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Ben Shapiro has entered the discussion.

Maaaan how did those guys become the richest people in the world and I just got depression and had a nervous breakdown in 2004

I was somewhat lucky in that I was a smart kid, but nowhere near the smartest kid in my school, so I never assumed such about myself. Fun fact, my class had one of the earliest cases of ‘salutatorian sued the school because he didn’t get to be valedictorian’ cases that I’ve heard of (1992).

This is what TAG classes are all about, really. "See, you aren't all that amazing. Do your homework. Yes, I mean the social science too."

ARS (Ayn Rand Syndrome): a development phase that's usually end by age 15. strongly associated with Smartest Guy in the Room Disease

And also DOGE

Did the math and realized that even if you're in the 99th percentile in the US, there's enough people like you to make a city bigger than Chicago. Was a bit humbling.

When they get together it becomes The Smartest Guys in the Room syndrome. I've seen this twice before in my lifetime. First Enron, 2nd the Rumsfeld gang.

Same

It was really hard to come to terms with the fact that even *if* I’m in the smartest one percent of the world I’m one-in-eighty-million. But I did!

They were always obnoxious, but a lot easier to handle before they had ways to make each other a trillion dollars through the group chat.

They could never come to terms with if you're one in a million, there's a thousand of you.

bsky.app/profile/dore...

There's a Bluey episode covering exactly this

I'm so glad I hated the “gifted” program and convinced my parents to let me drop out. Feels like a bullet dodged.

Most people like this discover they are not so special in college. The tragedy is that he dropped out of high school and did not have that formative experience. Also meeting people who have grown out of their Sophomore philosophers phase and won’t tolerate it.

My first interaction with him was him lecturing me on how stupid our IT setup was, because he could just bypass the network like so. Friends, I was there investigating why the gate house network kept getting fucked up.

The great brat theory of history.

I think it's harder for those kids to set expectations and agree it's a unique problem but I think it also correlates with highly competitive personalities that can seek to dominate others but I think those are separate issues. They can just often come packaged together.