cases of people with extraordinary abilities, but with mental disorders.
"Mensa membership associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests" would be both a more accurate description of the results, as well as perhaps a more believable correlation.
Perhaps people with superior IQs think and stress a lot.<p>I recently came across the work of Dr. Robert Sapolsky and his research highlights the long term effects of chronic stress.<p>It is possible that higher IQs lead to a lot of thinking and stressing out.<p>I can safely consider myself in the above average IQ bracket and I tend to stress a lot about things as obscure as the world's oceans, climate, politics, science, the Arctic ice, etc.<p>My brother is less inclined academically, is of a very easy going nature and always seems to be happy, with the exception being during difficult times in his business.
Is it possible that the study shows that high IQ people who bother to join a "high IQ society" tend towards higher mental and physical disorders, rather than high IQ people in general?
This paper made some news before and was also debunked back then. Note that (2017) should be added.<p>Here is a quote from Neuroskeptic:<p>“The ‘national average’ data in the mood disorders category, for instance, are taken from the NCS-R survey (data collected 2001-2003.) The NCS-R survey did not ask people whether they’d been diagnosed with a mood disorder. Instead, trained interviewers asked participants a series of questions about their mood, emotions, sleep, and other symptoms, and made diagnoses based on strict criteria.<p>Doctors in the real world don’t diagnose depression the NCS-R way, so we can’t compare the NCS-R estimate of mood disorder prevalence to the estimate of diagnosed prevalence from Karpinski et al.’s survey. It’s comparing Malus and Citrus.<p>Secondly, I have concerns about the sample. This wasn’t a study of high-IQ people. It was a study of Mensans, a self-selected subgroup of high-IQ people. 6.5 million Americans fall in the top 2% of IQ, and only 55,000 of them are members of American Mensa.<p>In other words, Mensans make up about 0.8% of high-IQs, and Karpinski et al. have data from less than 10% of Mensans, so the sample is seriously unrepresentative.“<p><a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/10/22/intelligence-risk-illness/#.XaU5MowxVvI" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/10/22/in...</a>
It's unclear to me that they've controlled for "people who join Mensa."<p>To be clear, I'm not throwing shade, and I was a member for awhile before I got sick of paying dues, getting spammed, and not going to meetings. They're a fine organization, spam aside.<p>But in general, people who join clubs based on personal qualities do so because they put some level of value and identity in that quality. <i>Some</i> people who tend that way do so because they have an emotional hole to fill, and <i>some</i> people who tend that way do so because it's their dominant positive quality (in their own perception).<p>So, neither of those speak to Mensa's core message of joining so you have people as smart as you to converse with. But both of those suggest a higher potential for Mensa members in general to have life issues they're compensating for by joining intelligence clubs.<p>I do believe the basic trend that very smart people have more mental disorders, at least. I think our knowledge of twice-exceptional people has grown a lot over time, and I think there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that quirks come with the intelligence territory. Get quirky enough and a quirk is a diagnosis. But I'm not convinced that particular skew starts at the 95% percentile.
Could this be caused by people with higher IQ being more honest and knowledgeable about things?<p>The average person has undiagnosed issues. They may have a mood disorder, but either deny that they have something wrong with them or have never bothered to have it checked out?<p>Compared to people who care enough to officially test their IQ. I argue that more people in a group like Mensa are more aware of their diagnosis' than the average person.
While this is a neat surface level study, there's a few issues I see with it.<p>>No separation of Full Intellectual Assessment or another re-test, simply self reporting the averaged figure. We lack resolution in results.(ex: were people with high verbal IQ more prone to schizophrenia?)<p>>Subjects were those concerned with their own mental status. All respondents were MENSA members. While I could test into MENSA, I simply don't care. I have a friend who is in MENSA, they are quite proud of this over dinner conversation, but they are also quite neurotic. This observation is anecdotal, but I'd think you're going to get more people who live a lot of time "in their heads" in MENSA. I would love to have another control group to compare results over.<p>>They understand that self reporting is ripe for error. An online survey is difficult to accurately administer, people will misrepresent things about them, especially if they think it is a reflection of their own personal value.<p>It's neat, but I don't think it's reliable enough to make any declarative statements about a linear progression of IQ and health disorders.
There's a quote I have and that is that smart people have a harder time being happy, because they worry too much.<p>I've never put it to test with others though.<p>The reasoning is that you see some sort of pattern always and you believe it's the end of the world.<p>Eg. China, climate change, ...<p>So you believe you need to earn as much as possible, so your odds for survival are better ( as an example).<p>Narcissists don't have this problem, as they are focused on themselves.
There's an interesting if not politically correct theory that<p>>Jews as a group inherit significantly higher verbal and mathematical intelligence and somewhat lower spatial intelligence than other ethnic groups, on the basis of inherited diseases and the peculiar economic situation of Ashkenazi Jews in the Middle Ages.<p>as<p>>During the [...] period, laws barred Ashkenazi Jews from most jobs, including farming and crafts, and forced them into finance, management, and international trade. Wealthy Jews had several more children per family than poor Jews.<p>I'm half jewish genetically myself and there do seem to be differences between the jewish and non jewish relatives kind of along those lines.
(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence</a>)
So to be clear, this wasn't a study of people with high IQs, it was a study of people who signed up for a high IQ club that wasn't, say, academic research. Sounds like you're looking at people where the biggest thing going for them is not their accomplishments, but their IQ score.
Reading the study, it's more like, people whose identity is tied up with being smart, (members of Mensa) spend a lot of time thinking about their mental health and are likely to think that they are not normal and are also like to respond to questionnaires about their mental health.
>> This theory holds that, for all of its advantages, being highly intelligent is associated with psychological and physiological “overexcitabilities,” or OEs.<p>On a speculative note, maybe those OEs are a result of maltreatment of some sort (there are many).
The study was only done on members of American Mensa, I wonder if there would be any difference across countries.<p>I'm from a poor European country; in high school (~15 years ago) I measured 156 in a Mensa IQ test, a friend had 168, and a third friend 172. We were top students in the generation, going to programming and math competitions. Definitely not in the popular kids club, but otherwise perfectly normal as far as I can tell. In the couple of Mensa meetings I've been to back then I have not really seen any of the mental or physical disorders considered in the study either.
I suspect a form of survivorship bias is contributing to these results.<p>Less-high-IQ people with the same disorders may never be diagnosed with these sorts of (often subtle & subjective) mood/anxiety/learning/chronic-immune disorders.<p>Perhaps, even, less-high-IQ people are more likely to literally perish before such diagnoses show up in national averages.<p>(And that's before considering the filter that many others have already mentioned: that only some, potentially-unrepresentative high-IQ people find the idea of joining MENSA appealing.)
IQ is bullshit. Children surrounded by adults who believe that bullshit correlate highly with adults who maybe aren't doing the best job caring - and possibly nobody is at fault there. IQ is literally another example of the abject failure of psychology as an intellectual discipline. May it one day be rectified because the subject matter is fascinating and obviously deeply important.<p>Choosing to not let children in your care do IQ tests is correlated with sensible, caring, intelligent adulting. No really. Really.
Unsurprised that most of the comments on this post are just people number dropping their IQ and anecdotes about their mental health problems and minimal discussion of the article itself.
This article sort-of falls in line with my theories on non-local consciousness. Intelligence could be just a particular manner in which that person's brain is accessing the consciousness dimension, and these mental disorders are just side-effects of this access. For example, I feel that the autistic can be more 'in-tune' with the non-local consciousness, which is why they have (generally) a different thought process. (I have ASD)
Look at it like this: If high intelligence didn't come with some pretty serious drawbacks, evolution would have made short work of dumb people long ago.
>From a practical standpoint, this research may ultimately lead to insights about how to improve people’s psychological and physical well-being. If overexcitabilities turn out to be the mechanism underlying the IQ-health relationship, then interventions aimed at curbing these sometimes maladaptive responses may help people lead happier, healthier lives.<p>Reading between the lines, in these cooling months, sent a chill up my spine.
Reading some of the other comments got me wondering, it seems most people had their IQ test when young, and were told their scores by their parents. I wonder two things, what would happen if they took that test again, would they score similarly now? And what if their parents told them a higher score then they actually did, I can imagine most parents don't want to have the you scored low conversation...
Since disorders were self-reported, I wonder if capacity or willingness to understand complex disorders was controlled.<p>For instance, a low intelligence person might consider autism to be "bad" and avoid considering it, or unable to afford doctors to tell him.<p>While a high intelligence person would recognize that the autistic spectrum has advantages and disadvantages, and would be more likely to accept it.
I think Mensa is not a good frame of reference for intelligent people: You have to actively work towards getting into Mensa, which limits the target group to people who are willing to do that work, pay membership and possibly desire the prestige associated with it. Therefore it is very possible that some people with mental issues use it as a gateway to self-validation.
All this study says is that there's a correlation of Mensa membership to a higher likelihood of certain disorders. It does _NOT_ establish any causal links, or even that Mensa membership is representative of the much much larger population of people who can get a 98th percentile score on an IQ test. Perhaps disorders cause people to join Mensa? Who knows.
We are living in a more and more defined, secure, safe world ( and part of the world where this is not the case, they are getting there sooner or later ). In defined world, characteristics other than intelligence play a much heavier role and since intelligence doesn't rewarded enough becomes secondary. I hope it's cycle that comes and goes.
What's more interesting to me is the fact that people are still sticking to this idea of expressing one's intelligence with one number. Just one. Using IQ as the degree of intelligence is like using one's weight or blood pressure as the degree of healthiness. It may be an important metrics, but only one of million variables.
As I've gotten older, my desire to be more intelligent has gone down while my desire to be more charismatic has gone up. It seems to me the ability to create and grow the social connections I desire is the key to happiness. With that ability comes to the necessary intelligence(s) to navigate through other parts of life as well.
Have a look at this IQ critic: <a href="https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...</a><p>Nassim Taleb has got some very valid points. Forget about IQ, it is not worth the time you focus on it.
Highly intelligent people should be pushed to physical exercise and forced to avoid sugary/processed food. I knew one girl with BPD and PhD and those two things helped her tremendously; every time she slipped her state rapidly deteriorated and it was hell for everyone around.
Be careful gleaning anything with email surveys like one. There could be confounders. E.g.<p>High IQ -> More $ -> More likely to see Dr for diagnosis<p>I didn't read the whole thing though--did anyone w/ the time decide to do a deep dive on the study and see how they controlled?
If the study is based on a comparisons between mensans and the general population, I can think of confounding factors that should make it impossible to draw these conclusions.
the thing about an IQ is that all it measures is the ability to take an IQ test, and ability to take an IQ test is thought to correlate with some sort of thing called intelligence, but nobody is quite sure how it relates to intelligence, what intelligence even is, or if intelligence is a single thing.<p>Which is why the vast majority of the people who talk about IQ tests and IQ scores are people that scored highly on it and very much want it to mean something important.
Maybe people who feel the need to be in an exclusive group based on arbitrary test data are associated with mental and physical disorders, logic suggests.
I request everyone to read Nissim Nicholas Taleb's criticism of this IQ BS. Now, I do not buy all his arguments but I do think his broader point is pretty much valid. At their core IQ tests measure how to answer exams designed by people like them.<p>I was born dirt poor in a remote godforesaken village in India. Today I work for one of the FANG in bay area.<p>The most depressing thing about working for this employer is howe dimwitted majority of their tech employees are beyond the core tech skills. Many of them can write complex code with ease and yet they do not understand simple sarcasm or hyperbole.