I have discovered that I believe in the Intelligence Value System. In this value system, it is not that the brilliant are more worthy, that is easily refutable. Take anyone you love who is not a genius. They are obviously of great worth to you. No, in this system, the brilliant are afforded certain special privileges just by virtue of being really smart. Among these privileges is the ability to tear down and humiliate whoever they wish with impunity.
I am definitely playing it under the radar in life because of some trauma. I want to stop this, and just live my life following my avenue of interest or avenues of profitability. I want to be able to pursue brilliance without feeling like I have strapped a boulder on my chest. There are many reasons for this. I believe strange things.
- One of those strange things I believe is that people smarter than you will, and can, tear you apart, and that your defence is to be smarter than them.
- They will make you feel like you are nothing. But the important thing is that they get to do this. Tearing people apart with impunity is a privilege accorded to them, by virtue of their superior intelligence.
- Your defence against this is to either become smarter than them, or disengage totally from their realms of intellectualness.
- The only way to achieve hard goals is to become a hard kind of person who hyper focuses on a thing to the exclusion of everything else, and is rude to others and this is justified in pursuit of their goals, because they are special. Because they are smart.
One of the many ways trauma has affected the second half of my twenties is that I am looking at everything, all information about the world, through its lens. This is just like how I spent my teens looking at the world through the lens of romance, or a lack thereof.
I wish to remove these glasses, and look at life and the world a little less encumbered, a little more objectively, and if that is not possible, at least a little broader out than I can see today.
On the one hand I believe I won’t amount to much in life unless I climb out of this mental model of strapping a boulder to my chest and staying under it, which doesn’t let me learn. If I tell myself I have to become the inventor of GAN or that I am not good enough, I’ll never get this, what’s the point, etc - I can never learn and actually improve. It is like blinding myself mentally with hate. You cannot see ahead or think clearly with all that hate.
Self: “Why do I have to become the inventor of GAN?”
Inner Critic: “Otherwise, what’s the point?”
Self: “The point is to learn about something you are curious about. Expand your skillset. See if it interests you. Improve your confidence. Maybe get ML jobs later instead of being afraid of it.”
IC: “Oh you really believe this crap? That you are honestly curious about ML?”
Self: “It is true that ordinarily I’d steer clear of such hard sounding subjects (all thanks to you). But yeah. I genuinely want to learn about it, because it is dominating tech conversations today and I don’t want to live in ignorance. I want to know what all the hoopla is about so that I need not hide under a rock and hope the conversational spotlight turns the other way whenever AI/ML comes up. Additionally, I would like to inform you - I no longer iwsh to believe the idea you have planted in me that hard things are not for me. It is really limiting, insulting and belittling. Fuck you. Hard things are for me. Easy things are not for me. I get existential crisis from trying to limit myself to mind numbingly boring books and from avoiding hard things. Fuck you again.”
IC: “Well. How do you plan to continue this high and mighty attitude when the going gets tough, like within an hour of your education probably for yo. You are all talk.”
Self: “It is true that in the past I have when stuff got hard. Thanks to you again. First of all, I did not know how to overcome the failure. I thought something was wrong with me - I am an imposter and a failure - for not getting it the first time. I did not realize that I have to sit with the content, go over it multiple times, practice spaced repetition till it solidified in my mind, or come at it from a different angle to grasp it better. I hadn’t yet read “A Mind for Numbers”. I also hadn’t yet identified you, Critic, as the reason for my negative thinking - I genuinely thought something was wrong with me and I should concede defeat. But now, I know you exist. I know you are very powerful, and have honed your muscles and weapons with years of training, haven’t you? I know I’ll have to watch out for you. Journal about you, go to therapy, fence with you like this (Thank you Dr. David Burns), and climb out of any pits you manage to push me into, if not fall into them in the first place. It is sad that I have to do this just to have a real chance at learning stuff, which I am sure comes naturally and easily to many, but I do not care. Everyone has their own demons. You, are my demon. And I have seen you. I will come at you, with all the facilities I have. And I’m sure you know that I can be quite resourceful.”
Demon: “This is all you do. Talk. Even about tech. You do not go for the content, do you. You go for the metadata. The articles about the content. You people-watch and read blogs and convince yourself this means you know things. You don’t actually learn, or put in the work. You are like those people who report on the greats, always in the sidelines. Pink collar journalism at best. Like a Gossip Girl for tech.”
Self: “This is true. It is of no importance how great others are, or if I’m matching up to them. After all, I don’t know anything about this topic now. Whatever they can do to me, tear me apart with their scalpel of brilliance - they can do now. I needn’t care about them and register them as a threat. What protection do I have right now against it happening now anyway?”
Demon: “Obscurity. You are safe if no one knows you. They cannot criticize and belittle you. You need not demean yourself by rolling over and showing your belly to their arguments. You can refuse to engage. If you do not learn, you do not become smarter - but you remain safe. You’ll never engage with smarter people, and they do not get to actually prove and expose to the world how stupid you are. How useless and nothing you are. Like I established earlier, you are never going to rise to their level. It requires sacrifices you are unwilling to commit to (I am being charitable here, assuming that this unwillingness is a choice). If you do not rise to their level, you have no protection against these arguments, their undoing and exposing of you. It is either “roll over” or “be annihilated”. Since neither option sounds appealing to you, I suggest that you do not play their game. Do not engage with the greats. Remain in your lane of midwit intelligence. Have the same sapless arguments, satisfy yourself with an occasional smart turn of phrase. Like you have admitted yourself countless times, there are many blessings in your life - happiness, love, everything you have ever wanted. Focus on that. Mastery is not your cup of tea. Intelligence is not for you. If you do not heed me, you will burn. You are not one of them. You are not a hard person. You don’t like hard work. You like soft things. You will never give up all your comfort to rise to their level of intelligence or hard work. You are not competitive. You are not type A. You are as easy going as they come. You are not high status. You are a bit mediocre, aren’t you. You don’t want the crux of the hard problems.”
Self: “I don’t even know where to begin. Let me go slowly and carefully. I am not happy in obscurity. I cannot believe I thought the hiding strategy would ever work. Perhaps this was your idea. I am quite unhappy in ignorance. I want to learn things. Just now, I do not think this is an intelligence issue at all. Maybe a hard work issue, but not intelligence. Because I have observed that I am good at things I want to do. I genuinely get depressed if I am not working on a goal. I want to be able to go after intellectual goals with all that I’ve got.
Now, more to your point - smarter people exist. People with more knowledge, accomplishments, achievements, mastery, hard work, exist. I have so far refrained from any real presentation of my opinions on controversial subjects to stay away from their fire. But say, that in the course of my life and my education, or by virtue of ever expressing an opinion out loud or online, I come into contact with them, and am engaged in discussions with them. Say, they are tearing my ill cooked observation or opinion apart and I cannot think of a viable defence. Say I am stumped. Say everyone sees this. What really is the fallout from this? They are smarter, my argument is flawed so I’m stupid? Now everyone knows I am stupid and pretending and worthless? And I should just go live under a rock or kill myself or “stay in my lane”? I should somehow minimize myself? And also I should from now on defer to them, trust their opinion more than my own and live my life by their command? This is peak trauma-speak, Demon. I have lost an argument. I have not sold myself into captivity to do the whims of their superior intellect. I am not the spoils of the argument, they are not my captor. There is something else entirely going on here that this is the mode of thinking we have taken.
People lose arguments all the time. I can disengage any time I want if the other person is a jerk or a jackass. I need not suffer obnoxious assholes. This is a thing I get to choose. If the other person is genuine but simply autistic, I can still disengage. After all this trauma thinking really, I do not give a crap. I can do what I want. If the other person is genuine, great. I can learn. I can indulge.
In the past, we have let others argue us into corners, reason about why we should do the thing we don’t want to do; where when we could not refuse their point or articulate clearly why it is that we still do not want to do a thing, we have accepted their argument as a reason to do it, against our own deeper instincts. We are no longer going to do this. We can do what we want. And if anyone is asking us to justify ourselves as to why don’t want to do a thing, we can simply say no. We need not explain ourselves constantly.
Regardless of the other people and their attributes, I am not stupid or pretending or worthless if I lose an argument. This is not a matter of ego or worth - at least it shouldn’t be. I should work on it if every argument I have is devolving into an ego fight, which it isn’t now, so we shall cross the bridge and so on.
What is the expectation here? I should win every argument? People more brilliant than me have the right to tear me down or bully me into things I don’t want to do? No. They are just arguing. This is a discussion. This is safe. No one can do anything to you now. Your self is unharmed and out of the picture. You are a grown adult now.
You need not live in fear. Say you work for an insanely brilliant but obnoxious guy. Say Steve Jobs. He’s giving you one of his stares. You are withering. He’s saying your design is bullshit. He’s going off - “Are you an idiot? You are a dishonest liar. I can‘t believe I employ such incompetent people who cannot bring themselves to give a crap about what they do” (but way more incendiary). Say you whimper internally.
Now, shitty as the situation is, you get to choose. You get to decide whether his obnoxiousness is worth working there for you; Whether you want to take it and then write “The day Steve Jobs yelled at me and enlightened my life” type articles or the more probable “Fuck you Steve Jobs. You may be you but I don’t need this crap” rage quitting that your flavour of trauma would make you do (at least after some examination of the matter with your therapist).
The point is that you have a choice here. Saying “I will live under a rock forever and not learn much and never grow out of my current level of competency and work on my complacency because I’m afraid that one day some guy who is smarter than me would yell at me and make me feel bad if I expose myself to any sort of real/brilliant work” is most mind fucked thing I’ve ever heard you say honestly. And you are the master of mindfuckery. This is the stupidest idea you have managed to come up with so far. Bravo. Is this why you think we need to be absolutely perfect and invent something like GAN? So that we never lose any argument and therefore never need to face any humiliation, and no one can tear us apart and no one can make us feel inferior and then finally, we’ll be safe? We can just breathe easy and just be? You want to be perfect so that you are beyond reproach and since you know we cannot be perfect, you just want to hide away so that “no one can get me”? Oh Demon. You are just afraid, aren’t you. But no one can pick on us now. We are grown. We are big. We can take care of ourselves just fine. We are not vulnerable anymore. We did stupid stuff before. We can say No now. We say No all the time now. I’ll protect us. You are just afraid, aren’t you.
Demon Gargoyle: You say all this. But the truth is you (we?) are just incompetent and will never get to the core of the work anyway. You just do the sidelined shadow work. Remember your school project?
Self: I was 11 and my life was falling apart. I had to cut out my raincoat to make that project.
Demon Gargoyle: You are just conceited. What about that time you knew you weren’t invited to that program and went anyway and pretended?
Self: Look. Everything before college that happened, just be content that we got out of it without developing an intravenous drug habit and a matching STD. Nothing else matters.
Demon Gargoyle: Excuses. But yeah. Leave childhood. What about 5 years ago? You were supposed to research X and you did such an incompetent job. You still can’t do Y.
Self: Yeah. I agree. That’s exactly why I want to learn more. Do you want us to be stuck in “this incompetent land” (in your words)? I know a few things well and I struggle with a few things. Learning, especially with you sitting on my head, is hard. Just let me learn please. Let us improve.
Gargoyle: Yeah. Okay
Self: Okay. I know you’ll pop up again. I am starting to think your intention is to protect me, though in the most fucked up way. Maybe I’m wrong? Idk how you developed. idk your purpose for existing. Whatever. But we’ll talk. I’ll take care of us.
Gargoyle: Okay. Learn.
—
Wow. This inner critic gargoyle was trying to just protect me and in the process, hurting me deeply. Is it, my gargoyle, a maladaptive coping mechanism? I am stuck in mediocrity (or status quo - basically stuck where I am when I know I can improve, because it is afraid we will get hurt if we are not perfect. My demon transformed into a Gargoyle. You know what Gargoyles do, don’t you? They guard.
I don’t know if this revelation will stay with me. But I wish it does. I’ll work on it.
—
About having to be super hard as a person and lose your softness and silliness and playful animalness if you want to become super brilliant:
The goal is first and foremost, to improve myself, it is not “Become super brilliant” anymore. That’s the Gargoyle’s goal, not mine. That goal was there so that no one can tear us down or harm us. But no, I'm there to make sure no one can harm us. The mirror image of the “super brilliance” goal is the “stay under the radar” goal. This is also the Gargoyle’s goal. The Gargoyle’s job is to guard us from bigger scarier people who can tear us down (in its words). It can do so in two ways. Way 1: Become perfect. That failed. Way 2: Don’t try anything. So, it was doing way 2. Don’t come under the radar of the brilliant or the privileged (since they are the ones who can tear us down), don’t fail at anything so you never have to face how imperfect and normal you are. Hide. We are not doing that either. We are doing what I want now. And I will protect us. No one can touch us today, and we are neither perfect, nor stupid today. In fact, my intelligence doesn’t have to do much at all with my ability to protect myself and stand my own as a person. It is my independence and general adultness and our sense of belonging that does it. This intelligence as armor is no longer needed. We are well armed just as we are now. We should have been protected when those bad things were happening to us. The Gargoyle shouldn’t have had to come into existence. But we are big now. The arena has changed.
I feel now a deep sense of compassion for my inner critic Gargoyle. I understand why it did what it did. It is small and it wants to protect. How heartbreaking that I wanted to slay it and thought of it as a demon and a devil. I accept my Gargoyle, and now I will protect us.
Date: 2024-08-09