What are your intellectual strengths and weaknesses?
Favorite/Least favorite subject(s), IQ, etc.
My favorite subject is probably science, least favorite English.
My IQ is ridiculous, something like 185
I'm awful at making friends, though. Pretty much all my social skills were sacrificed somehow for my intellect.
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{
std::cout<<Who are you, Shining One?<<
return 0;
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Do not know my IQ ir EQ nor do I care that much.
I like all science. I like socializing, but terrible at it.
I hate talking to 1/4 people I meet. I like simple talk over complicated talk, but hate chit chat
Anything hypothetical, theoretical is interesting.
I hate confrontations, even intellectual which is a weakness, still get in to arguments all the time, but it is exhausting.
No grammar or writting skills.
I do not consider my self intellectual, since I do not devot all my time to practical intellectual pursuits.
I also never listen to anyone...
Hmm. First, both my greatest strength and weakness is that my performance is directly proportional to my confidence. As I get better at a subject, I get much better, much faster. However, this also means curveballs like an insanely difficult exam that I don't do well on can tank my grades for the rest of the semester.
I'm an extremely good writer when I have a concept to work from, but I have difficulty coming up with original concepts. I do great, as a result, at academic or argumentative papers, but poor at creative writing. On the writing front, I am also very, very, very good at winging it. I can knock out an A grade paper in 20 minutes. I wrote one once on the preferential treatment of religion in this country that my English teacher called one of the best she had ever read. It took me an hour to research and write, and finished five minutes before it was due. On the flip side of this, if it's a subject that doesn't interest me, I can stare at the screen for hours typing nothing.
I do have a very high IQ. I was tested at age ten and scored 163. Haven't been tested since, but I do know a lot more in relation to my peers than I did when I was ten.
I am extremely good at self-education. Give me a few books in a subject I want to learn about, and I can master it in a few weeks. I've since forgotten, but I achieved competence in conversational Irish in two weeks when I was 18. Of course, this also means that non-interactive classes teach me virtually nothing. So many college classes just feature the teacher droning on and on, and I end up barely conscious. Some things, like Biology, it's fine. I can absorb subjects I'm interested or confident in via virtual osmosis. However, if it's one that I'm not interested in, and it doesn't feature interaction such as discussion, then I'm totally out of it. Also, my interests change at breakneck pace.
I test poorly. My understanding of a subject is generally worth about ten - fifteen points above my test scores. I don't work well in the confines of an exam, both for the anxiety and for the artificial constraints tests put on you. (No calculators, show your work, etc.) And as far as the anxiety goes... I manage mine, along with my ADHD, with nicotine. Not healthy, but that's not the point. When I'm locked in a room for an hour or two testing, with no chance to go outside or even to the restroom to smoke (E-cigs, baby), then my anxiety begins to ruin my exam performance.
My absolute biggest weaknesses are that when I read, I tend to scan, which means I can absorb the gist of what is said pretty easily, but I miss out on details. Same thing when I do math, I'm prone to lose a sign here or there. Second, if I don't immediately apply something I've learned, I lose it with great rapidity.
Finally, when I do do well on something early in the semester, I tend to get arrogant, which negatively affects my next exam, which tanks my confidence, which ruins my grade.
As far as subjects, traditionally, my strongest subjects are politics, philosophy, language, history, English, and biology. My poorest is art (shaky hands. Always ruined my artwork), followed by any math and mathematical sciences (I can understand concepts easily, but remembering the formulas is a &!%@#.)
Socially, I tend to get by better than a lot of Aspies. I can hold small talk without much effort, but I have difficulty keeping a conversation going. I do best in a heated conversation about a specific subject, and as a result, I have a bad habit of looking for arguments. I've never understood why, but in any scenario where I deal with people on a regular basis (living situations, work, etc.) people all seem to consider me a friend, albeit a background kind of one. My theory here is that I tend to never judge, and I always look for the value in what people are saying. I don't have much empathy, so I've learned to compensate by physically mimicking people, and if I criticize, I do it very low key, trying to lead them to see the flaws in their ideas rather than pointing it out. So people like me because they seem to project themselves onto me. I've had junkies and preachers both think I was on their good buddy, when I was just chatting with them over a cigarette. So I pick up friends wherever I go, but I have no idea why any particular individual likes me. So I would say that I, for whatever reason, understand social interaction more than your average aspie. The problem for me, however, is that to me, it means far, far less to me than for other people. For me, it's a light game to kill time, and for others, they build their lives around social interaction. This leads to extremely uncomfortable scenarios. I've had a woman fall head over heels in love with me and I never picked up on it. I thought we were just coffee buddies.
Strengths: Math, science, and memorization--my brain is like flypaper.
Weaknesses: Writing essays and analyzing literature, especially the emotional bits (though I haven't been diagnosed I'm reasonably sure I'm alexithymic) and poetry.
IQ: I've been tested, but sadly I don't have access to my scores. Probably not very high.
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Feel free to PM me. I don't bite!
Strengths:
My IQ is high, but I don't remember the exact number. I'm pretty sure it's high enough that I could get into MENSA, if I thought MENSA were anything other than a bunch of people having an arrogance/pity party and thus worth getting into.
Good memory. If it's relatively uncomplicated, I can frequently recall it without bothering to memorize it. By no means anything like a photographic memory, though. If it's complicated, I frequently tune it out, so I don't do quite so well with really complicated things -- unless I can find a way of simplifying them down to something simple. I probably have as good a rote memory as anyone else, but I find it nearly impossible to concentrate on attempting to memorize boring information, so I probably fare worse than average on rote memory in general. I don't think being bad at rote memorization is really bad, though, as Einstein said, "Never memorize what you can look up in a book."
My intuition is pretty good, especially in relation to logic, math, and computer programming.
I'm able to consider both sides of an argument; this is more of a skill than an aptitude, but is invaluable when trying to argue with someone. Even if you are set in your opinion and not considering even thinking about changing your mind, it helps you figure out their likely counterarguments so that you can work on countering those before they bring them up.
I tend to be good at focusing on details, sometimes to the point where I can't see the forest because of all the damn trees in the way.
Theoretical concepts are generally no problem for me, nor abstract symbolic representations of things, as long as the symbols have precise definitions. Imprecise notation can sometimes throw me off in situations where it probably doesn't affect other people much.
I test very well, and comparing my experience to fueledbycoffee's, it's clear that catching all the details in the question is definitely part of that. Frequently you can get strong hints about what the expected answer to the question is by reading it carefully and noticing details. That's especially true for true/false and multiple choice questions.
Weaknesses:
Inability to focus on something that bores me.
Inability to organize my way out of a wet paper bag. This does not include the inability to plan, I can plan quite well in great detail, it's just that when the time comes for the plan to have been completed I realize that I haven't started. Since the old plan didn't work, I make a new plan, and the new plan is brilliant and wonderful and concise and every other good adjective you can think of, and I really plan on following the new plan, and then I don't follow the plan. I saw a good quote in a blog recently that went something like "I really need to stop procrastinating. I'm going to stop procrastinating, starting tomorrow." I've got that guy beat. I've been planning to stop procrastinating starting tomorrow for years. This is, by far, my worst flaw.
I'm kind of bad at social skills, but not too bad -- or at least that's what I think. I'm not sure my social skills are good enough to accurately assess how good my social skills are, so it's entirely possible that I'm much worse than I think. I also don't socialize much, so my limited ability to recognize my inability might not have enough of a chance to work.
My processing speed is slow. It's like a turtle when everyone else is a rabbit. It's a really, really smart turtle, but nothing can make it fast. I always hated the fast mental arithmetic games we used to play in elementary school. They'd say "Quick! 1+1!", and I'd think, "Oh, good, an easy one. That's just 2. I'll open my mouth now and say 'two'." and by the time my mouth was starting to open, 7 different people had already shouted out the correct answer. If they threw me in with a room full of fourth graders and asked quick answer questions like that, I'd come out looking like a complete moron.
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"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it." --G. K. Chesterton
Strength: Most science concepts, nearly eidetic memory (for facts/information pertaining to interests/work), visual spatial work and concepts, pretty sure my overall IQ is high, good understanding of language and spelling (grammar/sentence structure is a bit weak and pedantic though), natural sciences such as Agriculture, Biology, and Geology.
Weakness: Math aside from <4 digit basic computations and Geometry, music, dealing with subjects I have no interest in, writing in general (hand writing hasn't changed since kindergarten, trouble with writing storylines).
Overall its a broken skillset as a lot of science requires math. I'm interested in programming, but the math holds me back. In engineering math holds me back. Even in origami the math holds me back from my potential... I have little interest in math, but at the same time wish I could understand it, it is very frustrating.
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BAP: 103 aloof / 100 rigid / 103 pragmatic
AQ: 40 EQ: 8 SQ: 114
Aspie: AS-156/200 NT-56/200
RAADS-R: 189 total
Diagnosed 9/2013
Very good at history, struggle with serious mathematics. That said, my PhD minor is going to be in econometrics. I have also taken graduate math and game theory, both fairly difficult. Those subjects do not come easily to me, but with lots of work, I get through with decent grades.
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PsychoSarah
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