“Wisdom”: You’re a sorcerer with a long beard. “Intelligence”: You’re the annoying engineering type that breaks the DM’s beta in creative ways.

I’m a chemist, and I lecture in some engineering-related courses (mostly thermodynamics and mathematics)

It can be legitimate to ask “why do you want to do X” so that you can help find a solution to the underlying problem. Saying “you shouldn’t do X” without knowing what the underlying problem is is the epitome of unhelpful and overbearing.

It’s literally a meme that devs have some obscure problem, and the only online resource they find is a forum post with one of

• nvm, I fixed it (no further explanation)
• Marked as duplicate (link to question about something different but related)
• “You shouldn’t do this, here’s how to do something else” (cannot do Y, that’s why I’m trying to do X)

I remember as a student when I couldn’t understand how professors could “just see” the solutions to problems. I’ve been reflecting after teaching a bit that I’m becoming that person, and how it just feels natural now, and that it’s really just because once you’ve seen enough problems in your field everything kind of just fits together, so new problems don’t really look that new anymore. It feels good to be honest, but I have a hard time thinking of it as wisdom, more just accumulated experience (then again, what is really “wisdom”?)

The question isn’t who exclusively has a landline, or why OP needs to call a landline. They’ve stated that they need to be able to call a landline: It’s safe to assume that they are aware of the existence of smartphones and internet-based calling services, and have concluded that it doesn’t serve their needs, which is why they’re asking for help calling a landline. Responding that they don’t need to call a landline reads like the classic stackoverflow response of “you don’t need to do <thing the question asks how to do>”.

This reads like a good old stackoverflow answer:

I want to do X, can anyone help?

X is dumb, and you shouldn’t do it. Here’s how to do Y.

I was just basing myself off OP’s scale, where 10 was “average” and 30 was “world class”, which I interpret as shifting the scale compared to how it would be in a dnd-game, such that the whole scale applies to actual humans.

In that spirit, I think it’s fair to put a talented engineer at 20 int, and an absurdly talented polymath at 30 int. My personal experience is that engineers with some years of field experience are often more “intelligent” (i.e. better at general problem solving) than most PhD’s.

I’m fun at parties, please believe me!

Follow up question: You say that 10 is average and 30 is world class, but what kind of distribution are we talking about, and what is the variance?

If I’m the strongest guy in a randomly selected group of 100, I’m far above average, but still miles away from being world class, but does that put my strength at closer to 15 or closer to 20? (Please note: I would not be the strongest in a random group of 100, unless all the other 99 happen to have severe muscle atrophy)

If 10 is average then anyone above the mean is above 10? Strongmen, Olympic lifters etc. are close to 30 str, since that is “world class”.

I would guess that a lot of “ordinary” people have at least one stat where they are above average, just based on how low “average” is for a lot of stats, and how most people are decently good at something.

Edit: This depends on the distribution of course, but stuff like strength, IQ, etc. are typically close to normally distributed, in which case about half the population is above average in any given stat.

To be fair, I don’t think it’s “ridiculous” to sort e.g. jeans into the broad categories of “typically wider or slipper hips/thighs compared to length” or t-shirts into “typically broader back vs. typically larger chest”.

The mens/women’s categories are probably the coarsest categories that makes sense, since the average man’s and women’s body are so different in so many ways.