Thoughts on Aperger’s Syndrome, IQ, and Social Networking

I was warned long before I even joined MySpace several years ago that I would end up hating social networking because of the combination of my high IQ, Asperger’s Syndrome, and how I was raised. I have tried for a very long time, but they were right. Out of every one of these I’ve joined, I’ve found a core of maybe 10 to 15 people with whom I can talk, enjoy company, and have reasonably intelligent discourse. For a site like MySpace, that is an incredibly small number, and for a purportedly adult site like TeeBeeDee, it is disappointingly few.

My friend Steve crunched some numbers a few years ago and came up with the notion that the odds of finding a group of people who think on the same level is proportionate to the percentage of people in the world with your same IQ. As I am in the 99.99 percentile, that doesn’t leave much space. He said it wasn’t necessarily that they have the same IQ, but that they think like you do, and therefore you would be comfortable with them. In my case, in the world there are 68 people, as the world population is just over 6.8 billion.

That’s kind of small.

The interesting thing about including the autism spectrum range is that I’ve found it to be true that any friends I’ve made think outside the box in very non-neurotypical (non-NT) ways. It takes a little study to figure out how that works, especially with the number of adults in particular who have not been diagnosed and/or who have no clue what really makes up the world of autism. But it also is a factor in how the synapse of the brain works, the random deletion of genome order at birth, and accounts for the IQ of many people with Asperger’s. Not everyone with Asperger’s is incredibly intelligent, but it is interesting to note that many of the great minds of our time have IQs over the 99.9 percentile and have some form of mild autism/Asperger’s.

Throw in the fact I’ve worked and associated with many cultures all over the world, trying to find people with an expansive worldview is equally difficult.

No wonder there are only 68 people who think like I do.

Unfortunately, if you did not have your IQ tested before the age of 12, you will never know your true IQ. After that age, it simply becomes a measure of your ability to retain knowledge, not your ability to learn.

If you know your IQ, do the math. If you don’t know where it falls on the percentile, here’s a ballpark chart. Mine is 167, which puts me at 99.99 on the chart.

65 – 01%
70 – 02%
75 – 05%
80 – 09%
85 – 16%
90 – 25%
95 – 37%
100 – 50%
105 – 63%
110 – 75%
115 – 84%
120 – 91%
125 – 95%
130 – 98%
135 – 99%
151 – 99.9%
167 – 99.99% 
183 – 99.999%

In doing some calculations of my own, it shows that the lower the intelligence factor, the wider the group of people with which others can associate, or get along.

So when you wonder why you can’t see eye-to-eye with most people and it seems so few people understand you, keep in mind that you are special in so many ways, and that specialness – which people in power with lower intelligence have tried for ages to eliminate – is worth cultivating in your awareness of the people around you.

 

Social Networking Sites

At some time or another, a good analysis of social networking sites was in order for me.  I’ve become increasingly disappointed and restless and unsure of my place in any of them.  I’ve made some good friends, adopted new family members, and found a forum for my articles outwith the usual places overseas.

It’s been several years now.  I’ve been on many social networking sites, including the “big ones”.  I’ve seen some unsettling things that, in a civilised world, should never happen.  I’ve seen people do some of the dumbest things on the face of the earth because they couldn’t do something as simple as google for information.  Besides this, I’ve seen many others who refuse to listen to logic and reason because they’d rather “play a game”.  That’s not ignorance.  That’s just plain stupidity.

The sites themselves don’t help.  When it is easy for someone to hack in and write an application that can suck the information from an account holder, including everyone on their friends lists, or you try to block an application and you cannot, even when it says you can, or people start thinking it should be okay to take the piss at other people in very illegal ways just because it’s the Internet and supposedly the US has no laws governing such a thing (sorry, but they do), then I think it’s time to cash them in and call it a day.

Tonight I question my participation in any of them.  I’ve already dumped my accounts at MySpace, Facebook, OK Cupid and Eons.  I have two left:  Teebeedee and Netlog.  I suppose it comes down to what you’re willing to put up with.

Me, I’m not willing to put up with any of it.

My articles are seen in 25 countries and translated in 10 different general languages, besides.  Why do I need to network through social networking sites?  Why should it matter to me what people in the US in particular think in regard to the issues about which I write?  They don’t, for the most part, and I am up to here trying to educate the thickheaded in social networking forums.

I’ll sleep on this and think about it further in the morning, but something tells me that social networking and I will never see eye-to-eye and I’ll end up pitching them all.  Or I’ll just keep Netlog which has, up to this point, been the least offensive.

In the meantime, I’ll just keep on writing here…and sending my articles overseas…and running my publishing company…and somewhere out there someone will learn something.  I just won’t know who.