@layman,
layman wrote:And how did you arrive at this conclusion? Did you sit down with 10 million other randomly selected people and engage in mental competition, or what?
It was estimated from my ability to master very hard subjects with no effort at a young age.
No matter how hard a subject is, I've always been able to master it almost instantly with no effort.
A good example is high school chemistry. There is some sort of nationwide chemistry test for high school students. Our teacher had this thing where if you take the test at the end of the year and your national percentile rank was higher than the percent on your grades, your grades would be adjusted upward to match your percentile rank.
It was supposed to be a pretty rough test. There are a lot of advanced students from private schools that take it. Apparently these schools even offer two years of chemistry and advanced college placement classes. All my school offered was one year of regular chemistry.
My approach to high school chemistry was to read fantasy novels all through class and not do a single page of homework in the entire year. I was honestly getting a perfect score of 0% for a grade. Then at the end of the year I leafed through my textbook for the first time the night before I took the national test.
I always have trouble with timed tests. Whenever there is talking in the distance I just can't concentrate and have to sit and do nothing while the valuable time just ticks away. I also take forever to fill in those little ovals. I wonder how I would do today when I could select a number on a computer without filling in any ovals. Because of these problems I left a lot of questions blank because time ran out before I was finished.
I don't know how all those private school students with two years of advanced placement chemistry did, but my percentile rank was 99.8%. Only 0.2% out of the entire nation got a higher score than me.
I of course would have been able to do much better if I'd had complete silence during the test and didn't have to waste time filling in ovals, but it is still a good example of my ability to master a hard subject with no effort.
Anyway, that's just one example, but the rest of my academic life was much the same.
layman wrote:If I were you, I would never stop at being in the "top 1000." Next thing ya know, people might start disagreeing about who the other 999 are. I would simply declare myself to be the smartest person in the whole damn world and be done with it.
I don't have a factual basis for making that claim however. I much prefer to make claims that I'm comfortable are true.
