Complex Numbers

Emotion Sickness

https://www.inc.com/travis-bradberry/are-you-emotionally-intelligent-here-s-how-...

Are You Emotionally Intelligent? Here's How to Know for Sure
Emotional intelligence is a huge driver of success.

The more I see about "emotional intelligence," the less I understand. I finally realized what was going on here: it's something that someone made up to make themselves feel better about not being very intelligently intelligent, and other people who aren't geniuses liked the concept and ran with it.

It's a bit like the old "but she's got a great personality" description, or the homilies poor people tell each other to feel less bad about being not rich, like I talked about a couple of days ago.

When emotional intelligence (EQ) first appeared to the masses, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70 percent of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into the broadly held assumption that IQ was the sole source of success.

I don't know why anyone ever thought IQ and "success" were correlated. Lots of people with high IQs are lazy as fuck. They do the bare minimum needed to get by, and tend to be really good at figuring out exactly what that bare minimum is. Which is another form of success, really.

So it sounds to me like they did some sort of correlation between IQ and some ill-defined concept of success, and then invented Emotional Intelligence to fill in the gap.

Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as being the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack. The connection is so strong that 90 percent of top performers have high emotional intelligence.

Sure. If you define Concept A as "that which correlates with success" you shouldn't be surprised that a lot of successful people possess Concept A. I mean... come ON.

Despite the significance of EQ, its intangible nature makes it difficult to measure and to know what to do to improve it if you're lacking.

Are you successful? Then you have a high EQ. Want a higher EQ? Achieve success. If something is difficult to measure, it's probably bullshit.

The article goes on to present purported "sure signs" that you have a high EQ, like:

You have a robust emotional vocabulary.

People with high EQs master their emotions because they understand them, and they use an extensive vocabulary of feelings to do so. While many people might describe themselves as simply feeling "bad," emotionally intelligent people can pinpoint whether they feel "irritable," "frustrated," "downtrodden," or "anxious."

Oh come on; that just means you've got some talent for writing.

You're curious about people.

The more you care about other people and what they're going through, the more curiosity you're going to have about them.

I assure you, one can be curious about people without giving half a shit about them.

After that one I have to admit I started skimming. This was starting to look like a random natal astrological chart.

Now, admittedly, this is a fairly old article by internet standards. It's just that when I came across it, I finally clicked with the whole "emotional intelligence" thing and how it's probably self-fulfilling feel-good nonsense. Nope, I'm just going to sit here smug with my off-the-chart level of actual intelligence and sling mud at what ordinary people do to feel better about themselves.

I guess that makes me emotionally retarded. I can live with that.