What is it like to be a low I.Q.?

A new flavor of Twitter I.Q. discourse

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In this week’s newsletter, a rundown of a particular flavor of I.Q. discourse on Twitter.

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“I.Q.” has long been an obsession among certain communities on Twitter, and indeed in what would eventually become “Silicon Valley” since well before Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk were ever born. But lately, on the occasions when I join the intellectual ferment of X, the Everything App, I find myself struck by the prevalence of what seems to have become a load-bearing I.Q. belief for an influential segment of Twitter¹: The idea that people at “different levels of I.Q.” experience the world so differently as to be nearly mutually incomprehensible. Here, e.g., is a tweet that crossed my FYP this week:

This question (to which many people responded by recommending Flowers for Algernon) is probably the most generous voicing I’ve seen of the assumption that particularly high- or low-I.Q. people have substantially disparate subjectivities. More often the claim takes a quasi-ironic form, and seems to almost always focused on the “low-I.Q.” end, e.g.:

Sometimes it’s simply just pathetic, as such as the case of this A.I. meme account using the LLM app Claud to understand “what it might feel like to be a 70iq person”:

I suppose it’s a sign of my own failings in the arena of intersubjectivity that I find this belief and line of inquiry baffling. My strong assumption is that most people experience the world pretty similarly, and not one of the tens of thousands of interactions I’ve had with people of widely varying degrees and kinds of intelligence has particularly challenged this assumption. Moreover, I myself have experienced, over the course of my own life, both the feeling of being very stupid and of being very smart, and found myself and my experiences mutually intelligible to others. (If I wanted to experience the feeling of being very stupid, for example, I would drink 12-13 beers one night and then wake up and take a sample LSAT the next morning.)

So why insist that people who test out to different I.Q. scores are comprehensibly different as human beings? There are obvious political motivations (and consequences) to the contention, and no different from those of any other kind of obsessive I.Q. posting. But this particular line of “inquiry” seems to me qualitatively different from the pseudoscientific I.Q. yapping of, to name the most prominent example, the Musk-beloved account “Cremieux.” (The closest thing to a citation in this mode of I.Q. discourse is an anonymous 2022 post on 4chan contending that that people with low IQs “can’t understand conditional hypotheticals.”²) Put another way, the concern here is individual, rather than population-level, differences in I.Q., and the mode is distinctly phenomenological rather than empirical--an abiding interest in the subjective experience of the “low-I.Q.”³ And, by implication, and maybe more importantly, one’s own distance from that category.

“What is it like to be a low-I.Q. person?” is, I think, the I.Q. version of what was once memorably called the “‘Noble Savage’ view of ‘Normies.’” And in this sense it should be familiar to us as rooted in a venerable anxiety common to every message board and social network and Discord server--the desire to separate one’s self and community from some less sophisticated, less unique, less alive imagined other: the normie, the N.P.C., the soyjak, the “low-I.Q. person.” (See also: “The Current Thing.”) (It often seems as though there’s something structural about online communities that produces this anxiety, and insists on the creation of a boring and predictable, but content and untroubled figure against which the community can be compared.)

Needless to say, the use of I.Q. to add a veneer of legitimacy (or even faux-empathy) to this kind of pre-existing, free-floating subcultural contempt is troubling. It also seems revealing about the intellectual habits and capabilities of the people asking the question. If you want to know what it’s like to be smarter or stupider than you are, or to have an intelligence that runs orthogonally to your own, simply go outside and have conversations with people you do not encounter or Twitter. Doing so will not only remind you that mutual comprehensibility and intersubjectivity among human beings is possible, it will help loosen your attachment to I.Q. in the first place.

1. I general I see this flavor of I.Q. posting concentrated at the vibrant overlap of two distinct X communities. The first is the “postrats” (also sometimes called T.P.O.T. or T.C.O.T.), a kind of breakaway network of Rationalists who have discovered irony, and who carry forward mainline Rationalism’s wall-eyed, showily “heterodox” free inquiry project through a strategy of light shitposting and self-help Substacks. The second is what I think of as the “J.D. Vance wing” of conservative Twitter--the contemptuous would-be intellectuals who clearly share a class and education background with their P.M.C. enemies. Where the defining affect of red-meat M.A.G.A. Twitter is a sleazy jouissance, a delight in cruelty and transgression, the J.D. Vance wing feels only a seething and bilious ressentiment.

2. This specific rendition of Twitter I.Q. talk--the thinly sourced but fervently accepted idea that some portion of the human population is so stupid that they can’t even comprehend the subjunctive mood--is an interesting one, even in its non-racist formulations. Former Reddit C.E.O. Yishan Wong, e.g., expanded the original 4chan claim (which limits its case to the 15 or percent of the U.S. adult population with a sub-90 I.Q.) to indict “the majority of human beings”:

But Wong’s example of what he means complicates the matter a bit. Is it that “B” “didn’t fully understand A’s statement” or is it that “B” thought that the question, taken at face value, was really weird, and used her command of social-conversational cues to interpret the tacked-on conditional to be a coy announcement of an imminent trip?

Similarly, in this viral text conversation between an employee and a manager, I would not say the manager is definitively “unable to comprehend conditional statements” when it seems just as likely that she’s trying to subtly tell the employee to mind his own fucking business. I suppose my point here is that when it comes to hypothetical and conditional statements being used in conversations, there are, perhaps, multiple kinds of intelligence at play, and I personally wouldn’t assume that blame for a failure to communicate always lies at the feet of my interlocutor.

3. A subjective experience previously only limned by the production designers of media like Sherlock and Limitless.