How have you handled another person hinting that they “believe” they are smarter than you.

37 comments

1. Let them believe what they wanna believe i show how smart i am through results.

2. I don’t care at all and probably wouldn’t even notice something like that

3. with laughter. Everything is relative. Smarter about what? Books? Motorcycles? Guitars? Yiddish poetry?

   Comments and attitudes like that are so ridiculous I don’t even tell people I have an engineering degree, an MBA and law degree, all from top 10 schools. If they find out later it will be a major paradigm shift for them. If they never find out I don’t care enough about their opinion to care.

4. I ignored them, until one guy I worked for, who after openly telling me, “You just need to accept that I’m smarter than you“, he decided that he had the right, to literally control every aspect of my life, personal and professional.

   Then I put my foot down. He did not respond well

5. Why care what they think?

6. I tell them that they are absolutely correct.

7. I had a friend who would occasionally suggest that he’s a genius, that he has an IQ of 160 or something like that. He wasn’t necessarily saying that he is smarter than me but that was definitely the implication. I’ve met people who are actual geniuses or as close as most people are going to meet in person, and my “friend” was not that by any stretch of the imagination.

   I wasn’t offended by the comparison. I just knew it was bullshit. And I grew to really dislike this guy until I eventually cut him off. Last I heard he’s living out of his car on disability.

8. I worked on a team with this guy who was really high and mighty, private schools and degrees and accolades and most of us didn’t have any of that. Any time we worked together he would always lay out the way he wanted things done, insistently. Sometimes I’d speak up and say it wouldn’t work, but he’d insist, and after the 2nd or 3rd time I was like whatever, let him figure it out, not my problem. After he fucked up bad a few times management asked what was going on and we all said we’d been following his ideas and he got shuffled around to some other place. If it’s at work, I’ve found just outlasting someone is usually a lot easier than fighting them.

9. They can believe whatever they want to lol I’m not pressed about it. If they start being condescending and insulting then that is a different story.

10. Take the opportunity to ask them shit I am having trouble with.

11. I dont have im the smartest person in the room complex so I just absorb any relevant knowledge

12. Still married!

13. Let them believe what they want. Who is smarter doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

14. What’s to handle? Makes no difference to me what they believe.

15. You just have to outlast boastful people. Keep it quiet, let them talk and eventually an opportunity will present itself for you to make their claims false. It always does.

16. I made up a little jingle to the exact words she used, and every time she did something boneheaded, I’d sing or hum it.

17. Just shake my head and move on. Had one bragging that he “knows how to counteract a magnetic field”. I replied that I do to. Not hard. Just a field of the same strength but opposite direction. He demanded to know just how would I knew that? I’m electrical engineer. I literally took nightmare courses of EMF Theory I & II.

    Others want to prove that they know something that you don’t, which is true of everyone. But I was looking for a car part online when my uncle, dropped out of high school so he wasn’t the brightest person but one hell of a guy whom I miss, basically made me from from his computer and pulled up a website. The brags that he “taught me something about computers”. SMFH.

18. Who knows? Maybe they are right… probably not as I have very high IQ, but lots of smarter people than me out there.
    Why argue about who is smarter, its pointless.

19. The confidence to say it out loud shows their ignorance in the first place.

    I’ve been accused of this in the past, but more so for how I speak when correcting someone, going further into something they are speaking on, etc. I have my flaws, but I don’t do this intentionally. To me, when you have to say it out loud, you’re doing it for yourself, and that alone shows you doubt yourself in the first place. Dishonesty.

20. I asked myself why it bothered me. What was I getting out of their opinion on me?

21. Just give them enough rope, they’ll hang themselves into it eventually.

22. What is there to handle? Maybe they’re right, and they are smarter than me. Who cares? There’s more to life than being smart.

23. “Good luck with that.”

24. Let them. Who gives a shit?

25. Let them believe it, then have a conversation about things I’m well versed in. They soon learn

26. Never argue with an idiot

27. Ask them if they know about the Dunning-Kruger effect.

28. It doesn’t really bother me. There is a chance that they could actually be smarter than me.

29. A dick measuring contest by any other name is still a dick measuring contest. Don’t engage, and stay in your lane. Those people will always demonstrate that they’re fools without your help.

30. If someone acts like they have special knowledge or is smarter than me for no good reason, what always works is saying some stupid bullshit followed by “but you wouldn’t understand that.” Knocks them off their high horse easily. A lot of people who think they’re smarter than others can’t handle any level of pushback, so the bare minimum is enough.

    Anecdote: My friend and I were at a dinner with our meetup group talking about Paw Patrol, because we both have little kid relatives that are obsessed with it. Guy comes up and gives the esoteric “academic” take of “have you heard that Paw Patrol is fascist?” My friend doesn’t miss a step and says that it’s not fascist because the authority figure in Paw Patrol (the mayor) is always cheating in the games they play, so it can’t really be fascist. The guy who brought the point up just slinked away, he couldn’t handle an opposing take on fucking paw patrol.

31. A lion does not concern themself with the opinion of the sheep.

32. By not really giving a shit if they are or aren’t.

33. I let them continue with their beliefs.

    I’m not the smartest person around…. so, no illusions on my part.

34. ignored them because i’m smart enough to not be concerned with their dumb ass

35. My current job includes administering Wechsler IQ tests to individuals along with other psychological test batteries, so intelligence comes up a lot at work. The thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of people I test who like to hint at how smart they are actually do tend to be pretty smart… in some areas. These individuals also tend to score lower when it comes to social/personality tests.

    Considering all that, when someone at work likes to show off how much smarter they are, I just roll with it. I don’t know my own IQ (can’t test yourself on a test you already know so well), so I just accept that some of them are probably smarter than me in some ways. Then I write down notes for my boss about the patients lack of social perception and ability to navigate social scenarios.

    Edit for clarification: People who score lower on social/personality tests are people who have high IQs AND like to show off their intelligence, not just those with high IQs. Also when I say “lower” on social/personality tests I mostly mean they have more clinically significant scores. You don’t really score “lower” on social and personality tests, you just generate results that suggest measures that are abnormal.

36. i don’t care.
    people often have an inflated opinion of themselves

37. Let them run their mouths, and feign interest. Most people are not worth the extra mental energy they try to extract from you.