IQ Test Confirms I Am Not An Idiot

I don't want to go into the details of how it came about, but last week I found myself in a situation where I found myself taking an IQ Test for the first time in my life.

The idea of taking such a test made me nervous. What if it confirmed one of my worst fears and I learned I was an idiot?

I'd taken a similar test, years ago, the Federal Government's GSA Test. I did well on that one, got a GSA 14 Rating. Whatever that means. Likely I qualified to be a mailman.

The IQ Test has a lot of very abstract type questions, more like puzzles. Some of them I had to ponder for a bit to figure out the answer. One of the questions totally baffled me and no amount of pondering led to anything but a wild guess.

When it was all over I learned my IQ is 133. Since I had no idea what that meant I feared it might mean I was an idiot. I was pleasantly surprised to learn it was quite the opposite. As in I'm at the far right end of that bell curve you see above, with idiots being on the far left. Unfortunately for me, I suspect most of the people I know are in the middle of that bell curve. Or lean to the left.

A few weeks ago I was talking to an Iraq War vet. He said an amusing thing. He said he is not prejudiced against anyone due to race, ethnicity, sex preferences, nothing of that sort. The one thing he was prejudiced against was stupid people.

I've always tended to not overtly let anyone know, for the most part, that I think what they are saying or doing or the way they are acting is stupid. I felt, who am I to judge. But now that I've got these new IQ 133 credentials I'm thinking I might start allowing myself the privilege of thinking, geez, are you stupid or what? I likely won't be saying it out loud.

I've known some people who I've characterized as having degraded thinking. That sounds nicer than saying I think they are stupid. I have only directly told one person that she had degraded thinking. The situation called for it. I still think I prefer the degraded thinking terminology to bluntly telling someone they are not worth listening to because they are stupid.

I'm thinking stupid is different than ignorant. It is possible to be an ignorant person, but not stupid. Most ignorant people are stupid in that they are stupidly being lazy about losing their ignorance, as in not trying to learn more about the world they live in. Or question their ignorant beliefs. An ignorant person can get rid of their ignorance. A stupid person is stuck being stupid. This doesn't mean you can't be President of the United States one day. Obviously.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I've not offended anyone with my stupid talk. I highly doubt any of those on the downside of the IQ Bell Curve would read far enough to get to the stupid part of this particular blogging and you who have aren't on that part of the Bell Curve, so all is good.

I must go do something smart now.