Performative Humility for the High-IQ

Some forms of top 1% outliers must pretend they are not to avoid social scorn.

Those who exude confident excellence without apology are often mistaken as displaying unearned arrogance by midwits (who can't tell the difference.)

The smarter you are, the more you are expected pretend you are NOT running rings around the 99% of the population with lower IQs, that you haven't already anticipated and mapped out 90%+ of their midwit-tier dialogue tree, even before those unremarkable thoughts occur to them.

There is a degree of performative self-abasement which is socially-expected of those with top 1% IQs, and those who don't play along (primarily the Autistic, or those who are socially-savvy but command low Agreeableness trait and DGAF) are punished by social-shaming and accusations of "arrogance."

Oddly, this self-abasement is only expected in the intellectual realm.

We don't scold elite-tier athletes who command top 0.1% genetics/physical prowess, when they don't pretend they are just a slightly-stronger/faster human than the rest of us. Indeed, we celebrate and cheer their freakishly abnormal levels of agility, speed and strength.

But even acknowledging the existence of intellectual differences and how they affect the way humans with higher genetic potential and aptitude can calculate and comprehend complex topics is fraught with social pressure.

The intellectual equivalent of an elite-tier athlete (top 0.1% genetics who dedicated years of hard work to optimize that elite brain's processing power) must performatively display an everyman aw-shucks demeanor, humoring intellectual inferiors (which is pretty much everyone, statistically) to avoid social punishment.

Those with high IQs and hamstrung by high Agreeableness are terrified of social scorn and knuckle under pressure; they internalize the social conditioning which diminishes their potential because they eventually convince themselves they are the slightly-above-average person they're asked to pretend to be.

Only the Autistic and low-Agreeableness types can resist that sort of social pressure and allow their top 0.1% IQs to flourish to its maximum potential.