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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3638 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I put myself around true 140 IQ.

You are probably in good company with the rest of the "midwit quants". They think they of themselves much like you do.

Yes but considering you aren't, in a demonstratable level, some sort of polygot or martian like Von Neumann, I have to doubt you are an actual 140 IQ. No, people who brag about their IQ online tend to just be arrogant autists in that 120 range who think they are geniuses, call it a heuristic. Saying it out loud just gives further evidence that you lack the social intelligence to understand that.

I'm going to reply to both of our chains here because I think they overlap.

Someone who hasn't mastered the basics misinterprets that as "wrong" or "dumb."

Your whole linguistic verbiage reads as this weird striver/hustle slang. The fundamentals of what? If you were a CEO or COO doing hiring successfully I'd be more inclined to believe demonstrated mastery of the "position of intuitive mastery of the fundamentals" but if you were an executive you wouldn't be trying to get rich, you'd already be rich. So I think the implication that you've mastered hiring for talent is unfounded. Otherwise that could be your startup idea. I'm sure a lot of people would pay top dollar to a firm that could hire them the right person for the job.

upwards due to the intelligent logic like the critique of the pedigree lingo, the assessment of hiring practices from a psychometric point of view, as well as the concept of Fallacy of Sufficient Competition.

Your critiques don't read as a genius, they read as someone bitter about being gatekept out of a field. If I google "Fallacy of Sufficient Competition" I get 6 medium/substack articles, not the epitome of an original idea.

Aka, the poster is wrecking 115-125 IQ normies which is a robust sign of higher intelligence.

One, I seriously doubt anyone here is considered a normie. Two, I just realized you sound like this guy from slow horses. I couldn't find the clip where he talks about how much a genius he is but this is the general level of obnoxiousness, midwit behavior that you are engaging in: Roddy Ho. People who are smart don't feel the need to flex their IQ continuously. You would just give actually interesting arguments instead of name dropping references and getting triggered.

You have to be smart enough to do this yourself to appreciate it, though

Wow I really got hit with the rick and morty special unironically, maybe you are a troll lol.

This is simply not true.

Ok they were medium articles when I looked yesterday. But my search doesn't have them show up, here are the links. Full disclosure: I just scanned them.

Medium, Research Paper from 2016, Some open source textbook, The Cellophane paradox from the DuPont court case

You would just give actually interesting arguments instead of name dropping references and getting triggered.

I'm not making claims I am a genius wiz kid with a mega IQ. As Dase puts it: I'm a 120IQ midwit ML engineer. Furthermore my interest in this conversion is quite low to put any serious effort in a field that is outside my expertise.

but it's high enough for a quant finance job

It probably is, but it sounds like quant finance jobs are looking for more than intelligence.

I guess I can't be frank about that here without people getting triggered.

The only thing that triggered anyone here is the sheer autistic arrogance: "The I'm smarter than everyone but can't seem to tie my own shoe laces" mentality. Followed by repeated attempts at trying to flex that and just failing.

Look, my intelligence is not that high, but it's high enough for a quant finance job.

So, are you employed in one? Self-employed in something adjacent to finance, at the very least?

Reminds me of the other poster in possession of towering intelligence and a suspicious lack of tangible achievements who thought declaring his intellectual superiority enhanced his argument. Doubt it's actually him, though, it's been a few years and I don't think he would return to do the same thing again.

I think this personality archetype/line of debate is just fairly common amongst 'smart' mildly autistic guys who are about to graduate university and struggling to find 'worthy' graduate employment.

Absolutely, for some reason there's this insane arrogance that smart-ish autistics get. Not sure why it's such a thing.

I don't even think his line of argumentation is necessarily completely wrong. He's probably top 5% in raw intelligence, current elite selection methods have issues with being relentlessly KPI hacked and considering 'annoying white autist' is probably the archetype that has contributed the most to human advancement and creating modernity there's currently discrimination throughout the pipeline.

However one must also acknowledge he's kinda annoying and complaining isn't achieving anything.

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God I've been around here for a bit, I'm not sure I remember who this is. There's been a couple people that will flex credentials in other fields to give themselves a flex, but IQ flexers are not something I've remembering.

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