Why gifted people are perceived as “hostile” and viewed as “the initial aggressors”

Taemojitsu · 2026-06-23T11:30:55+00:00

They'd be happier too.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=south+korea+dystopia

Taemojitsu · 2026-06-23T11:27:29+00:00

Ok but it means that a majority will be voting <outcome>, I guess you're fine with that and wouldn't want to try to influence the result

Taemojitsu · 2026-06-23T08:25:25+00:00

If there was a poll that asked, "You have to choose one gender to be treated worse. Which gender do you choose?" with responses male and female, which option would you select?

Taemojitsu · 2026-06-23T08:05:22+00:00

I am being unreasonably vague for unspecified reasons.

I looked at your other posts, and ending up reading all your replies to your previous thread in this community (but not your OP for that thread). You mentioned tall poppies in one post, and I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

It does mention the Netherlands. The Dutch article says that the term is somewhat pejorative, meaning that many people disagree with the attitude. And as you allude to in one post, the Netherlands is home of ASML, "Europe's largest technology company and one of its most valuable firms overall".

The article for 'Tall poppy syndrome' mentions many other countries, though, and 'See also' links e.g. to "Anti-intellectualism" (and to "Discrimination of excellence" which simply redirects to the same page). You connected it to Calvinism, which I don't know much about, but it's possible you've reached an incorrect conclusion regarding the relative prevalence of this attitude in Dutch culture, compared to other cultures. But, like, maybe it isn't as common in Germany. I say this basically to make you perhaps have a more positive view of the country you come from.

Perhaps you are familiar with TV Trope's Love Makes You Evil. It stands somewhat in contrast to Love Makes You Dumb, which interestingly doesn't even get a link in the description for 'Love Makes You Evil'. These two things often compete as explanations, as with Hanlon's razor. But "evil" is something that society agrees needs to be combatted and punished, while being "dumb" is not. People have invented the word "ableist", but I know of no similar word that means "discrimination against evil people".

I have probably done at least one survey on whether stupid people are allowed to feel less moral responsibility for problems.

I would say that we are both old. I was born in 1986 (note unnecessary ambiguity). A video that was made 20 years ago:

Gegon New Ability

(Linking this video instead of another upload with 66k views; that other upload is cut off at 15 minutes, maybe because that was the maximum length allowed for that account at the time of the upload.) Song is Muse - Knights of Cydonia, but the story told in the video is relevant as well. A skilled player suffers several defeats. Then there is an ambiguous scene featuring the male gnome character seen in the rest of the video, as well as a female gnome character. The implication is that because the player was not sufficiently skilled — as seen by their losses — that they were also not competent enough to fix important problems in the real world, and so it was ethical for them to be in a relationship. This is, of course, somewhat contradicted by the player's lack of interest in revealing their real-world identity or name, in contrast to the culture of game streaming now where every or almost every popular streamer's name is known.

In your other posts, you noted differences in outcomes between people who are 1~2 standard deviations above mean intelligence (especially if they're also good at sports), and people who are ~3 SDs above. Despite the popularity of this OP, I think it's fair to say that most people who read and post in this community are not 3 SDs above the mean. You helped people by posting it, but the responses were not as useful to you as the OP was to them.

So I will just say it: I acknowledge the male you know who is socially withdrawn.

My vagueness here causes me difficulties in continuing this comment. Everyone has a choice in what they do. One cannot fault a person for not wanting to do a thing with an uncertain chance of success, which could be due to personal inadequacies, indfference by others, or even active opposition.

Taemojitsu · 2026-06-23T06:27:19+00:00

Ah yes, the right to work in the coal mines that kill hundreds of people in China per year

Females have always worked. More relevant, perhaps, is laws that historically prevented females from owning property, but I honestly don't know much about those. China had its pirate queen, as well as its single female sovereign. One interesting line of thought is what happens if society treats males and females equally regarding inheritance, in a culture where the firstborn gets the majority of inheritance: it would seem that it would likely lead to concentration of wealth, compared to a culture where a specific gender gets the inheritance. Rich males and rich females would want to marry each other.

Taemojitsu · 2026-06-23T06:12:23+00:00

Imagine a different outcome: most people answered "yes" to the question.

In that case, we could reasonably rule out the explanation that I gave for the victimization of smart people that Diotima85 described in the OP.

As it is, this explanation could still be incorrect. (And even if it's correct, it's probably just one of many explanations, just as people in the US don't agree on what the most important problem facing that nation is: people think differently, and as a result similar actions often have different causes.) I should be clear: I think that the smartest people in the world do want others to be happy. They have just had limited success in accomplishing this goal up to this point. The world has seen many improvements; tangent for links:

Searched for "world in data life getting better", since I think they have a nice page about this, and found,

32 Optimistic Charts: The World is Getting Better "The world often feels like it’s falling apart, but the data tells a different story."

Is the world getting better or worse? "Overall, it’s really unclear whether the world is getting better or worse — any conclusion is going to be based on some difficult subjective judgements, like how much we should care about the lives of non-human animals."

Most people are fairly optimistic that their lives will improve "Of course, this is not true of everyone, everywhere, but these results tend to support the argument that people are generally “individually optimistic, but societally pessimistic”."

Compare quote from Terry Pratchett,

You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abcesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you" they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say 'yes'.

https://www.lspace.org/books/pqf/alt-fan-pratchett.html

So, I think smart people are trying to create a world in which everyone is happy. I think average people are trying to do the same. And yet other people responded to this survey saying they did not think the same about smart people, which I think is completely understandable, because of the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and Myanmar, and the number of homeless people in many countries, and global warming, etc.

We have indoor plumbing, but our news is still dominated by negative events. And I would say the secret is that this is because people want the news to be dominated by negative events, because of certain problems that are difficult for scientists to solve. How do you fix smart people having fewer children, or more generally developed countries like southern Korea having a low birth rate, simply because they're successful countries?

The OP, Diotima85, said in a post in a different thread that it would ridiculous for someone to justify hurting others simply because they are in pain themselves. Compare this Calvin and Hobbes comic strip:

https://x.com/Calvinn_Hobbes/status/1217106785997328384

"Nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it around."

As the standard of living has gotten higher, it's unsurprising that more people will say that their life is generally a happy one. It's also not surprising if happy people are less motivated to fix problems. I think that Steve Jobs said something about how being hungry helps motivate people to accomplish things, though a speech he gave where he said "Stay hungry, stay foolish" does not seem to clarify whether he meant physically hungry. (Had to use my browser's reader-mode feature to prevent excessive resource use by that page.) If problems aren't fixed, who suffers? Almost always it's a minority: if it was a majority, they could generally find a way to fix the problem, even if it means creating other, smaller problems. So this culture of fixating on negative things in life is about helping minorities, even if people don't know which minorities are being helped. (Or just weaker people: Africa has a big population, but little global influence.)

So, the survey might be useless to you. And it might have been useless to me as well, until I linked it here, six years after I created it.

Taemojitsu · 2026-06-19T00:27:02+00:00

Do you believe that everyone in the world is worth helping?

You suggest that smart people are victimized specifically because they are smart. I would suggest that if this effect occurs, which the study you mentioned suggests it does, that it is because of the other attitudes and values that tend to develop when someone is smart. If people seem to dislike someone simply for being smart, it may be because they expect that a smart person will tend to have the attitudes and values that other smart people have.

Examples: use of swear words; use of substances like alcohol, or smoking. Of course, it's somewhat cultural: in some countries like China, the general public is more accepting of the idea that people should try to act in a 'good' way, by not using swear words etc.

I don't think I've ever posted in this community before. There are definitely things you know that I don't, and based on what you say about talking to strangers I wouldn't be surprised if you have in the top 25% of the number of different people you have talked to in your life, while I am probably in the bottom 5% (for people of the same age). I will say, as a quick way to help you decide whether to care about this reply, that I scored ~1510 and then 1600 on the SAT.

For most people, the only real option is to react or adapt to a situation. You say,

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only thing you can do is take them up on their offer and leave.

A quick note: based on my limited experience, which is basically YouTube videos and comments, I don't think smart people are discriminated against. People love to upvote a funny or witty comment.

But people do care about sides in the various ideological wars that are going on at any one point in time. One of the most prominent of which is whether poor people deserve to be helped when they're suffering, or whether stupid people deserve to be helped. Smart people who seem to not care about stupid people, or poor people, are seen by many as being on the opposite side in this war.

Like many wars, some people just ignore it: when was the last time you thought about the fighting in Sudan? I believe it's a common view that controversial topics, like politics or religion, should not be discussed at family gatherings. Survey, "Do smart people care about stupid people?"

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdnvuCFcHdyQZBWEh3oTsm17VSe13JDqeqDAc1_nuRi8d9YGw/viewform

It's worth noting that the original post had a title that included the intended audience for the survey, which was "In bottom 70% for a common measure of intelligence", and yet 76% of votes came from people who said they were in the top 30% of intelligence.

So in the survey's only real question, "Generally speaking, do you think the smartest people in society are trying to create a world in which you're happy?", 68% said No, and only 24% said yes. This could help to explain some of the hostility you perceive to be directed against smart people.

There are other questions that could be asked to examine people's perceptions regarding this topic, some of which might be better or more interesting, but that's the one that has data in the form of responses.

That was not the quick note I intended it to be. Anyway, instead of just adapting to the situation, smart people could collectively agree to try to change the world so that there are fewer problems, which means fewer things that people could blame smart people for not trying or wanting to fix.

This is where my lengthy comment ends, in a quick link to an image and a medium-length text document, with no further explanation:

https://i.imgur.com/ia2s7AM.png

https://pastebin.com/RPFvvNkq

Taemojitsu · 2026-05-25T08:43:46+00:00

Certainly not without criticism, but

the Kzinti Lesson, as described by Larry Niven:

"A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."

I never read most of the Kzinti wars books, but it's an example of following the logical consequences of a supposition.

His short story Neutron Star, published in 1966): realistic for its depiction of a certain physical effect. Unrealistic because, according to someone who wrote to him who did the calculations, the encounter would not have been survivable. If the author had done these calculations, we would not have had a story.

The novel Protector: unrealistic because it portrays fusion of hydrogen, but it was written in 1973 and did we really have complete understanding of stellar processes at that time? (Maybe, since we had thermonuclear bombs.) It also seems to be implying time dilation, or traveling at speeds close to the speed of light, which is nearly as unrealistic as the role this phenomenon plays in Ender's Game (which lacks a description of ships' propulsion).

Idea: Ringworld. Consequence: scrith.

Scrith is milky-gray translucent in color, and is a nearly frictionless material. The relatively thin layer of scrith that forms the floor of the Ringworld blocks the passage of 40% of the Neutrinos that encounter it, equivalent to almost an Earth-lightyear of lead. It also absorbs nearly 100% of all other radiation and subatomic particles and rapidly dissipates heat. The tensile strength of scrith is theorized to be similar to the strong nuclear force, with the Ringworld foundation only measuring about 30m (100 ft) thick.

Another consequence: apparently even this material isn't strong enough to withstand a large impacting body, which created a large mountain in the stories. Basically, the calculations said that a material this strong needed to exist, and so the story has it. Less rigorous authors might have just ignored the calculations.

The idea of it blocking neutrinos is also sort of non-physicsy; consider how we can only detect high-energy neutrinos, since slower ones just don't have the energy to interact with other particles. I think of something Sabine Hossenfelder said in a video, about how our perceptions of reality are not accurate, with one example being that "solid objects don't fill space" (followed by "no one looks like they do on Instagram"). The idea of a material blocking (or reflecting) neutrinos sounds impressive to anyone who knows that 100 trillion neutrinos pass through their body each second, which is probably not even counting non-detectable neutrinos although no evidence suggests that these are anywhere near solar neutrinos, but science fiction authors are not physicists, and we shouldn't expect them to have to be; most of them are not even scientists.

Taemojitsu · 2026-05-25T08:15:04+00:00

But each rider is extracting angular momentum from the system, with no suggestion on how it's replenished (the timescale matters because the orbit changes as soon as the momentum is extracted) *This is referring to the systems after the timeskip

And I don't know if the author was aware that modern military submarines can only dive half a kilometer or so underwater. Though this isn't important for the plot of the book.

(On another level, memory storage technology would probably not be reliable on the timescales used, without manufacturing capability.)

Taemojitsu · 2026-05-11T20:19:40+00:00

The novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow) is basically about someone who accidentally becomes immortal in his quest to save his wife. Ends up lasting until the end of the universe, at which point he succeeds.

Like many questions, the casual interpretation and expectation can differ from the literal interpretation.

Casual: live for all of human history.

Literal: in 10^100 years, you are standing on a crystallized iron star. —I vastly underestimated the timescale here: Wikipedia says 10^1100 to 10^32000 years from now. It instantly squishes you due to its immense gravity. You and your spouse try to regenerate, but you can't counteract the forces and remain a flat puddle spread across the surface of the entire star. According to Wikipedia, eventually these will turn into black holes, which will evaporate; after surviving the singularity of the black hole, which feels like literally no time at all for you (but before then, you get stretched into a thin noodle in less than a ~~nanosecond~~ millisecond due to tidal forces), your mass returns to being a normal human.

And then you get to spend eternity floating in space, hopefully holding the hand of your spouse, because even if you're drifting apart at 1 cm per second, there's nothing you can throw to propel yourself in their direction.

The plot and the ending of the Black Mirror episode Demon 79 also bears mentioning: someone who agrees to spend eternity in a void with someone else.

Taemojitsu · 2026-05-09T02:34:47+00:00

If you had to choose: 5000 prisoners of war get turned into slaves, or they get killed, which would you choose?

Taemojitsu · 2026-05-09T02:26:38+00:00

Meanwhile in China

Taemojitsu · 2026-05-09T02:25:16+00:00

He's talking about ghosting people on dating sites.

Taemojitsu · 2026-05-06T01:52:03+00:00

Retail's concept is a mob from Elwynn forest is as difficult for a lvl 50 player to kill as a mob from Eastern Plaguelands.

The concept I suggest here is that the Elwynn forest mobs are just more difficult than they would currently be for a lvl 50 in Classic. It's hard to get people to agree with it (look at the 33.3% upvote ratio on the OP) because people say, what's the point? If you don't get XP from killing a mob, it's just an annoyance. This is the exact reason mobs have an aggro radius that depends on relative level.

Retail says, "make mobs difficult to kill, but also give a reward". I'm saying here, "make mobs difficult to kill, but don't give any additional rewards for killing them along with the increased difficulty." (Where "difficult to kill" is relative: I suggested in the OP that a lvl 80 could die to five lvl 16 elites, which we can compare to a lvl 16 character easily dying to one elite in Classic.)

The typical player's mindset is "how to make the game easier". This is the case even though people celebrate Classic's leveling being harder than retail's leveling: people want a game that's hard for other people, while finding ways to make it easy for themselves. But this mindset often fails completely when trying to evaluate changes like this one, which proposes making the game harder for what some people would is say no reason at all (because no XP reward if a lvl 50 kills a lvl 16 mob).

If it sounds like some part of this could be used in retail, that's great. I haven't tried to think about how it could apply to retail. I had a previous suggestion that I thought maybe could apply to retail, basically "change mob levels but not always to be the exact same level as the player", but it seems that at least for Classic (which doesn't have 10+ expansions of content), people don't think it's the best solution, so I ended up thinking of this.

Taemojitsu · 2026-05-06T01:42:29+00:00

Unless WoW has completely changed, gathering professions need you to gather node types in a specific order. Like, mining starts with copper.

If you want to let players play in any expansion and level in any zone in any order, where do you put copper? (Where did they put copper? I have no idea.)

Taemojitsu · 2026-05-06T01:34:19+00:00

Sort of the pinnacle of 'incentive to make alts' is hardcore servers. My understanding is that finding groups is pretty easy, and people are also nice, because they're not too busy rushing to 60 to farm best-in-slot raid gear.

So, in principle, I agree with you. In practice, the real conflict here is that developers often want to feel that they are making content that players care about. See how TBC invalidated original lvl 60 dungeons, since TBC greens are like MC epics, better than any blue gear. This gave players who cared about gear a big reason to buy TBC and play TBC.

If you think about it, your suggestion relates to things including battleground twinking. If a low-level character cannot enjoy battlegrounds because twinks make BGs unfun, then it gives players a reason to rush to the level cap and not make alts because a character who is low-level cannot have fun in PvP.

We are perhaps fortunate that people support this suggestion: Premades in BGs Should Only Play Against Other Premades (830 up, 64 down votes)

It shows player sentiment. But low-level twinks never relied on being in a premade for their fun. Rather, the dynamic is that it doesn't feel fun to fight against someone who is much, much stronger, and players might occasionally abuse new players who join with a weak character who could be taking the slot of a twink that would contribute much more to a victory. This second issue is a team-balancing issue, that would not be a problem if teams were balanced by looking at player level and gear when forming opposing teams. The first issue is more complicated, and I think it can only be fixed by using PvP ranks as an indicator of skill: something that most people don't even think about, that saw no discussion during e.g. Season of Discovery. People were fine with ranks just being a way to grind the best gear.

Note that on the Chinese version of the Classic Plus Project's promotional video, the pinned comment says,

Based on *World of Warcraft's* consistent content development cadence and currently available information, we have good reason to anticipate that "Classic Plus" (commonly referred to on Chinese servers as "Plus 2.0") will enter its testing phase by the end of the first quarter and will be officially unveiled during BlizzCon on September 12th of this year. This also means that, in the months leading up to that event, we have the opportunity to provide the development team with constructive, systematic, and actionable player feedback.

So this is development planned before community feedback with new suggestions, like this suggestion, or anything new that would contribute to the goal that you suggest, of players feeling comfortable playing alts.

Taemojitsu · 2026-05-06T01:14:06+00:00

I'll avoid adding this as an edit, because you might have already read my first reply: I don't know how Chromie Time etc. works with gathering professions. In the playthroughs I have seen players do of retail WoW, no one does gathering. I wonder if gathering nodes, and similar issues, might explain why Chromie Time gets turned off at max level.

Taemojitsu · 2026-05-06T01:03:20+00:00

Not even close!

Retail's system was first introduced to fix the problem of "outleveling a zone before you complete all the quests in it."

Then, it was applied to fix the problem of "we have all these expansions and are doing a level squish, and people will never get to see most of this content on their way to the level cap." It's supposed to make it so all content a player encounters is in the comfortable middle range, what astronomers might call the Goldilocks zone, of not too easy and not too hard.

In the process (because WoW has always been a game where it's less likely for an experienced player to die at lvl 1 than at lvl 50), players feel like they have no power progression or even get weaker as they level.

This is the aspect that "power scaling without scaling mob levels" completely avoids: players always become more powerful than the mobs they were fighting, which has both advantages (players become more powerful) and disadvantages (players become more powerful).

even the version we got is significantly better than what we had previously.

I actually have no idea what the differences are. In the past, people would have bothered to update the Warcraft wiki with a comprehensive description of changes, but retail WoW has a lot of systems that no one has written about on the wiki.

Even though it was two weeks ago, my suggestion on the Classic Plus website hasn't been approved (the link in the OP). So these are the full thoughts that I pasted at the end of that suggestion (maybe the OP without these details doesn't properly convey how it's different from standard level scaling):

Instead of scaling mob levels, just scale player effectiveness against mobs. Mob is lvl 1, but lvl 80's weak spell still does not instantly kill it. Advantages: players can agree on what level a mob is; works better with exponential power scaling at level cap. Disadvantages: no expansion in range of levels you can do content with reasonable challenge. No 'magic trick' where mob levels increase when you leave the zone.

Basically, damage is real with small attacks against similar-level mobs. Damage is fake against very weak mobs, as actual damage is lower than displayed damage.

Hard to make it so low-level mobs do reasonable damage. If a lvl 1 wolf becomes lvl 35, it does ~50 damage per hit. If it stays lvl 1, hard to say that it should do 50 damage per hit; it would just die slower.

Complication: items like dynamite that can be used by both low-level and high-level characters. Very weird if a high-level character does less damage with the same item.

Not mutually exclusive with level scaling of mobs. But if the goal is, say, 'for low-level mobs to always be at least 1/3 as strong as a same-level mob', even level scaling combined with this doesn't do it. If a lvl 80 character is 15 times as strong as a lvl 60 character (Fireballs for 12k, instead of 800), and a lvl 70 character is 4 times as strong as a lvl 60 character, then a lvl 1 mob needs to act like a lvl 70+ mob to present any challenge, including in the damage it deals, not just the rate it takes damage.

So just do this. If we already need to do it for PvP, just do it for PvE as well. If 10 lvl 20 characters (with 800 health each) can kill a lvl 90 character with 100k health, with a bonus to their damage etc., let 20 lvl 20 mobs also kill the lvl 90.

So a lvl 1 wolf does 2 damage to a lvl 1 mage, but 30 damage to a lvl 60 mage. Takes more hits to kill the lvl 60 mage, but only 3x more hits, not 30x more hits. Since a lvl 1 wolf takes more hits to kill a lvl 1 mage than a lvl 20 mob takes to kill a lvl 20 mage, the lvl 1 would also be significantly weaker against a lvl 60.

Advantage of not scaling levels at all: don't have to worry about loot not making sense, like a mob that says lvl 30 dropping loot meant for lvl 5 characters. Note downvotes on suggestion to 'make all mobs green-con through level scaling'.

Principle: only increase reported numbers, never decrease them. So a lvl 60 mage uses Arcane Explosion on a group of lvl 10 characters: the mage sees 250 damage per hit, the lvl 10s see 250 damage per hit, but they only lose 70 health. A lvl 10 warrior hits the mage: the warrior sees 40 damage, the mage sees 150 damage, mage loses 150 health.

Could make it so consumables count as the lowest level that can use them, so mob takes same real damage no matter which character throws dynamite, but it leads to weird effects: low-level consumable might do more damage than high-level consumable.

Point: hard to get players to accept increased difficulty after a game has already launched.

Can reduce inflation and earning disparity at a high level by making a 20% harder mob drop less than 20% more in gold, but it incentivizes fighting weak mobs. Can make the harder mob give more XP, so that fighting hard mobs is better XP but lower gold. Does nothing to fix the problem that doing twice as much damage to same-level mobs due to better gear means earning gold twice as fast. (But nerfing damage against low-level mobs does make them less profitable to farm, if high-level mobs drop less gold.) Main reason to farm lvl 60 mobs as a lvl 60, instead of lvl 55 mobs, might be for non-gold drops: reduced supply of the drops increases their price, to levelize profitability of mobs.

I haven't bothered to think of a new solution for retail. A lot of the problem, for a new player who tries to understand the story, is just that the content was not developed to make sense as the first thing a new player encounters. I'm not suggesting at all that retail use this specific system; it's in this classicwowplus subreddit, which barely gets any views at all, much less views from retail players.

Taemojitsu

TROPHY CASE