I finally know why I feel like a fraud when people say I’m smart

By David McElroy · February 6, 2019

Imagine you’re a contestant on a quiz show. Your opponents are brainy folks with wide knowledge. The questions aren’t just trivia. You have to think quickly on your feet to solve problems.

Now let’s imagine you have a secret weapon. You have a tiny receiver inside your ear — and somebody elsewhere who has access to most of the knowledge of the world is whispering the answers in your head. Your opponents are bright, but this other person feeds you those answers quickly enough that you have the most points.

The show is over. You’re declared the winner. Everybody remarks about how brilliant you are. But you feel like a fraud, because you know that someone else was feeding you those answers. It looked remarkable, but you know that you didn’t have any idea how to work out the answers which you so confidently gave.

And you’re scared people are going to find out you’re a fraud.

That’s how I’ve felt for my entire life. I’ve been blurting out answers that appear in my head — or writing them down in some way — ever since I was a child. And I felt like a fraud.

People told me I was smart, but I didn’t feel smart. Tests claim my IQ is somewhere between 155 and 165, depending on the test, but that just destroyed my faith in such tests. (When I was in high school, a church friend who was working on her Ph.D. gave IQ tests to several of us as part of a psychometrics class. She had me retake the test, because she thought she must have done something wrong, but the second result was also higher than what she had ever seen before.)

I eventually discovered that other bright people shared my feeling of being a fraud, but I always figured it was different for those folks. With them, I assumed, it was just a psychological problem with confidence. I had confidence. I simply knew that my luck was going to run out some day — because wherever these answers were coming from, they had to stop eventually.

I was recently listening to an interview with psychologist Daniel Kahneman and had an epiphany. (He won a Nobel Prize for his work in behavioral economics, but he’s probably best known for his popular book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.”) Kahneman distinguishes between two different systems of thinking in our brains — System 1 and System 2.

He says System 1 is the quick intuition that works automatically and System 2 is the slower, more deliberate use of systematic reason to work out an answer. All of a sudden, I had a perfect framework for understanding why I felt like a fraud.

I have always thought that intelligence is the ability to consciously reason your way to an answer — to be able to say, “Well, if we simplify this single-variable equation into standard form and then solve using the quadratic formula, we can solve for X, so let’s do that.”

I could reason my way to answers — mathematically or otherwise — as well as other reasonably bright people, but I never had that feeling of brilliance that I saw with a handful of people who could go through mounds of calculations in their heads.

And that made me feel like a fraud.

You see, I’m more likely to have someone bring me a complex real-world problem and I suddenly blurt out, “That won’t work, because there will be too much [something or other] on this side. To make it work, you have to increase your input by 50 percent and [do whatever]. That’s all.”

Here’s the thing. I will generally have no idea where that solution came from, but it will be the right solution at least 90 percent of the time, especially when it’s about something fairly abstract instead of an engineering problem. And that’s why I’ve felt like a fraud.

I’ve felt as though there’s something in my body — completely out of my control — that whispers these ideas and solutions. When I listen and confidently go with what the “voice” says, I’m usually right. When I wait for the slow and rational side of me to catch up, I’ll lose the genius of the moment or (far worse) come up with an inferior answer that turns out to be wrong.

But Kahneman tells me I’m not a fraud. I’m simply using some automatic form of intelligence which goes beyond my conscious thought. And I feel like a fraud because my conscious thought doesn’t seem all that brilliant to me. (In fact, I’ve always felt convinced that I wasn’t as bright as people assumed — that I must just be surrounded by idiots.) By Kahneman’s reckoning, I’m really good at System 1 and only moderately good at System 2.

I had read Kahneman’s insight before, but it didn’t have the same impact for me. I’ve been dealing lately with the realization that I have always trusted this physical feeling in my body — my literal gut — to tell me the truth. The process has been so automatic that I haven’t known what I was doing until lately.

So am I really smart?

Maybe. I guess so. But I’m not sure it matters. (I’ve written before about coming to realize that intelligence is overrated without other values. I even used the same illustration.) All I know now is that it doesn’t matter how I arrive at my answers. It only matters that I can trust my answers.

This quick and automatic intuitive intelligence isn’t perfect. There are times when it tells me something as truth, but it can turn around 180 degrees when one solitary fact changes — and I often have no conscious understanding of what that one fact had to do with changing everything.

I’ve learned from long experience that this little voice in my gut is pretty clever. As long as I’m confident and go with what he tells me, I can sometimes come up with remarkable answers that lead me to success.

But I now understand that it’s not cheating. There’s no smart fellow on the other end of this radio receiver giving me information. I’m not cheating. That’s really me. Even if I don’t quite understand how it works, that little voice is a part of me — and he’s smarter than it sometimes feels as though I am.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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